Spring - Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flow

A Little Closer to the Edge - OCEAN VUONG

Young enough to believe nothing will change them, they step, hand-in-hand,

into the bomb crater. The night full of black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks

from shattering against her cheek, now dims like a miniature moon behind her hair. In this version the snake is headless — stilled like a cord unraveled from the lovers’ ankles. He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press into her — as the field shreds itself with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home out of hip bones. O mother, O minutehand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season. Where apples thunder the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.

Elaine Kahn | A Voluptuous Dream During an Eclipse

Cause and Effect - Richard Jackson

It’s because the earth continues to wobble on its axis that we continue to stumble down the streets of the heart. It’s because of the loneliness of the first cell trying to swim through its primordial pool that we are filled with a kind of galactic fear. For example: one moment a rocket falls capriciously into a square. Another moment, a rogue wave turns over the fishing boat whose crew leaves their memories floating like an oil slick that never reaches shore. In this way we understand our dying loves scratching at the door. In this way, each love creates its own theory of pain. Each love gnaws the derelict hours to the bone. But because there are so many blank spaces in history we still have time to write our own story. Wittgenstein said our words have replaced our emotions. He never understood how we have to cleanse ourselves of these invisible parasites of doubt and fear. We might as well worry about the signals from dead worlds wandering around the universe forever. Think instead of how the trees prop up the sky. How the rain falls into the open eyes of the pond bringing a vision no one expected. Here’s mine: this bee hovering over the pencil seems to bring a message from the deepest flowers you inhabit. Because I don’t know where all this love has come from, because the clouds are covered with our footsteps that know no time, I am no longer surprised when each day comes from a new place, because in this way, I can imagine these words getting lost in your lungs, my fingers curling inside you as if I could gather you inside my own heart, or tracing the slope of your hip towards a whole other world. Don’t worry. Like us the planet wobbles because of the shifting hot and cold zones, high and low pressures, the pull of tides. The stars that are these words are always closer than we think despite the theories of astronomers. In this way, I will always be there, a rain falling into the sea, the abandoned light opening your eyes despite the curtains of reason, the life you give each time you turn to me, because the stumbling breaths we borrow from each other are all we have to keep each other alive.

Taxidermy - Sierra DeMulder

Five years after your daughter’s death, you still cry in the juniors section of department stores. You preserve her bedroom like a taxidermist. Her unworn prom dress still hangs like a skinned mermaid in her closet. Cancer entered your home like a greedy tenant, drew himself into family portraits, slept in your daughter’s bed, swallowed all her blood cells. It started with a headache. A fever, your daughter melting like a popsicle. It took you a week to tell your husband about the blood in the toilet. Sometimes, you wonder if you never caught it, could you have lived as if it was never there? As if saying that word instantly drapes a shroud over your house. Would it still have slept like cremation in her bed? The doctors spoke to you in time lines, as your daughter’s weight dropped like a count down, a surprise party no one wanted to throw. Once, when she was in the other room, her blood being read like tea leaves, the doctor suggested not to bother with college applications. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell her. You couldn’t bring yourself to say it. Sometimes you think she knew, as she methodically filled out each question and box, it was never for her. There is still a stack of unsent applications hidden like tumor in your dresser. She kissed every envelope goodbye. You couldn’t bear to send more of her away. When she passed, quietly like a note to God, all you wanted was to swaddle her in your arms like an infant, bring her home from the hospital, fragile and new. Breastfeed her back to life, potty train and finger paint, reteach her the alphabet, retrace her first steps back to you. To lose a child is like giving birth in reverse. It is slow and it rips, planting a permanent lump in your throat. When chemotherapy pulled out the last of her hair, you started carrying her baby teeth in your pocket: A reminder things can grow back.

The Ninth Elegy - Rainer Maria Rilke

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then have to be human–and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate?… Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too….. But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart. Trying to become it.– Whom can we give it to? We would hold onto it all, forever… Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the act of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness, and long experience of love,–just what is wholly unsayable. But later, among the stars, what good is it–thay are better as they are: unsayable. For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window– at most: column, tower….But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together, that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy? Threshold: what it means for two lovers to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door– they too, after the many who came before them and before those to come…., lightly. Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness. More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act. An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits. Between the hammers our heart endures, just as the tongue does between the teeth and, despite that, still is able to praise. Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one, you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze. Tell him of Things. he will stand astonished; as you stood by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile. Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form, serves as a thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last. Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, invisible? Isn’t it your dream to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent command? Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over–one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is our intimate companion, Death. Look, i am living. On what? neither childhood nor future grows any smaller…..Superabundant being wells up in my heart. translated by Stephen Mitchell

Desire - Mary Mackey

in my dreams I hold my lovers next to me all at once and ask them what was it I desired? my hands are full of their heads like bunches of cut roses blond hair, brown hair, red, black, their eyes are pools of bewilderment staring up at me from the bouquet what was it I desired? I ask again was it your bodies? did I hope by draping your flesh over me I could escape boredom loneliness gray hairs shooting towards me from the future like thin arrows? did I think I could escape, by taking your breath into my mouth, did I think I could escape the responsibility of breathing? what did I desire in you? sex knowledge? power? love? did I expect the clouds to crack and blue moths to fly out of the stars? did I expect a voice to call to me saying “Here at last is the answer.” what I yell at them shaking my lovers what did I desire in you? their ears fall off like petals they shed their faces in a pile at my feet their bewildered eyes pucker and close centers of fallen flowers the last face floats down circling in the darkness at my feet what did I desire in you? I whisper the stems of their bodies dry in my hands

Ellen West - Frank Bidart

I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ... But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT ... cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife. . . . Why am I a girl? I ask my doctors, and they tell me they don’t know, that it is just “given.” But it has such implications—; and sometimes, I even feel like a girl. . . . Now, at the beginning of Ellen’s thirty-second year, her physical condition has deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton, and weighs only 92 pounds. . . . About five years ago, I was in a restaurant, eating alone with a book. I was not married, and often did that ... —I’d turn down dinner invitations, so I could eat alone; I’d allow myself two pieces of bread, with butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of vanilla ice cream, at the end,— sitting there alone with a book, both in the book and out of it, waited on, idly watching people,— when an attractive young man and woman, both elegantly dressed, sat next to me. She was beautiful—; with sharp, clear features, a good bone structure—; if she took her make-up off in front of you, rubbing cold cream again and again across her skin, she still would be beautiful— more beautiful. And he,— I couldn’t remember when I had seen a man so attractive. I didn’t know why. He was almost a male version of her,— I had the sudden, mad notion that I wanted to be his lover ... —Were they married? were they lovers? They didn’t wear wedding rings. Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed politics. They didn’t touch ... —How could I discover? Then, when the first course arrived, I noticed the way each held his fork out for the other to taste what he had ordered ... They did this again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent smiles, for each course, more than once for each dish—; much too much for just friends ... —Their behavior somehow sickened me; the way each gladly put the food the other had offered into his mouth—; I knew what they were. I knew they slept together. An immense depression came over me ... —I knew I could never with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth: happily myself put food into another’s mouth—; I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal. . . . Even as a child, I saw that the “natural” process of aging is for one’s middle to thicken— one’s skin to blotch; as happened to my mother. And her mother. I loathed “Nature.” At twelve, pancakes became the most terrible thought there is ... I shall defeat “Nature.” In the hospital, when they weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt. . . . January 16. The patient is allowed to eat in her room, but comes readily with her husband to afternoon coffee. Previously she had stoutly resisted this on the ground that she did not really eat but devoured like a wild animal. This she demonstrated with utmost realism.... Her physical examination showed nothing striking. Salivary glands are markedly enlarged on both sides. January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit” Says that her own poems are “hospital poems ... weak—without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly.” February 8. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached herself to an elegant, very thin female patient. Homo-erotic component strikingly evident. February 15. Vexation, and torment. Says that her mind forces her always to think of eating. Feels herself degraded by this. Has entirely, for the first time in years, stopped writing poetry. . . . Callas is my favorite singer, but I’ve only seen her once—; I’ve never forgotten that night ... —It was in Tosca, she had long before lost weight, her voice had been, for years, deteriorating, half itself ... When her career began, of course, she was fat, enormous—; in the early photographs, sometimes I almost don’t recognize her ... The voice too then was enormous— healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of crude effects, even vulgar, almost out of high spirits, too much health ... But soon she felt that she must lose weight,— that all she was trying to express was obliterated by her body, buried in flesh—; abruptly, within four months, she lost at least sixty pounds ... —The gossip in Milan was that Callas had swallowed a tapeworm. But of course she hadn’t. The tapeworm was her soul ... —How her soul, uncompromising, insatiable, must have loved eating the flesh from her bones, revealing this extraordinarily mercurial; fragile; masterly creature ... —But irresistibly, nothing stopped there; the huge voice also began to change: at first, it simply diminished in volume, in size, then the top notes became shrill, unreliable—at last, usually not there at all ... —No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make her artistry subtler, more refined, more capable of expressing humiliation, rage, betrayal ... —Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit loathed the unending struggle to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose mechanics, and suffocating customs, seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit ... —I know that in Tosca, in the second act, when, humiliated, hounded by Scarpia, she sang Vissi d’arte —“I lived for art”— and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks, with a voice reaching harrowingly for the notes, “Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?” I felt I was watching autobiography— an art; skill; virtuosity miles distant from the usual soprano’s athleticism,— the usual musician’s dream of virtuosity without content ... —I wonder what she feels, now, listening to her recordings. For they have already, within a few years, begun to date ... Whatever they express they express through the style of a decade and a half—; a style she helped create ... —She must know that now she probably would not do a trill in exactly that way,— that the whole sound, atmosphere, dramaturgy of her recordings have just slightly become those of the past ... —Is it bitter? Does her soul tell her that she was an idiot ever to think anything material wholly could satisfy? ... —Perhaps it says: The only way to escape the History of Styles is not to have a body. . . . When I open my eyes in the morning, my great mystery stands before me ... —I know that I am intelligent; therefore the inability not to fear food day-and-night; this unending hunger ten minutes after I have eaten ... a childish dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause,— half my mind says that all this is demeaning ... Bread for days on end drives all real thought from my brain ... —Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin conceals the ideal not to have a body—; which is NOT trivial ... This wish seems now as much a “given” of my existence as the intolerable fact that I am dark-complexioned; big-boned; and once weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds ... —But then I think, No. That’s too simple,— without a body, who can know himself at all? Only by acting; choosing; rejecting; have I made myself— discovered who and what Ellen can be ... —But then again I think, NO. This I is anterior to name; gender; action; fashion; MATTER ITSELF,— ... trying to stop my hunger with FOOD is like trying to appease thirst with ink. . . . March 30. Result of the consultation: Both gentlemen agree completely with my prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of commitment even more emphatically than I. All three of us are agreed that it is not a case of obsessional neurosis and not one of manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s demand for discharge. . . . The train-ride yesterday was far worse than I expected ... In our compartment were ordinary people: a student; a woman; her child;— they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces; but I thought I was surrounded by creatures with the pathetic, desperate desire to be not what they were:— the student was short, and carried his body as if forcing it to be taller—; the woman showed her gums when she smiled, and often held her hand up to hide them—; the child seemed to cry simply because it was small; a dwarf, and helpless ... —I was hungry. I had insisted that my husband not bring food ... After about thirty minutes, the woman peeled an orange to quiet the child. She put a section into its mouth—; immediately it spit it out. The piece fell to the floor. —She pushed it with her foot through the dirt toward me several inches. My husband saw me staring down at the piece ... —I didn’t move; how I wanted to reach out, and as if invisible shove it in my mouth—; my body became rigid. As I stared at him, I could see him staring at me,— then he looked at the student—; at the woman—; then back to me ... I didn’t move. —At last, he bent down, and casually threw it out the window. He looked away. —I got up to leave the compartment, then saw his face,— his eyes were red; and I saw —I’m sure I saw— disappointment. . . . On the third day of being home she is as if transformed. At breakfast she eats butter and sugar, at noon she eats so much that—for the first time in thirteen years!—she is satisfied by her food and gets really full. At afternoon coffee she eats chocolate creams and Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads poems, listens to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and all heaviness seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one a letter to the fellow patient here to whom she had become so attached. In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead. “She looked as she had never looked in life—calm and happy and peaceful.” . . . Dearest.—I remember how at eighteen, on hikes with friends, when they rested, sitting down to joke or talk, I circled around them, afraid to hike ahead alone, yet afraid to rest when I was not yet truly thin. You and, yes, my husband,— you and he have by degrees drawn me within the circle; forced me to sit down at last on the ground. I am grateful. But something in me refuses it. —How eager I have been to compromise, to kill this refuser,— but each compromise, each attempt to poison an ideal which often seemed to me sterile and unreal, heightens my hunger. I am crippled. I disappoint you. Will you greet with anger, or happiness, the news which might well reach you before this letter? Your Ellen.

from “The Seismographic Ear” - Laurence Wieder

From transmitter to receiver, from dusk to dark. Plucked, the string vibrates about a single line Tending rest and motion, an attempt to hold them both At once, and likewise inspiration seizes on Two states and makes them one, holds them Together in a dream of union, just like Lincoln Until the vibrations come too intense and A thin glass shatters in the dining room.

The Lay Brother - Robert Huff

Francesco’s fingers must have had their say About the blessed living near the Word With waxen doll or with a beating bird, While heavy oxen kept the cold away.

But here Duns Scotus’ bells shoulder the rain. Chill incantation keeps a chilly choir. Waiting for snowy birds, I dream of fire: Poor devils tell me folds could not contain.

The ragged beggars dancing in the wild Till hooded voices hobbled in dark frocks Praised them into our tidy looking flocks. I would not dream so. When I was a child

My father sent me scampering after strays. In lambing season we worked through the night Within our dancing fire’s ring of light, FOr there were many lambs to touch those days.

Billy the Kid - Jack Spicer

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