are you dreaming, Frederick?

"There were, at this very moment, half a dozen books lying neglected in her bedroom, for she knew quite well that if she read them she would only be in possession of yet more information about herself, and with even less idea of how to use it."
--Doris Lessing


"Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do."
--Richard Feynman


"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale


"Steps"
Digging earth from puddles, she would wake stranded.
Hollyhocks flooded the back step. Morning bright with leaves.
In green schoolrooms, chalk bit blackboards.
Robins paced the blowing grass.
Picnic day, her father sat, muttering, "She's dead,"
over and over to fresh rain.
His shoulders bent, broken like a doll.

The cow lay wrapped in drops like a bursting pear,
Mica schist. Children ran through the ponds
under ferns. Its neck was a home for midges; its smell,
a bleach for dingy clouds. In radiant sheets of water,
a shadow buried the sun.

Weeds grew to stone. She hid among witch hazels,
the yellow flowers a tired beacon.
Night air on empty fields. Twice Minona teased their birth,
dotting the broken hay with footprints.
A flame danced through birches. Lights along the backbone.
Veins stuffed with stars. This life forbids comfort, traces
with fingers a terrible sharing. Years. Years to find
the right step.

Men stroked her thighs, tried to make her sleep.
Their throats went dry from calling, as ducks
caught in a thicket cry. Woolen mud never wakens,
yet bright maples gather pain.
The sap glistens, beads in moon wash.

Pretend these mountains are not hungry. I've heard a young voice
muttering at wind, like straw on fire.
She moves drunk toward lightning,
letting her arms stiffen, wanting to be fog,
the smell of dead fruit. I've covered her tracks
with a difficult river, and like a plover,
wade from water to rock and back. It foams beryl green
in the sunset, and at every bend, leaves something behind.
--Roberta Hill


"Dear Petrarch"
The sweet singing of virtuous and beautiful ladies...
More like dogs barking, more like a warning now.
When our mouths open the hole looks black,
and the hole of it holds a shadow. Some keep

saying there's nothing left to tell, nothing left to tell.
If that's the truth I'll open my door to any
stranger who rattles the lock. When my mouth
opens it will scream, simply because the hole

of it holds that sound. As for your great ideas,
literature, and the smell of old books cracked--
the stacks are a dark sea, and anyone could find
herself trapped, legs forced, spine cracked.

It's a fact. Everyone knows it. If I lived in your
time, the scrolls of my gown would have curled
into knots. It's about being dragged by the hair--
the saint, the harlot both have bald patches. Girls

today walking down the street may look sweet,
chewing wads of pink gum. And the woman at the bar
may never read. Lots of ladies sing along to the radio
now. But the hole of our mouths holds a howl.
--Cate Marvin


"Pasture of My"
Ire field, long running with flame grass:
what can I untell you? Even the weeds have
eavesdropped. And you, incapable of misstep,
make fronds cringe with your scrutiny. Sorry,
my field says, that you have passed through
us at wrong hours, sorry that when sun lights
upon us we grow tawdry with flame. Why

is it always my field, my grass, my thin
creek running blue wire through my being?
Only my and mine, my and my own, always
the swerving grain I've known. Still, would
you exist if not for patience, if not for waiting--
and cycles long we have waited for your
singular tread. Still, we worry you'll find

our green not stunning enough, find us in
our wanting, wanting. Perhaps you'll lean
to twist a flower from its stem, then find your
hand touches nothing, perhaps you won't,
perhaps we do not exist. Still, it makes us be,
your walking through us--and all the years
we lay beneath weather passively, we forget.
--Cate Marvin


"The School Where I Studied"
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain
the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge,
I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge,
the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites.
I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil,
I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die.
I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room
where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom always open
to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape
we were seeing from the window.
The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones.

I remember the brief tumult of the two of us
near the rickety steps, the tumult
that was the beginning of a first great love.
Now it outlives us, as if in a museum,
like everything else in Jerusalem.
--Yehuda Amichai


"Untitled"
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A Parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin? Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feast and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
and scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.
--Vladimir Nabokov


"The Fishermen"

for J.V. C.H. A.F. E.H. E.M.

Sometimes you dance slow with your best friend
while a woman you love differently than you love
Etta James sings At Last into a karaoke machine
like she wrote it in the bathroom.
Sometimes every person you know is drunk enough
it becomes a new definition for sober.

There is a bar on the west side of Brooklyn
the fishermen call home (or they used to
when Brooklyn had fishermen), a siren carrying them back
to their whiskey. Sometimes there is tonight.
We are six people making footsteps that never disappear.
Can you imagine the lines we have drawn to get here?

There are people who have called us their homes.
Tonight, there is family in the oxygen. Sometimes,
two people is its own person. It has a lifespan,
it gets hungry, it too, can lie underneath its sheets
and wonder how it can still feel alone--
Sometimes it is more.

There is a phone booth in the bar that seats one.
Six of us scramble inside, crawl up the walls
until even our drinks fit. Our bodies are rediscovering
what it is to be possible. It is one night
when the clocks in Brooklyn begin to spill backwards,
then stop. The bartender--still as a stalagmite,

while the perfect pour stays perfect.
The couple at the corner table,
together like popsicle sticks in a freezer--
the ovvvvv from I love you suspended
in the air like a vibrating chandelier.
We, with our songs, with our slow dances,

our smiles--which on any other day
rotate like the swing on a jump rope--
we are the last to go, we are the last to go

we are last--
--Jon Sands


"Allegiances"
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked--
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:--we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.
--William Stafford