are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?"
--Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room


"To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks--all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere."
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway


"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
--Wallace Stevens


"North"
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,

those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight--
it said Thor's hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, 'Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.'
--Seamus Heaney


"Are they remedial measures--trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, and incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?"
--Virginia Woolf, Orlando


"Bog Queen"
I lay waiting
Between turf-face and demesne wall,
Between Heathery levels
And glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille
For the creeping influences:
Dawn suns groped over my head
And cooled at my feet,

Through my fabrics and skins
The seeps of winter
Digested me,
The illiterate roots

Pondered and died
In the cavings
Of stomack and socket.
I lay waiting

On the gravel bottom,
My brain darkening,
A jar of spawn
Fermenting underground

Dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
The vital hoard reducing
In the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
Gemstones dropped
In the peat floe
Like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
Wrinkling, dyed weaves
And phoenician stichwork
Retted on my brests'

Soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
Like the nuzzle of fjords
At my thighs -

The soaked fledge, the heavy
Swaddle of hides.
my skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
And stripped
By a turfcutter's spade

Who veiled me again
And packed coomb softly
Between the stone jambs
At my head and my feet.

Till a peer's wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
A slimy birth-cord
Of bog had been cut

And I rose from the dark,
Hacked bone, skull-ware,
Frayed stitches, tufts,
Small gleams on the bank.
--Seamus Heaney


"Penis Envy"
I envy men who can yearn
with infinite emptiness
toward the body of a woman,

hoping that the yearning
will make a child,
that the emptiness itself
will fertilize the darkness.

Women have no illusions about this,
being at once
houses, tunnels,
cups & cupbearers,
knowing emptiness as a temporary state
between two fullnesses,
& seeing no romance in it.

If I were a man
doomed to that infinite emptiness,
& having no choice in the matter,
I would, like the rest, no doubt,
find a woman
& christen her moonbelly,
madonna, gold-haired goddess
& make her the tent of my longing,
the silk parachute of my lust,
the blue-eyed icon of my sacred sexual itch,
the mother of my hunger.

But since I am a woman,
I must not only inspire the poem
but also type it,
not only conceive the child
but also bear it,
not only bear the child
but also bathe it,
not only bathe the child
but also feed it,
not only feed the child
but also carry it
everywhere, everywhere...

while men write poems
on the mysteries of motherhood.

I envy men who can yearn
with infinite emptiness
--Erica Jong


"Sojourn in the Whale"
Trying to open locked doors with a sword, threading
the points of needles, planting shade trees
upside down; swallowed by the opaqueness of one whom the seas

love better than they love you, Ireland--

you have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.
You have been compelled by hags to spin
gold thread from straw and have heard men say:
"There is a feminine temperament in direct contrast to ours,

which makes her do these things. Circumscribed by a
heritage of blindness and native
incompetence, she will become wise and will be forced to give in.
Compelled by experience, she will turn back;

water seeks its own level":
and you have smiled. "Water in motion is far
from level." You have seen it, when obstacles happened to bar
the path, rise automatically.
--Marianne Moore


"Sky News from the Garden of Eden"
(Iraq – 10th April 2003)

Soldiers break
through a hotel lounge
fingering death.

A girl sits with her family--
Innocents.

Her dress is thin
as this paper;
her terror as white.

She holds up her hands
like wheat to the scythe.
This gesture says:

We are nothing, spare us.
We will live unseen
beneath the body of a tank,
claim no sunlight,
drink rain, eat insects.

Not even her eyes have fire enough
to touch those terrible gods.

Within this year
her dress will be rags,
she will grow old,
while others gather silk
around their bellies,
deal in gold.

Perhaps she's already dead,
in camouflage of dust,
owning no grief--no grave,

no mark but this frail surrender
on my screen.

I switch off:
my tears leave nothing but salt.
--Gerard Rochford


"If You Forget Me"
I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
--Pablo Neruda


"A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention"
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.
--Yehuda Amichai


"Nativity"
In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night's darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.
--Li-Young Lee


"Long Afternoons"
Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me.
The river flowed patiently, nudging lazy boats to sea.
Long afternoons, the coast of ivory.
Shadows lounged in the streets, haughty manikins in shopfronts
stared at me with bold and hostile eyes.

Professors left their schools with vacant faces,
as if the Iliad had finally done them in.
Evening papers brought disturbing news,
but nothing happened, no one hurried.
There was no one in the windows, you weren’t there;
even nuns seemed ashamed of their lives.

Those were the long afternoons when poetry vanished
and I was left with the city’s opaque demon,
like a poor traveler stranded outside the Gare du Nord
with his bulging suitcase wrapped in twine
and September’s black rain falling.

Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze
that sees but doesn’t penetrate; tell me how to cure myself
of silence.
--Adam Zagajewski


"Keeping Things Whole"
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
--Mark Strand


"True Love"
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from the mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex--surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it, I cannot see beyond it.
--Sharon Olds


"Rendezvous"
Not for these lovely blooms that prank your chambers did
I come. Indeed,
I could have loved you better in the dark;
That is to say, in rooms less bright with roses, rooms more
casual, less aware
Of History in the wings about to enter with benevolent air
On ponderous tiptoe, at the cue "Proceed."
Not that I like the ash-trays over-crowded and the place
in a mess,
Or the monastic cubicle too unctuously austere and stark,
But partly that these formal garlands for our Eighth Street
Aphrodite are a bit too Greek,
And partly that to make the poor walls rich with our un-
aided loveliness
Would have been more chic.

Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-
driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you
are you, none other.
Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.
But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed—with
pumice, I suppose--
The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I
wish I did not feel like your mother.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay


"So it wasn't just memory. Memory was just half of it, it wasn't enough. But it must be somewhere, he thought. There's the waste. Not just me. At least I think I don't mean just me. Hope I don't mean just me. Let it be anyone, thinking of, remembering, the body, the broad thighs and the hands that liked bitching and making things. It seemed so little, so little to want, to ask. With all the old graveward-creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeated clinging not even to the defeat but just to an old habit; accepting the defeat even to be allowed to cling to the habit--the wheezing lungs, the troublesome guts incapable of pleasure. But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails: and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring, dry and wild and faint in the night, but he could face it, thinking, Not could. Will. I want to. So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won't be memory because it won't know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.--Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief."
--William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

"A poet is a musician who can't sing."
--Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind


"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."
--Henri Poincaré


"home means that"
home means that
when the certainly
roof leaks it
's our (home

means if any moon
or possibly
sun shines they are
our also my

darling)but should some im
probably
unworld crash
to 1

nonillion(& so)nothings
each(let's
kiss)means

home
--e.e. cummings


"No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas."
--Virginia Woolf


"Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle--for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life."
--Virginia Woolf


"I Write For..."
I write for my own kind,
I do not pitch my voice
that every phrase be heard
by those who have no choice:
their quality of mind
must be withdrawn and still,
as moth that answers moth
across a roaring hill.
--John Hewitt


"Empty Room"
The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax.
The clock's voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists: a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.

But time flows through the room, light flows through the room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting or a child snipping at paper.
--A. S. J. Tessimond


"Latterday Oracles: Noise"
Listen to me and you will not need to listen
To your own voice thin as a shred of paper uncurling,
Your laughter empty and brittle as an eggshell:
Your thoughts thrown back in your teeth by the cynical wind.

You will not hear the diffidence of breath,
The importunacy of blood, denying death,
The pulse's halt and start,
The morse code of the heart,
Or your two hands whispering together, unquiet as air-stirred leaves.

Listen to me and you will not need to listen.
I am your rampart against silence, time,
And all the gods with empty arms, and eyes
Cold as mirrors, cold and white with questions.
--A. S. J. Tessimond


"Come In"
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
--Robert Frost


"Near the Wall of a House"
Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.
--Yehuda Amichai


"Little Beast"
1.

An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.
The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night
is thinking. It's thinking of love.


It's thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
That's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey kisses for everyone.

Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife
carves the likeness of his lover's face into the motel wall. I like him
and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.



2.

Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
I'm sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.



3.

History repeats itself. Somebody says this.
History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,
over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is a little man in a brown suit
trying to define a room he is outside of.
I know history. There are many names in history
but none of them are ours.



4.

He had green eyes,
so I wanted to sleep with him
green eyes flicked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool--
You could drown in those eyes, I said.
The fact of his pulse,
the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire
not to disturb the air around him.
Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,
the way we look like animals,
his skin barely keeping him inside.
I wanted to take him home
and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his
like a crash test car.
I wanted to be wanted and he was
very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.
You could drown in those eyes, I said,
so it's summer, so it's suicide,
so we're helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.



5.

It wasn't until we were well past the middle of it
that we realized
the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,
far from being subverted,
had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.
Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,
replete with tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes
and not the doorway we had hoped for.
His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker that before,
scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.



6.

We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars
as the road around us
grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through the glass
already laced with frost,
but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out of
lullabies.
But damn if there isn't anything sexier
than a slender boy with a handgun,
a fast car, a bottle of pills.



7.

What would you like? I'd like my money's worth.
Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this--
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood
on the first four knuckles.
We pull our boots on with both hands
but we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do
is stand on the curb and say Sorry
about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.
--Richard Siken


"The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles"
Believe what you want to. Believe that I wove,
If you wish, twenty years, and waited, while you
Were knee-deep in blood, hip-deep in goddesses.

I've not much to show for twenty years' weaving--
I have but one half-finished cloth at the loom.
Perhaps it's the lengthy, meticulous grieving.

Explain how you want to. Believe I unraveled
At night what I stitched in the slow siesta,
How I kept them all waiting for me to finish,

The suitors, you call them. Believe what you want to.
Believe that they waited for me to finish,
Believe I beguiled them with nightly un-doings.

Believe what you want to. That they never touched me.
Believe your own stories, as you would have me do,
How you only survived by the wise infidelities.

Believe that each day you wrote me a letter
That never arrived. Kill all the damn suitors
If you think it will make you feel better.
--A.E. Stallings


"Jack Straw's Castle"
1.
Jack Straw sits
sits in his castle
Jack Straw watches the rain

why can't I leave my castle
he says, isn't there anyone
anyone here besides me

sometimes I find myself wondering
if the castle is a castle at all
a place apart, or merely
the castle that ever snail
must carry around till his death

and then there's the matter of breath
on a cold day it rears before me
like a beautiful fern
I'm amazed at the plant

will it survive me
a man of no account
visited only by visions

and no one here
no one who knows how to play


visions, voices,burnings smells
all of a rainy day

2.

Pig Pig she cries
I can hear her from next door
He fucked me in the mouth
and now he won't give me car fare
she rages and cries



3.

The rain stops. I look round: a square of the floor,
Blond wood, shines palely in the laggard sun;
The kittens suck, contrasting strips of fur,
The mother in their box, a perfect fit,
I finally got it how I wanted it,
A fine snug house when all is said and done.

But night makes me uneasy: floor by floor
Rooms never guessed at open from the gloom
First as thin smoky lines, ghost of a door
Or lintel that develops like a print
Darkening into full embodiment
--Boudoir and oubliette, room on room on room.

And I have met or believed I met
People in some of them, though they were not
The kind I need. They looked convincing, yet
There always was too much of the phantom to them.
Meanwhile, and even when I walked right through them,
I was talking, talking to myself. Of what?

Fact was, the echo of each word drowned out
The next word spoken, and I cannot say
What it was I was going on about.
It could be I was asking, Do these rooms
Spring up at night-time suddenly, like mushrooms,
Or have they all been hiding here all day?


4.

Dream sponsors:
Charles Manson, tongue
playing over dry lips,
thinking a long thought;
and the Furies, mad
puppetry heads appearing
in the open transom above
a forming door, like heads
of kittens staring angrily
over the edge of their box:

'Quick, fetch Medusa,'
their shrewish voices,
'Show him Medusa.'

Maybe I won't turn away,
maybe I'm so cool
I could outstare her.


5.

The door opens.
There are no snakes.
The head
is on the table.

On the table
gold hair struck
by light from
the naked bulb,
a dazzle in which
the ground of dazzle
is consumed, the
hair burning
in its own gold.

And her eyes
gaze at me,
pale blue, but
blank as the eyes
of zombie or angel,
with the stunned
lack of expression
of one
who has beheld
the source of everything
and found it
the same as nothing.

In her dazzle I
catch fire
self-delighted
self-sufficient
self-consuming
till
I burn out
so heavy
I sink into
darkness into
my foundations.


6.

Down in the cellars, nothing is visible
no one
Though there's a sound about me of many breathing
Light slap of foot on stone and rustle of body
Against body and stone.
And when later
I finger a stickiness along the ridges
Of a large central block that feels like granite
I don't know if it's my own, or I shed it,
Or both, as if priest and victim were only
Two limbs of the same body.
The lost traveller.
For this is the seat of needs
so deep, so old
That even where eye never perceives body
And where the sharpest ear discerns only
The light slap and rustle of flesh on stone
They, the needs, seek ritual and ceremony
To appease themselves
(Oh, the breathing all around me)
Or they would tear apart the life that feeds them.



7.

I am the man on the rack.
I am the man who puts the man on the rack.
I am the man who watches the man who puts the man on the
rack.


8.

Might it not have been
a thought-up film
which suddenly ceases

the lights go up
I can see only
this pearl-grey chamber
false and quiet
no audience here
just the throned one

nothing outside the bone
nothing accessible

the ambush and taking of
meaning were nothing
were
inventions of Little Ease

I sit
trapped in bone
I am back again
where I never left, I sit
in my first instant, where
I never left

petrified at my centre

9.　

I spin like a solitary star, I swoon.

But there breaks into my long solitude

A bearded face, it's Charlie, close as close,
His breath that stinks of jail--of pain and fungus,
So close that I breathe nothing else.

Then I recall as if it were my own
Life on the hot ranch, and the other smells.
Of laurel in the sun, fierce, sweet; of people
--Death-swear or lust-sweat they smelt much the same.
He reigned in sultry power over his dream.

I come back to the face pushed into mine.
Tells me he's bound to point out, man,
That dreams don't come from nowhere: it's your dream
He says, you dreamt it. So there's no escape.

And now he's squatting at a distance
To wait the taunt's effect, paring his nails,
From time to time glancing up sideways at me,
A sly mad look. Yes, but he's not mad either.

He's gone too far, Charlie you've overdone it.
Something inside my head turns over.
I think I see how his taunt can be my staircase,
For if I brought all of this stuff inside
There must be an outside to bring it from.
Outside the castle, somewhere, there must be
A real Charles Manson, a real woman crying,
And laws I had no hand in, like gravity.

About midnight. Where earlier there had seemed
A shadowy arch projected on the bone-like stone,
I notice, fixing itself,
Easing itself in place even as I see it,
A staircase leading upward.
Is that rain
Far overhead, that drumming sound?
Boy, what a climb ahead.

At the bottom, looking back, I find
He is, for now at any rate, clean gone.


10.

My coldness wakes me,
mine, and the kitchen chair's.

How long have I sat here? I
went to sleep in bed.

Entering real rooms perhaps,
my own spectre, cold,

unshivering as a flight of
flint steps that leads nowhere,

in a ruin, where the wall
abruptly ends, and the steps too

and you stare down at the broken
slabs far below, at the ivy

glinting over bone-chips which must
at one time have been castle.

11.

Down panic, down. The castle is still here,
And I am in the kitchen with a beer
Hearing the hurricane thin out to rain.
Got to relax if I'm to sleep again.
The castle is here, but not snug any more,
I'm loose, I rattle in its hollow core.
And as for that parade of rooms--shed, jail,
Cellar, each snapping at the next one's tail--
That raced inside my skull for half the night,
I hope I'm through with that. I flick the light.
And hope the dungeons will be there for good
(What laid those stones?) at least I found I could,
Thrown down, escape by learning what to learn;
And hold it that held me.
Till I return.

And so to bed, in hopes that I won't dream.

. . . . . . . . . .

I drift, doze, sleep. But towards dawn it does seem,
While I half-wake, too tired to turn my head,
That someone stirs behind me in the bed
Between two windows on an upper floor.
Is it a real man muttering? I'm not sure.
Though he does not seem phantom-like as yet,
Thick, heavily breathing, with a sweet faint sweat.

So humid, we lie sheetless--and are close,
Facing apart, but leaning ass to ass.

And that mere contact is sufficient tough,
A hinge, it separates but not too much.
An air moves over us, as calm and cool
As the green water of a swimming pool.

What if this is the man I gave my key
Who got in while I slept? Or what if he,
Still, is a dream of that same man?
No, real.
Comes from outside the castle, I can feel.
The beauty's in what is, not what may seem.
I turn. And even if he were a dream
--Thick with sweating flesh against which I lie curled--
With dreams like this, Jack's ready for the world.
--Thom Gunn


"How to Eat a Poem"
Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
--Eve Merriam


"Bess"
Ours were the streets where Bess first met her
cancer. She went to work every day at the
secure houses. At her job in the library
she arranged better and better flowers, and when
students asked for books her hand went out
to help. In the last year of her life
she had to keep her friends from knowing
how happy they were. She listened while they
complained about food or work or the weather.
And the great national events danced
their grotesque, fake importance. Always

Pain moved where she moved. She walked
ahead; it came. She hid; it found her.
No one ever served another so truly;
no enemy ever meant so strong a hate.
It was almost as if there was no room
left for her on earth. But she remembered
where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers;
she did not weep when she passed its houses;
and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner
and slipped from pain, her hand opened
again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.
--William Stafford


"Strange Ways"
Increasingly often now
You reach into your handbag
(the one I bought you some Xmases ago)
And pulling out
A pair of dead cats
Skinned and glistening like the underside of tongues
Or old elastoplasts
Sticky with earwigs
You laugh cruelongly
And hurl them at my eyes
Why?
Even though we have grown old together
And my kisses are little more than functional
I still love you
You and your strange ways
--Roger McGough


"Miniature Bridges, Your Mouth"
what we do in the dark has no hands. no
crossover effect, no good-bye kiss after the alarm.
what we carry in, we carry out, end of story. this
doesn't even want to be love. except in minutes
when your face has the shape of my palm and I think
lungful. let want out with the cat. returns
and returns, something dutiful. persistent.
hold your breath, let it build, let go. this is practice.
I'm losing weight, a bad sign, I'm happy. serious,
you say. contained, I think. the cat comes back
with a dead bird to the doorstep, an offering. bloodless
this should be easy. a two-step to cowboys. you're beautiful
but that's not the point.

x

I know my way back perfectly well. like the back
of my hand, as it were. but look, the labyrinth walls
are high hedge and green. this also could be joy.

xx

I literally don't know your middle name. does that
matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. not
what I'd anticipated. softer. to begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that's a liability.

xxx

I am not often off-kilter. but you're so silent, even
naked, and almost absent. I hush too, why
are we here. go. want to throw things, you, the clock,
break windows until something bleeds and you finally
scream. I tell you too much; we are not
those people. or nothing--maybe I say
utilitarian fuck. how would that be. I want you
to want to fall in love with me and that's
unhealthy. wrong. leave your shoes by the door
and pretend it's about the movie. it's love
in the movies it's casablanca and toy story
and water no ice come here. pockets need
to be untucked, drawers thrown open,
nobody's safe. there, I've said it:
someone I was could have loved you.
--Marty McConnell


"Tonja's Letter"
She tells me of a dream. A man carrying tea on a tray, and the host,
derisive.

How she got up from her chair, angry. Walked a road along the sea. dauphins
over water, under, over: bracelets of bodies. And above, birds—

How did they take shape out of a white sky?
Paper, creased sharply.

How did they know when to migrate, when to move on?





Later, an answering dream.

I unlocked a cabinet, opened my ribs.
From a many-branching tree: finches, warblers, kingfishers. One pelican.

They flew off. I distracted myself by setting a table, taking goblets
and dishes from the cabinet: no end to what I could take.

And the tree that held the birds?

This was a dream, remember.

In a dream, the day after this one passes through
the day before.

This is how we wake.
--Anne Simpson


"When I Think of the End of the World Now"
I can't help but see the first few crocuses that will
somehow shoot through the layers of ash

like fingers still tender and bright enough to redeem
the particulate drizzle that will no doubt keep

staining our expectant faces as we huddle in cellars,
under overpasses, crouching on hazmat pallets

and wondering how to fill the silences piling above us
like stricken snow. I think of Pavlov sweating

on his deathbed, requesting nothing but a bowl of mud
from the creek near his boyhood home in Ryazan

where he sailed newsprint yachts and packed pies
so thick his mouth would water for days after.

And when he cradled that dish of earth, he must have
sighed, smiling, sinking both hands deep into memory

so his fever had no choice but to break. I think of you
and hear the last yellow line train sparking to a stop

beneath your bedroom window on Killingsworth, that
voice always warning, Doors are closing. I wish I could

go back now and tape the wolfish sounds we'd make
when we made love, though I know or say I know

there may never be a way to replay them.
--James Crews


"To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our fill attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just the Muzak in dull or tedious place anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

"The memoir-relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Of those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull...only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it...as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."
--David Foster Wallace, The Pale King


"Bruno, maybe someday you'll write...Not for me, dig, what he hell does it matter to me. But it has to be beautiful, I feel like it's gotta be beautiful. I was telling you how when I was a kid learning to play, I noticed that time changed. I told that to Jim once and he said that everybody in the world feels the same way and when he gets lost in it...He said that, when somebody gets lost in it...Hell no, I don't get lost when I'm playing. Only the place changes. It's like in an elevator, you're in an elevator talking with people, you don't feel anything strange, meanwhile you've passed the first floor, the tenth, the twenty-first, and the city's down there below you, and you're finishing the sentence you began when you stepped into it, and between the first words and the last ones, there's fifty-two floors. I realized that when I started to play I was stepping into an elevator, but the elevator was time, if I can put it that way. Now realize that I haven't forgotten the mortgage or the religion. Like it's the mortgage and the religion are a suit I'm not wearing at the moment; I know that the suit's in the closet, but at that moment you can't tell me that that suit exists. The suit exists when I put it on, and the mortgage and religion existed when I got finished playing and the old lady came in with her hair, dangling big hunks of hair all over me and complaining I'm busting her ears with that goddamned music."
--Julio Cortázar, "The Pursuer," translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn


"Paris isn't a casino in the provinces, and everybody has his eye on Johnny. And while I'm thinking that, I can't help having a bad taste in my mouth, anger, not against Johnny nor the things that happen to him; rather against the people who hang around him, myself, the marquesa and Marcel, for example. Basically we're a bunch of egotists; under the pretext of watching out for Johnny what we're doing is protecting our idea of him, getting ourselves ready for the pleasure Johnny's going to give us, to reflect the brilliance from the statue we've erected among us all and defend it till the last grasp. If Johnny zonked, it would be bad for my book (the translation into English or Italian was coming out any minute), and part of my concern for Johnny was put together from such things. Art and Marcel needed him to help them earn bread, and the marquesa, well, dig what the marquesa saw in Johnny besides his talent. All this has nothing to do with the other Johnny, and suddenly I realized that maybe that was what Johnny was trying to tell me when he yanked off the blanket and left himself as naked as a worm, Johnny with no horn, Johnny with no money and no clothes, Johnny obsessed by something that his intelligence was not equal to comprehending, but which floats slowly into his music, caresses his skin, perhaps is readying for an unpredictable leap which we will never understand."
--Julio Cortázar, "The Pursuer," translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn


" 'What happens to them is that they get to think of themselves as wise,' he said sharply. 'They think it's wisdom because they've piled up a lot of books and eaten them. It makes me laugh, because really they're good kids and are really convinced that what they study and what they do are really very difficult and profound things. In the circus, Bruno, it's all the same, and between us it's the same. People figure that some things are the height of difficulty, and so they applaud trapeze artists, or me. I don't know what they're thinking about, do they imagine that you break yourself up to play well, or that the trapeze artist sprains tendons every time he takes a leap? The really difficult things are something else entirely, everything that people think they can do anytime. To look, for instance, or to understand a dog or a cat. Those are the difficult things, the big difficulties. Last night I happened to look in this little mirror, and I swear, it was so terribly difficult I almost threw myself out of bed. Imagine that you're looking at yourself; that alone is enough to freeze you up for half an hour. In reality, this guy's not me, the first second I felt very clearly that he wasn't me. I felt that, and when something like that's felt...But it's like at Atlantic City, on top of one wave the second one falls on you, and then another...You've hardly felt and already another one comes, the words come...No, not words, but what's in the words, a kind of glue, that slime. And the slime comes and covers you and convinces you that that's you in the mirror. Sure, but not to realize it. But sure, I am, with my hair, this scar. And people don't realize that the only thing that they accept is the slime, and that's why they think it's easy to look in a mirror. Or cut a hunk of bread with a knife. Have you ever cut a hunk of bread with a knife?' "
--Julio Cortázar, "The Pursuer," translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn


"A man can't say anything, right away you translate it into your filthy language. If I play and you see angels, that's not my fault. If the others open their fat yaps and say that I've reached perfection, it's not my fault. And that's the worst thing, the thing you really and truly left out of your book, Bruno, and that's that I'm not worth a damn, that what I play and what the people applaud me for is not worth a damn, really not worth a damn."
--Julio Cortázar, "The Pursuer," translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn

"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

"A Dog after Love"
After you left me
I let a dog smell at
My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose
And set out to find you.

I hope it will tear the
Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis
Or at least
Will bring me your stockings between his teeth.
--Yehuda Amichai


"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)"
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay


"Every Day You Play"
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
--Pablo Neruda


"I cannot live with You"
I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –

Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
Old Ones crack –

I could not die – with You –
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down –
You – could not –

And I – could I stand by
And see You – freeze –
Without my Right of Frost –
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise – with You –
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus' –
That New Grace

Glow plain – and foreign
On my homesick Eye –
Except that You than He
Shone closer by –

They'd judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –

Because You saturated Sight –
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be –
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame –

And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –

So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
--Emily Dickinson


"jasper texas 1998"
for j. byrd
i am a man's head hunched in the road.
i was chosen to speak by the members
of my body. the arm as it pulled away
pointed toward me, the hand opened once
and was gone.

why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it.
the townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust. i am done.
--Lucille Clifton


"When You Go"
When you go,
if you go,
and I should want to die,
there's nothing I'd be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream
and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.
--Edwin Morgan


"Billy the Kid"
I.
The radio that told me about the death of Billy The Kid
(And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)
Let us fake out a frontier -- a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him -- a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles -- a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.
Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio
That told me about the death of Billy The Kid
The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going.
The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.

II.
A sprinkling of gold leaf looking like hell flowers
A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but wrinkled
again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron
A painting
Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid.
Collage a binding together
Of the real
Which flat colors
Tell us what heroes
really come by.
No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers
Fall from the hands of heroes
fall from all our hands
flat
As if we were not ever able quite to include them.
His gun
does not shoot real bullets
his death
Being done is unimportant.
Being done
In those flat colors
Not a collage
A binding together, a
Memory.

III.
There was nothing at the edge of the river
But dry grass and cotton candy.
"Alias," I said to him. "Alias,
Somebody there makes us want to drink the river
Somebody wants to thirst us."
"Kid," he said. "No river
Wants to trap men. There ain't no malice in it. Try
To understand."
We stood there by that little river and Alias took off his shirt
and I took off my shirt
I was never real. Alias was never real.
Or that big cotton tree or the ground.
Or the little river.

IV.
What I mean is
I
Will tell you about the pain
It was a long pain
About as wide as a curtain
But long
As the great outdoors
Stig-
mata
Three bullet holes in the groin
One in the head
dancing
Right below the left eyebrow
What I mean is I
Will tell you about his
Pain.

V.
Billy The Kid in a field of poplars with just one touch of moonlight
His shadow is carefully
distinguished from all of their shadows
Delicate
as perception is
No one will get his gun or obliterate
Their shadows

VI.
The gun
A false clue
Nothing can kill
Anybody.
Not a poem or a fat penis. Bang,
Bang, bang. A false
Clue.
Nor immortality either (though why immortality should occur to
me with somebody who was as mortal as Billy The Kid or
his gun which is now rusted in some rubbish heap or shined
up properly in some New York museum) A
False clue
Nothing
Can kill anybody. Your guy, Billy,
And your fresh
Face.

VII.
Grasshoppers swarm through the desert.
Within the desert
There are only grasshoppers.
Lady
Of Guadalupe
Make my sight clear
Make my breath pure
Make my strong arm stronger and my fingers tight.
Lady of Guadalupe, lover
Of many make
Me avenge
Them.

VIII.
Back where poetry is Our Lady
Watches each motion when the players take the cards
From the deck.
The Ten of Diamonds. The Jack of Spades. The Queen
of Clubs. The King of Hearts. The Ace
God gave us when he put us alive writing poetry for unsuspecting
people or shooting them with guns.
Our Lady
Stands as a kind of dancing partner for the memory.
Will you dance, Our Lady,
Dead and unexpected?
Billy wants you to dance
Billy
Will shoot the heels off your shoes if you don't dance
Billy
Being dead also wants
Fun.

IX.
So the heart breaks
Into small shadows
Almost so random
They are meaningless
Like a diamond
Has at the center of it a diamond
Or a rock
Rock.
Being afraid
Love asks its bare question--
I can no more remember
What brought me here
Than bone answers bone in the arm
Or shadow sees shadow--
Deathward we ride in the boat
Like someone canoeing
In a small lake
Where at either end
There are nothing but pine-branches--
Deathward we ride in the boat
Broken-hearted or broken-bodied
The choice is real. The diamond. I
Ask it.

X.
Billy The Kid
I love you
Billy The Kid
I back anything you say
And there was the desert
And the mouth of the river
Billy The Kid
(In spite of your death notices)
There is honey in the groin
Billy
--Jack Spicer


"Goodnight Moon"
Beloved, tell me--

Why do you come
only when I
orphan my ambitions?

Why do you show
only when all hope
has fled?

Why, Honeyed Moon,
will you meet me
only on my funeral bed?

And, tell me--

Why won't the dead
stay dead?
--Ivan Granger


"War Poet"
I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me;
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.
--Sidney Keynes


"You Can't Be a Star in the Sky without Holy Fire"
Why should I keep telling you what I love, and whom?
I am so dull and awkward, what difference would it make?
Yet I can't shut up. I'm like that mockingbird up on the
bee-riddled pole at the corner of our basement. He is de-
mented, singing I must have sex, singing stay away from me.
Every once in a while he does a little hip-hop, he flaps his
wings, he does a break-down. When does he breathe? When
does he sleep? And beneath him are the morning glories,
who could teach me a thing or two about the absolute rage to live,
and also the trumpet vine, which is serene and alluring, but which
is all muscle and will underneath. And the wisteria! You
would stand naked in the snow-white shower of its blossoms, but it
would send a root down through you and plant a stake in your heart.
No, I can't shut up, it's not in my nature, just as beauty is not,
just as all those virtues I read about have gone missing. And I
don't want everyone to gather round either. In another world
I am ready to lie down in solidarity with all the doomed blossoms
along the white fences. In another world I would stop grinding
my own bones. In another world I would convert all my failures
and consume them in a holy fire. But then there is that mindless
bird--he can't shut up--and it's one world only, and he knows it.
--Frank X. Gaspar


"A good deal of what passes for religion is just a vague fear or homesickness."
--Archie Robertson