are you dreaming, Frederick?

"There is another world, but it is inside this one."
--Paul Éluard


"We Were Emergencies"
We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.
But tonight let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows
lookin' like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth's way of not letting go.
Let go.
Tonight, poets, let's turn our wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can't get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this.
With your airplane parts.
Move forward.
And repeat after me with your heart:
I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.
Make love to me
like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I'm new to this,
but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it.
That we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it.
That if our hearts
really broke
every time we fell from love
I'd be able to offer you confetti by now.
But hearts don't break, y'all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I'm havin' a fantastic time.
--Buddy Wakefield


"If you are looking for hell,
ask the artist where it is.
If you cannot find an artist,
then you are already in hell."
--Avigdor Pawsner


"A Palmful of Universe"
Eternity isn't much when you hold it
like a moon between your fingertips.

Hey.
Let's drink an ocean on the rocks tonight.
A toast to the east coast, to sea glass and paper cuts
and hearing your heart beat in every place he touches you.

And I say this now
knowing fully well that you've heard it all before,
drunk one night, hanging your feet off the edge
of the world, you must've told the person beside you
how small you felt,
how small you were
underneath an ocean of
falling tinsel.

But listen.
We've been living this conversation
since before the ages of watches and sun disks
and asterisks, in a time before people like me
could ever ruin the moon for us all.

So let's call them ancient feelings.

The two of us, sitting looking at the same moon
that Neruda has seen, that Fitzpatrick has seen,
and when I say Fitzpatrick
I mean my middle school principal, not the man who wrote that one book
about the sad upper-class of Long Island.

Because I'm flossing my teeth with latitude lines
and I'll never understand time zones or how
days even exist when the sun never meets a dead end
to make a U-turn.

I had a dream once that a love and I carved our names into tree bark.

The same night, a birch woke up shivering and wept--
its leaves falling onto the floor beneath it--
and he whispered to the woodpecker that he dreamt his roots almost
touched another's.
And his blossoms wilted underneath a colder moon.
--Shinji Moon


"How terribly sad it is that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living."
--Jostein Gaarder


"Please Understand (A Bachelor's Valentine)"
When, next day, I found one of your earrings,
slightly chipped, on the steps leading up to
but also away from my house,

I couldn't decide if I should return it to you
or keep it for myself in this copper box.
Then I remembered there's always another choice

and pushed it with my foot into the begonias.
If you're the kind who desires fragile mementos
of these perilous journeys we take,

that's where you'll find it. But don't knock
on my door. I'll probably be sucking the pit
out of an apricot, or speaking long distance

to myself. Best we can hope for on days like this
is that the thunder and dark clouds will veer elsewhere,
and the unsolicited sun will break through

just before it sets, a beautiful dullness to it.
Please understand. I've never been able to tell
what's worth more—what I want or what I have.
--Stephen Dunn


"Tear It Down"
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.
--Jack Gilbert


"Home Is So Sad"
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
--Philip Larkin


"Making the Move"
When Ulysses braved the wine-dark sea
He left his bow with Penelope,
Who would bend for no one but himself.
I edge along the book-shelf,
Past bad Lord Byron, Raymond Chandler,
Howard Hughes; The Hidden Years,
Past Blaise Pascal, who, bound in hide,
Divined the void to his left side:
Such books as one may think one owns
Unloose themselves like stones
And clatter down into this wider gulf
Between myself and my good wife;
A primus stove, a sleeping bag,
The bow I bought through a catalogue
When I was thirteen or fourteen
That would bend, and break, for anyone,
Its boyish length of maple upon maple
Unseasoned and unsupple.
Were I embarking on that wine-dark sea
I would bring my bow along with me.
--Paul Muldoon


"To Return to the Urges Unconscious of Their Beginning"
I want to return to the first urges, those urges that seemed so unconscious of their beginnings.
Urges that were eager to admire the first pen in my life my mother brought me when I was a child.
Urges that were the radiant new shirt of days in my poor village.
I want to return to those urges so unconscious of their beginnings.
Urges that were my astonishment at seeing the first feeding breast and the 1001st nostalgia that seemed almost too much to bear.
Urges that were the first naive and truthful song a soldier of the 308th division taught me in his loving arm.
Urges that were my first sensations at seeing my poems in print. How happy and anxious my heart that moment seeing the small creatures of handwriting incarnated into the dragons of type.
Urges that were the first insult about my poems that I heard from the mouth of one who didn't know me.
I want to return to those first urges so unconscious of their origins.
So I need no longer know which urges are introverted and which are extroverted.
So I need no longer know which poetry must be connected to policy and which must be away from policy.
So I need no longer know which poetry must be in established patterns as in "North of the River," or must be in free fashion as in "Cochinchina."
And last, so I need no longer know, can poems be sold, and can they be sold at a profit.
--Pham Tien Duat, translated from the Vietnamese by Ngo Vinh Hai and Kevin Bowen


"I'll Give You Red"
I'll give you red,
the color the Russians loved
so much they used it to make
their word for beautiful:
krasniy.
I'll give you scarlet
from the epaulets of blackbirds.
Or cardinal
from the spirits threading
through a steamy green
Midwestern afternoon.
I'll give you crimson
from the feathers the parrot
hides in his tail
and only lets us see
when he is furious.
Here is your cerise
the sad, shameful stain of cherries.
And vermilion
the bright sash of yesterday
that lingers on the horizon.
I'll give you ruby
the color of lies
that lovers tell themselves,
the flame at the prism's
deepest heart.
But I will keep this red
the drunken sweet damp scent
of the breeze that sweeps
over strawberry fields
in June.
--Tamara Madison


"Lipstick"
(Based on observations in Bosnia and Afghanistan by war photographer Jenny Matthews.
Confirmed by the Max Factor catalogue 1945.)

In war time women turn to red
swivel-up scarlet and carmine
not in solidarity with spilt blood
but as a badge of beating hearts.

This crimson is the shade of poets
silenced for speaking against torture,
this vermillion is art
surviving solitary confinement,

this cerise defies the falling bombs
the snipers taking aim at bread-queues,
this ruby's the resilience of girls
who tango in the pale-lipped face of death.
--Maggie Butt


"The Rescued Year"
Take a model of the world so big
it is the world again, pass your hand,
press back that area in the west where no one lived,
the place only your mind explores. On your thumb
that smudge becomes my ignorance, a badge
the size of Colorado: toward that state by train
we crossed our state like birds and lodged--
the year my sister gracefully
grew up--against the western boundary
where my father had a job.

Time should go the way it went
that year: we weren't at war; we had
each day a treasured unimportance;
the sky existed, so did our town;
the library had books we hadn't read;
every day at school we learned and sang,
or at least hummed and walked in the hall.

In church I heard the preacher; he said
"Honor!" with a sound like empty silos
repeating the lesson. For a minute I held
Kansas Christian all along the Santa Fe.
My father's mean attention, though, was busy--this
I knew--and going home his wonderfully level gaze
would hold the stare I liked, where little happened
and much was understood. I watched my father's finger
mark off huge eye-scans of what happened in the creed.

Like him, I tried. I still try,
send my sight like a million pickpockets
up rich people's drives; it is time
when I pass for every place I go to be alive.
Around any corner my sight is a river,
and I let it arrive: rich by those brooks
his thought poured for hours
into my hand. His creed: the greater ownership
of all is to glance around and understand.

That Christmas Mother made paper
presents; we colored them with crayons
and hung up a tumbleweed for a tree.
A man from Hugoton brought my sister
a present (his farm was tilted near oil
wells; his car ignored the little
bumps along our drive: nothing
came of all this--it was just part of the year).

I walked out where a girl I knew would be;
we crossed the plank over the ditch
to her house. There was popcorn on the stove,
and her mother recalled the old days, inviting me back.
When I walked home in the cold evening,
snow that blessed the wheat had roved
along the highway seeking furrows,
and all the houses had their lights--
oh, that year did not escape me: I rubbed
the wonderful old lamp of our dull town.

That spring we crossed the state again,
my father soothing us with stories:
the river lost in Utah, underground--
"They've explored only the ones they've found!"--
and that old man who spent his life knowing,
unable to tell how he knew--
"I've been sure by smoke, persuaded
by mist, or a cloud, or a name:
once the truth was ready"--my father smiled
at this--"it didn't care how it came."

In all his ways I hold that rescued year--
comes that smoke like love into the broken
coal, that forms to chunks again and lies
in the earth again in its dim folds, and comes a sound,
then shapes to make a whistle fade,
and in the quiet I hold no need, no hurry:
any day the dust will move, maybe settle;
the train that left will roll back into our station,
the name carved on the platform unfill with rain,
and the sound that followed the couplings back
will ripple forward and hold the train.
--William Stafford


"Aunt Mabel"
This town is haunted by some good deed
that reappears like a country cousin, or truth
when language falters these days trying to lie,
because Aunt Mabel, an old lady gone now, would
accost even strangers to give bright flowers
away, quick as a striking snake. It's deeds like this
have weakened me, shaken by intermittent trust,
stricken with friendliness.

Our Senator talked like war, and Aunt Mabel
said, "He's a brilliant man,
but we didn't elect him that much."

Everyone's resolve weakens toward evening
or in a flash when a face melds--a stranger's, even--
reminded for an instant between menace and fear:
There are Aunt Mabels all over the world,
or their graves in the rain.
--William Stafford


"Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets"
1
Breaking every law except the one
for Go, rolling its porpoise way, the rocket
staggers on its course; its feelers lock
a stranglehold ahead; and--rocking--finders
whispering "Target, Target," back and forth,
relocating all its meaning in the dark,
it freezes on the final stage. I know
that lift and pour, the flick out of the sky
and then the power. Power is not enough.

2
Bough touching bough, touching...till the shore,
a lake, an undecided river, and a lake again
saddling the divide: a world that won't be wise
and let alone, but instead is found outside
by little channels, linked by chance, not stern;
and then when once we're sure we hear a guide
it fades away toward the opposite end of the road
from home--the world goes wrong in order to have revenge.
Our lives are an amnesty given us.

3
There is a place behind our hill so real
it makes me turn my head, no matter. There
in the last thicket lies the cornered cat
saved by its claws, now ready to spend
all there is left of the wilderness, embracing
its blood. And that is the way that I will spit
life, at the end of any trail where I smell any hunter,
because I think our story should not end--
or go on in the dark with nobody listening.
--William Stafford


"The Epitaph Ending in And"
In the last storm, when hawks
blast upward and a dove is
driven into the grass, its broken wings
a delicate design, the air between
wracked thin where it stretched before,
a clear spring bent close too often
(that Earth should ever have such wings
burnt on in blind color!), this will be
good as an epitaph:

Doves did not know where to fly, and
--William Stafford


"At This Point on the Page"
Frightened at the slant of the writing, I looked up
at the student who shared it with me--
such pain was in the crossing of each t,
and a heart that skipped--lurched--in the loop of the y.
Sorrowing for the huddled lines my eyes had seen--
the terror of the o's and a's, and those draggled g's,
I looked up at her face,
not wanting to read farther, at least by prose:
the hand shook that wrote that far on the page,
and what weight formed each word, God knows.
--William Stafford


"Near"
Walking along in this not quite prose way
we both know it is not quite prose we speak,
and it is time to notice this intolerable snow
innumerably touching, before we sink.

It is time to notice, I say, the freezing snow
hesitating toward us from its gray heaven;
listen--it is falling not quite silently
and under it still you and I are walking.

Maybe there are trumpets in the house we pass
and a redbird watching from an evergreen--
but nothing will happen until we pause
to flame what we know, before any signal's given.
--William Stafford


"The Animal That Drank up Sound"
1
One day across the lake where echoes come now
an animal that needed sound came down. He gazed
enormously, and instead of making any, he took
away from, sound: the lake and all the land
went dumb. A fish that jumped went back like a knife,
and the water died. In all the wilderness around he
drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountainside
and folded a quilt over the rocks, getting ready
to store everything the place had known; he buried--
thousands of autumns deep--the noise that used to come there.

Then that animal wandered on and began to drink
the sound out of all the valleys--the croak of toads,
and all the little shiny noise grass blades make.
He drank till winter, and then looked out one night
at the stilled places guaranteed around by frozen
peaks and held in the shallow pools of starlight.
It was finally tall and still, and he stopped on the highest
ridge, just where the cold sky fell away
like a perpetual curve, and from there he walked on silently,
and began to starve.

When the moon drifted over the night the whole world lay
just like the moon, shining back that still
silver, and the moon saw its own animal dead
on the snow, its dark absorbing paws and quiet
muzzle, and thick, velvet, deep fur.

2
After the animal that drank sound died, the world
lay still and cold for months, and the moon yearned
and explored, letting its dead light float down
the west walls of canyons and then climb its delighted
soundless way up the east side. The moon
owned the earth its animal had faithfully explored.
The sun disregarded the life it used to warm.

But on the north side of a mountain, deep in some rocks,
a cricket slept. It had been hiding when that animal
passed, and as spring came again this cricket waited,
afraid to crawl out into the heavy stillness.
Think how deep the cricket felt, lost there
in such a silence--the grass, the leaves, the water,
the stilled animals all depending on such a little
thing. But softly it tried--"Cricket!"--and back like a river
from that one act flowed the kind of world we know,
first whisperings, then moves in the grass and leaves;
the water splashed, and a big night bird screamed.

It all returned, our precious world with its life and sound,
where sometimes loud over the hill the moon,
wild again, looks for its animal to roam, still,
down out of the hills, any time.
But somewhere a cricket waits.

It listens now, and practices at night.
--William Stafford


"Freedom"
Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river,
though, if you want to.
It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.

No leader is free; no follower is free--
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.

If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
if you wake up before other people.
--William Stafford