are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Cuttings (Later)"
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it--
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
--Theodore Roethke


"The Moor"
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart's passions -- that was praise
Enough; and the mind's cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
--R. S. Thomas


"To Levitate"
My mother swears she saw
my baby brother rise from his cot
one stormy night when
we were living upstate.

She was awake, checking the shutters,
when she saw him levitate,
a foot or more, covers rising
with him the way they do

in carnival shows, so you don't see
the wires. But, he lay soft and pliant,
a floater, weightless as
a shadow on the wall.

"Something in the air," Mother said,
because she believed in such things,
and reminded us often that most
children know how to fly.

And I do remember running down a hillside,
breathless, the ground rising to meet me,
my heart lifting my blood
so effortlessly

I knew that if I stepped out onto the air
that it would hold me.
I may even have done it
without realizing

how easy it is, before doubt takes hold
and weds you to the ground.
Odd that we should forget
such things.

Odd, too, when I tell the story
how no one believes exactly,
but the room gets quiet
and everyone listens.
--Cathryn Essinger


"What Did I Learn in the Wars?"
What did I learn in the wars:
To march in time to swinging arms and legs
Like pumps pumping an empty well.

To march in a row and be alone in the middle,
To dig into pillows, featherbeds, the body of a beloved woman,
And to yell "Mama," when she cannot hear,
And to yell "God," when I don't believe in Him,
And even if I did believe in Him
I wouldn't have told him about the war
As you don't tell a child about grown-ups' horrors.

What else did I learn. I learned to reserve a path for retreat.
In foreign lands I rent a room in a hotel
Near the airport or railroad station.
And even in wedding halls
Always to watch the little door
With the "Exit" sign in red letters.

A battle too begins
Like rhythmical drums for dancing and ends
With a "retreat at dawn." Forbidden love
And battle, the two of them sometimes end like this.

But above all I learned the wisdom of camouflage,
Not to stand out, not to be recognized,
Not to be apart from what's around me,
Even not from my beloved.

Let them think I am a bush or a lamb
A tree, a shadow of a tree,
A doubt, a shadow of a doubt,
A living hedge, a dead stone,
A house, a corner of a house.

If I were a prophet I would have dimmed the glow of the vision
And darkened my faith with black paper
And covered the magic with nets.

And when my time comes, I shall don the camouflage garb of my end:
The white of clouds and a lot of sky blue
And stars that have no end.
--Yehuda Amichai


"At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina"
A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy,
receives my admission and points the way.
Here are gray jackets with holes in them,
red sashes with individual flourishes,
things soft as flesh. Someone sewed
the gold silk cord onto that gray sleeve
as if embellishments
could keep a man alive.

I have been reading War and Peace,
and so the particulars of combat
are on my mind--the shouts and groans
of men and boys, and the horses' cries
as they fall, astonished at what
has happened to them.
Blood on leaves,
blood on grass, on snow; extravagant
beauty of red. Smoke, dust of disturbed
earth; parch and burn.

Who would choose this for himself?
And yet the terrible machinery
waited in place. With psalters
in their breast pockets, and gloves
knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,
the men in gray hurled themselves
out of the trenches, and rushed against
blue. It was what both sides
agreed to do.
--Jane Kenyon


"Ithaca"
When you set out on your way to Ithaca
you should hope that your journey is a long one:
a journey full of adventure, full of knowing.
Have no fear of the Laestrygones, the Cyclopes,
the frothing Poseidon. No such impediments
will confound the progress of your journey
if your thoughts take wing, if your spirit and your
flesh are touched by singular sentiments.
You will not encounter Laestrygones,
nor any Cyclopes, nor a furious Poseidon,
as long as you don’t carry them within you,
as long as your soul refuses to set them in your path.

Hope that your journey is a long one.
Many will be the summer mornings
upon which, with boundless pleasure and joy,
you will find yourself entering new ports of call.
You will linger in Phoenician markets
so that you may acquire the finest goods:
mother of pearl, coral and amber, and ebony,
and every manner of arousing perfume--
great quantities of arousing perfumes.
You will visit many an Egyptian city
to learn, and learn more, from those who know.

Bear Ithaca always in your thoughts.
Arriving there is the goal of your journey;
but take care not to travel too hastily.
Better to linger for years on your way;
better to reach the island's shores in old age,
enriched by all you've obtained along the way.
Do not expect that Ithaca will reward you with wealth.

Ithaca bestowed upon you the marvelous journey:
if not for her you would never have set out.
But she has nothing left to impart to you.

If you find Ithaca wanting, it's not that she's deceived you.
That you have gained so much wisdom and experience
will have told you everything of what such Ithacas mean.
--Constantine P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by Stratis Haviaras


"Liberty Street Seafood"
I stand in line. Behind me the hungry stretch & wiggle
out the door. Sterling cake bowls nestle in ice:

mullet striped bass whiskered cat rock shrimp
steel porgies blue crab "No eel 'til Christmas"

mother mussels flat-face flounder sleeping snapper
whiting one sea turtle (lazy fisherman).

In his fishmonger-owner apron Randy is white, round
as a blowfish, conducting this orchestra of desire.

Members: the cut boys and the lined up, who come
every day and wait in between frozen ice and hot oil.

The cut boys are well suited in fish scale and high up
on risers above us. They sing out with their knives.

Stationed inside tiny cutting booths slashing this throat
and that. Fish tune.

Veritas: Those who are exquisite at beheading
always occupy a throne.

One has a giant Afro. Another's hair is finely braided
backward, like flattened rows of corn. The half-straight

ends of his thick black wool curl up his neck like one large
fin. The last one has shaved and greased his head for duty.

Old men who sit around, outside the front door, tease.
Early on they named him, Dolphin. He is playful, jumpy,

slick, far more endangered than the other two. All three
wear the heavy rubber smocks of men who use their

hands to kill (& feed). All three hold knives longer than their
johnsons. For now, they are safe. The wet wood engulfs

them from the waist down. Cleaned fish: their handiwork
will soon be on display at ninety-six dinner tables, Southside.

We pass the time by lying:

How you do?
Fine.

Alabaster fish scales streak & dot their hair like Mardi
Gras keepsakes. Fish petals float into the wet air.

Black. Indian. Zulu. Sequined, smelly, bloody scales settle
across three sets of brown hands, arms, in muscle shirts.

Scales thick as white evening gloves. The cut boys turn
each fish over like one-eyed fabric dolls. One has his

Mama Helene's eyelashes. He is the jittery dolphin
on the loose. A hand-me-down Afro pick sits in No. 2's

back pocket. This one with a tail always on his neck
has a fist always on his comb, circa 1975, belonging

to his brother, thrown under the jail, up under in upstate
Connecticut. Cause: a bad fight about a chica gone jugular.

These cut boys, shine jewel & scale, stationed before a wall
of black & silver ways & means. Eastern Star daughters and

North Star slaves stare out at the hungry through their
notched eyes. They whisper and laugh, loving how we wait

on them. Three Black boys in hip hop haute couture, in suits
of bloody, rubber smocks, standing side by side, making

three dollars an hour, beheading and detailing fish.
Their long knives whacking pine all day. Fish eyes roll.

So Friday is made. The white man reaches
for the money, faces the hungry,

his back fully turned,
their knives just above his head.
--Nikky Finney


"5"
July 30th. The strait has become eccentric--swarming with jellyfish today for the first time in years, they pump themselves forward calmly and patiently, they belong to the same line: Aurelia, they drift like flowers after a sea burial, if you take them out of the water their entire form vanishes, as when an indescribable truth is lifted out of silence and formulated into an inert mass, but they are untranslatable, they must stay in their own element.

August 2nd. Something wants to be said but the words don't agree.
Something which can't be said,
aphasia,
there are no words but perhaps a style...

You can wake up in the small hours
jot down a few words
on the nearest paper, a newsprint margin
(the words radiate meaning!)
but in the morning: the same words now say nothing, scrawls, slips of the tongue.
Or fragments of the high nocturnal style that drew past?

Music comes to a man, he's a composer, he's played, makes a career, becomes Conservatory Director.
The climate changes, he's condemned by the authorities.
His pupil K is set up as prosecutor.
He's threatened, degraded, removed.
After a few years the disgrace lessens, he's rehabilitated.
Then, cerebral hemorrhage: paralysis on the right side with aphasia, can grasp only short phrases, says the wrong words.
Beyond the reach of eulogy or execration.
But the music's left, he keeps composing in his own style,
for the rest of his days he becomes a medical sensation.

He wrote music to texts he no longer understood--
in the same way
we express something through our lives
in the humming chorus full of mistaken words.

The death-lectures went on for several terms. I attended
together with people I didn't know
(who are you?)
--then each went his own way, profiles.

I looked at the sky and at the earth and straight ahead
and since then I've been writing a long letter to the dead
on a typewriter with no ribbon just a horizon line
so the words knock in vain and nothing sticks.

I pause with my hand on the door handle, take the pulse of the house.
The walls are so full of life
(the children don't dare sleep alone in the little room upstairs--what makes me safe makes them uneasy).

August 3rd. In the damp grass
a greeting shuffles from the Middle Ages, the Edible Snail,
subtle gleaming grey-and-yellow, with his house aslant,
introduced by monks who liked their escargots--the Franciscans were here,
broke stone and burned lime, the island became theirs in 1288, a gift of King Magnus
("Almes fordoth all wykkednes / And quenchyth synne and makyth hyt les")
the forest fell, the ovens burned, the lime was shipped in
for the building of the monastery...
Sister snail
almost motionless in the grass, the antennae are sucked in
and rolled out, disturbances and hesitation...
How like myself in my searching!

The wind that's been blowing carefully all day
--the blades of grass on the outer skerries are all counted--
has lain down peacefully at the heart of the island. The match flame stands straight.
The sea painting and the forest painting darken together.
The foliage on the five-story trees turns black.
"Each summer is the last." Empty words
for the creatures in the late-summer midnight
where the crickets whirr their sewing machines frantically
and the Baltic is close
and the lonely water tap rises among the wild roses
like the statue of a horseman. The water tastes of iron.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton


"How the Late Autumn Night Novel Begins"
The ferryboat smells of oil and something rattles all the time like an obsession. The spotlight's turned on. We're pulling into the jetty. I'm the only one who wants off here. "Need the gangway?" No. I take a long tottering stride into the night and stand on the jetty, on the island. I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly that just crawled out of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand hang like misshapen wings. I turn around and see the boat gliding away with its shining windows, then grope my way toward other houses...It's good to fall asleep here. I lie on my back and don't know if I'm asleep or awake. Some books I've read pass by like old sailing ships on their way to the Bermuda Triangle to vanish without trace...I hear a hollow sound, an absentminded drumming. An object the wind keeps knocking against something the earth holds still. If the night is not merely an absence of light, if the night really is something, then it's that sound. Stethoscope noises from a slow heart, it beats, falls silent for a time, returns. As if the creature were moving in a zigzag across the Frontier. Or someone knocking in a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but was left behind here, knocking, wanting back. Too late. Couldn't get down there, couldn't get up there, couldn't get aboard...The other world is this world too. Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters that I love.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton


"Schubertiana"
1

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint where one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million people.
The giant city becomes a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee cups are pushed across the counter, the shop windows beg from passersby, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, elevator doors glide shut, behind police-locked doors a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too--without statistics--that right now Schubert is being played in a room over there and that for someone the notes are more real than anything else.

2

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year's nest under the guttering of this very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the landmass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as "The Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually in the morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

3

The string quartet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts.

4

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that the accident telegram isn't for us and that the sudden axe-blow from within won't come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three hundred times life-size bee-swarm of steel.
But none of this is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us company part of the way.
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers--trustingly--follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the darkness.

5

We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor, two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm's terrible balance: joy and suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, "This music is so heroic," and she's right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly despise themselves for not being murderers,
don't recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be bought, don't recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transformations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged and strong, snail track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us--now--
up
the depths.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton


"A Place in the Forest"
On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up--that was all. You go alone. A tall building that consists entirely of cracks, a building that is perpetually tottering but can never collapse. The thousandfold sun floats in through the cracks. In this play of light an inverted law of gravity prevails: the house is anchored in the sky and whatever falls, falls upward. There you can turn around. There you are allowed to grieve. You can dare to face certain old truths otherwise kept packed, in storage. The roles I have, deep down, float up, hang like the dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some out-of-the-way Melanesian islet. A childlike aura circles the gruesome trophies. So mild it is, in the forest.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton


"The Blue-Wind Flowers"
To be spellbound--nothing's easier. It's one of the oldest tricks of the soil and springtime: the blue wind-flowers. They are in a way unexpected. They shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one's gaze never pauses. They glimmer and float--yes, float--from their color. The sharp violet-blue now weighs nothing. Here is ecstasy, but low voiced. "Career"--irrelevant! "Power" and "publicity"--pompe and "Trompe up!" Raising the rafters. And above all those brows the crowning crystal chandeliers hung like glass vultures. Instead of such an over-decorated and strident cul-de-sac, the wind-flowers open a secret passage to the real celebration, quiet as death.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton

"The World Is a Beautiful Place"
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti


"The Great Migration"
The third question in Spanish class is: De donde eres tu?
She'd come for brand-new words: las flores rojas, el puente
To have words like crema de leche on her tongue at least
for a few weeks before tasting the bitter syllables of their history.

How begin with the young woman next to her asking: Where?
Young enough to be her daughter but--


The place where you were one of five half-naked children
playing in the dirt under a porch. There was a yellow dog.
The place where I was a white girl sitting in a dusty car
with the window rolled down, looking at you. No word
to share. That place. That place.


She says, Del Sur.
The girl replies: We moved up here when I was eight.
Until last year every dream I had happened there.
I take my daughter down to see my aunts. She's four.
Back home she can take her shoes off. The ground's not
strewn with glass, like here. The dirt's clean, at least.
Do you have folks, back home?


From class to home
she tries out her lessons. At the bus stop bench, she sat next to
a man who hated spring, its thunderhead clouds, its green-
leafed rain. At home, he said, there was only sun. In the north
in Chile, rain was somewhere else, not falling everywhere
like sadness here. He'd not been back in twenty years.


There was him, and the man who hated the cold and the brick factory
and the one room with fifteen people he can't remember. He began
to walk back to Guatemala. Police picked him up in Texas.
No soles to the bottom of his shoes. Police stopped him in Mexico.
Three thousand miles in four months. He'd done it before. His compass
was walk south, toward warmth, you come to home before the war.


At home there was a dirt track by the paved road, worn down
through pink sundrops and fox grass, an emphatic sentence
written by people walking north to work.

Books called it
The Great Migration, but people are not birds. They have in common
only flight. Now, in the city night, they dream they're caught
in a cloud of dust and grit, looking down at land being shoved,
furrowed, or burned by huge machines. In the daylight they stand
in line at the post office and buy money orders to send home.


Beatrice is there to collect a package from her mother. This time
she's sent onions grown in sandy soil. She says they are sweeter
than apples, that one will feed a crowd, that they have no bitterness.


At home their neighbor said: I can tell any county I'm in
just by smelling the dirt.


Beatrice puts aside five
onion globes shining yellow as lamplight, like the old kerosene
lamp they set in the kitchen for emergencies. She'll give
them to the woman who sits by her in Spanish class, the one
young as a daughter, the one she'd never have known at home.
--Minnie Bruce Pratt


"Looking at MRI Scans of My Brain"
My husband and I held the films up against the sliding glass door in
Oregon the summer it seemed my sadness might never go away, trying
to make sense of whatever illness swirled there in black and white and
gray, so terrible the river winding through me seemed more real than I
was, somewhere beneath the Douglas fir's shawl of liquid silver, the
grape leaves unfurling their fuzz of green.

Here were thought and memory, feeling and dream. I stared into those
transparent sheets of myself my husband traced with one finger as I'd
seen him trace our route across a ten thousand foot mountain, follow-
int the convoluted folds and cross sections as patiently as he followed
the slow lines of elevation.

And I thought, This is what matters--the transparent mind that lets the
world through like a window, one we can open any time, whenever we
want, the wind in our hair, mysterious, fern-delicate, human. Or is it his
standing beside me that I remember, ready to remind me that what felt
crazy was only a matter of degree, my footing on that mountain easily
recovered by reaching my hand out to his as he balanced, just a few steps
ahead, impossibly steady before me?
--Alison Townsend


"in time of daffodils... (16)"
in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me
--e.e. cummings


"Children's Song"
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.
--R. S. Thomas


"Signal Hill"
England sent tap tap,
and tap tap tap, and the hill
answered back.

There were cannons
in bunkers, mines in the narrows,
the Will to Power

periscoping up
in the harbour. Those battlements
rust and whistle

there still, but splashes
of spray-paint lighten the gloom,
and will for a while if we let the vandals
roam, confettiing the concrete
with condoms, trading

in pills that alter
their vista through the gun-slits
of history. The vandals

are young, and make
use of the ruins. Stand back.
Thank them for that.
--Ken Babstock


"Dzunuk-wa"
You expect an old woman,
way past her stale date,
dragging her wrinkled
breasts on the sidewalk,
curdling her milk; but I’m
as new as the weeds that
grow through the cracks in
the pavement, the young
loons singing on artificial
lakes; and I will, yes, I do
keep coming back from my
time in the woods. Huuu
uuuuuuuuuu. I come with
the animals chased from the
forest. I come with my hunger,
my thirst for justice. I come
with my old friends, my new-
every-year body painted in
designer colours, Frog spit
on my breast, Susiutl slung
over my shoulders, Star on
my forehead, and always my
blood singing through. Uh-
hooooo. You can't resist my
lips by Revlon, mouth wide
open, ready to swallow side-
walks, streetlamps, hydroponic
children growing tame in the
garden you think you own.
--Linda Rogers


"Aftermath"
Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same,--and War's a bloody game,…
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?... Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.
--Siegfried Sassoon


"Sonoma Fire"
Large moon the deep orange of embers.
Also the scent.
The griefs of others--beautiful, at a distance.
--Jane Hirshfield


"Seven Stanzas at Easter"
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
--John Updike


"They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt lingo. They told stories about Ted Lavender's supply of tranquilizers, how the poor guy didn't feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was.

"There's a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.

"They were waiting for Lavender's chopper, smoking the dead man's dope.

"The moral's pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they'll ruin your day every time.

"Cute, said Henry Dobbins.

"Mind blower, get it? Talk about wiggy. Nothing left, just blood and brains.

"They made themselves laugh.

"There it is, they'd say. Over and over--there it is, my friend, there it is--as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is."
--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried


"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
--Tim O'Brien

"Crying"
Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, "Ha ha! ha ha!"
And if people say, "Hey,
what's going on up there?"
"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!"
--Galway Kinnell


( cut for child abuse triggers )


"Poetry for Supper"
'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem's making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'
'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen.'
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.
--R. S. Thomas


"Paradise"
What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its way
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
Barbeque eater,
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
"This is paradise," you said,
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.
--Emma Jones


"Parents"
What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them

The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link
of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.
--William Meredith


"XLIII"
if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)
--e. e. cummings


"The New Year"
It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
you lie under the weather of stones.
There is no thread to lead you back.
Your friends doze in the dark
of pleasure and cannot remember.
Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.
You do not see the rain falling and the man walking away,
the soiled wind blowing its ashes across the city.
You do not see the sun dragging the moon like an echo.
You do not see the bruised heart go up in flames,
the skulls of the innocent turn into smoke.
You do not see the scars of plenty, the eyes without light.
It is over. It is winter and the new year.
The meek are hauling their skins into heaven.
The hopeless are suffereing the cold with those who have nothing to hide.
It is over and nobody knows you.
There is starlight drifting on the black water.
There are stones in the sea no one has seen.
There is a shore and people are waiting.
And nothing comes back.
Because it is over.
Because there is silence instead of a name.
Because it is winter and the new year.
--Mark Strand


"Disappear"
1. Three Shadows

What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace.

Another one of those days when we're standing by the side of a road with our mothers, sweating in our Sunday dresses, waiting for the bus home. You stand in the puddle of your mother's shadow, twisting your body so your own vanishes inside the darkness. I'm invisible, you shout, counting the three shadows left, then blowing me a stiff kiss. It's cooler here too.

Is it possible for this not to be a story of disappearance?

2. After Hours

Your voice from a phone booth on a sidewalk, in the rain, outside a diner with an unreadable sign. Your voice speaking in code, coming to me in bits and pieces, syllable by syllable. Your voice doubled, echoing, bouncing off a stained glass dome, traveling through a dark tunnel where a train is about to pass. The lilt in your voice betrays you as you pretend to sell me potato peelers and non-stick frying pans. Your voice from another time zone, competing with the waves of the sea. In a letter with no return address, your voice cracks jokes and says "my feet hurt" in another language. Your voice in the tired words on my computer screen, hidden somewhere in the identical towns of postcards. Your voice like a shadow on a road.

3. Landscape

When we were children, you didn't care for words, you only filled pages with vertical lines. Beyond the page, the bite marks at the tip of your pencil, bare knees, a scrawny cat sleeping at your feet. We lived in the city and I thought you drew lampposts, telephone lines, the long, rusty rods scattered in construction sites. Your voice insisting, no, no, these are trees.

4. No Rain

I walk one block and pass a series of testaments to failure--the skeleton of a building, a half-built bridge already breaking down. On the dusty metal fence hangs a sign that promises a highway.

You were in love, you wanted out of a city that screamed abandonment.

5. Another Routine

A new mayor, a new name for this road. The man selling sweet corn at the corner makes it a point to recite all the names to every customer in need of directions. I don't listen to him as I make my way to this place, known to me now only as the road where you last stood. I stare at its slender body, following the shape of a tree that has fallen down, beaten endlessly by the weight of buses and trucks.

6. Inside the dark

I fall into a puddle on my way to catch a bus, and unlike a dog, I can't sit around and lick my wounds, I have to walk away like nothing has happened. The face of Jesus looms on a billboard, but where is the comfort that can be bought? Let me watch the blind men by the terminal massage commuters for a fee, let me listen to karaoke music and stare at the stall selling cheap umbrellas, let me stand under the shadow of a lamppost as is my habit, though it is evening, the weather is cool, and you are gone. If I keep still enough inside this shadow, it is as if I am not here. If I keep still enough, there is no proof you are not here with me.
--Conchitina Cruz


"Dead Butterfly"
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.

Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived--so briefly--in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?

This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar.
--Ellen Bass


"Try to Praise the Mutilated World"
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
-—Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh.


"Choices"
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

for Drago Štambuk
--Tess Gallagher


"Nearly a Valediction"
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.
--Marilyn Hacker


"How to Make Love to a Trans Person"
Forget the images you've learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it's highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she's "had the surgery."
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet it
Let her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she'd lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They're just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It's what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That's the important part.
Don't worry about the bodies.
They've got this.
--Gabe Moses