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Twenty Questions--David Lehman
Why did the moth fly into the flame? Was it for the same reason
That Achilles died young? Who gets more fun out of sex,
The man or the woman? (Be sure to explain how you can tell.)
Which is more real to you, heaven or hell?
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? What causes the death of love—
The love of death? Did Adam and Eve have a choice?
Did the Virgin Mary? What are we afraid of, anyway?
Even agnostics have the right to say “thank god,” don’t they?
Looking at these dancing atoms, shall I say I saw a ring
Of pure and endless light? Or did I dream the whole thing?
Whom shall I say is calling? Are you in if it’s your wife?
Are you willing to relocate? Do you like your life?
What makes this night different from all other nights?
Would you say it’s your fate to be always,
Without exception, five minutes late? If you arrived
At 9:10, would the ceremony have started at 9:05
Though it had been scheduled for 9:15? As you walk down
The aisle, and the others rivet their attention to you,
Do you ask yourself what you’re going to do,
As though it mattered, as if you knew?
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Elegy for a Suicide--John Poch
She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:
there’s only so much you can do with friction
and an intentional hand before the hand burns.
he sound that scissors make in a child’s hand
while crunching construction paper aches when
she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,
that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.
Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that.
We come down from bunk beds. We come down from
the funky reds and yellows of the spring’s summer tanager
gone in fall. We fail to see the most vivid birds
high in the trees on the other side of leaves.
Where did those sad seeds come from or how take root?
Her departure spun out of some samara down into a maple
shadow that shadows well into night’s sweet syrup.
O host, we don’t know the words for this country,
and this country pretends we have no knife,
no guns in the bedroom, no large car for escaping
or crashing over hard hillsides or into houses.
We stuff our faces, blank as pills, with pills.
No one wants to open that book, but it’s a book.
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Nox Borealis--Campbell McGrath
If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly,
if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion,
if the wind can learn to read our minds
and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket,
surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.
Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming
unimaginable dreams in hollow trees,
even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us
with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.
Listen to me now: think of something you love
but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us
only what we can afford to lose.
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What I'm Looking For--Maureen N. McLane
What I'm looking for
is an unmarked door
we'll walk through
and there: whatever
we'd wished for
beyond the door.
What I'm looking for
is a golden bowl
carefully repaired
a complete world sealed
along cracked lines.
What I'm looking for
may not be there.
What you're looking for
may or may not
be me. I'm listening for
the return of that sound
I heard in the woods
just now, that silvery sound
that seemed to call
not only to me.
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A Song on the End of the World--Czeslaw Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
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Live Blindly and Upon the Hour--Trumbull Stickney
Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,
Poor, child, and be not to thyself abhorred.
Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord
And the long strips of river-silver flow:
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight
About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.
Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old
Apollo springing naked to the light,
And all his island shivered into flowers.
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Hunger--Gamaliel Bradford
I’ve been a hopeless sinner, but I understand a saint,
Their bend of weary knees and their contortions long and faint,
And the endless pricks of conscience, like a hundred thousand pins,
A real perpetual penance for imaginary sins.
I love to wander widely, but I understand a cell,
Where you tell and tell your beads because you’ve nothing else to tell,
Where the crimson joy of flesh, with all its wild fantastic tricks,
Is forgotten in the blinding glory of the crucifix.
I cannot speak for others, but my inmost soul is torn
With a battle of desires making all my life forlorn.
There are moments when I would untread the paths that I have trod.
I’m a haunter of the devil, but I hunger after God.
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Invictus--William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
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St. Elizabeth--Aracelis Girmay
I run high in my body
on the road toward sea.
I fall in love. The things
the wind is telling me.
The yellow sky quiet
in her quiet dress.
Old birds sending news
from the reddish hills.
& the one hawk flying
in the distance overhead.
That hawk is what
the wind says. In love
with the heaving
of my peacock chest,
with my lungs, two wings,
such flying things,
but mine for now, just for now
as I open my stride
above the good, dirt road,
fall in love with the mustard
& coriander dust,
& the far, far mountain
beveled by light, by rain,
the easy eye of the sun, now,
smoke floating across the hillside
like a face I knew once very well.
Very well, I fall in love
with the flowers & the wash
hung like prayer flags, see,
in red Juanita's yard. In love
with the earth the color of earth. In
love with the goats, their bellies & hooves,
& the goat mouths bleating
as they greet me on the road.
I fall in love. How they wear
their strange & double-eyes.
How they do not blink
or laugh at me
or say a thing I understand
when I ask them in my English,
because they circle around my feet,
as if they always knew me,
Were you my children once?
Did I know your names?
Oh, little magics?
Little children?
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Nothing--Randall Mann
My mother is scared of the world.
She left my father after forty years.
She was like, Happy anniversary, goodbye;
I respect that.
The moon tonight is dazzling, is full
of itself but not quite full.
A man should not love the moon, said Milosz.
Not exactly. He translated himself
into saying it. A man should not love translation;
there’s so much I can’t know. An hour ago,
marking time with someone I would like to like,
we passed some trees and there were crickets
(crickets!) chirping right off Divisadero.
I touched his hand, and for a cold moment
I was like a child again,
nothing more, nothing less.
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You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life--Rebecca Hazelton
I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you.
We’ll talk about kids
but make plans to travel.
I will remember your eyes
as green when they were gray.
Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.
Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better.
There will be small things.
I will pick up your damp towel from the bed,
and then I won’t.
I won’t be as hot as I was
when I wasn’t yours
and your hairline now so
untrustworthy.
When we pull up alongside a cattle car
and hear the frightened lows,
I will silently judge you
for not immediately renouncing meat.
You will bring me wine
and notice how much I drink.
The garden you plant and I plant
is tunneled through by voles,
the vowels
we speak aren’t vows,
but there’s something
holding me here, for now,
like your eyes, which I suppose
are brown, after all.
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Ruins--Eliza Griswold
A spring day oozes through Trastevere.
A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs.
Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples
pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun.
Every hard bulb stirs.
The fossilized egg in my chest
cracks open against my will.
I was so proud not to feel my heart.
Waking means being angry.
The dead man on the Congo road
was missing an ear,
which had either been eaten
or someone was wearing it
around his neck.
The dead man looked like this. No, that.
Here’s a flock of tourists
in matching canvas hats.
This year will take from me
the hardened person
who I longed to be.
I am healing by mistake.
Rome is also built on ruins.
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In a Beautiful Country--Kevin Prufer
A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.
Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.
Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.
The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds
into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,
then down you’ll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,
the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.
A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don’t worry
about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You’re thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.
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The Gift--Robert Thomas
When I got the box home from the gun shop, I let it sit on my kitchen table
in its wax wrapping for hours before I opened it.
Safe from the elements. Protected from rust
and more esoteric forms of corrosion.
My father gave me a rosewood chess set when I turned twelve.
I’d never felt so loved through and through, almost literally, as if
I were transparent —
and it probably wasn’t love, just a lucky, last-minute guess
at the toy store, which is probably what most love is, anyway.
I took the set into my room, shut the door,
determined to master every fork and zugzwang,
that strange position where you’d be safe
if only you didn’t have to make a move.
Now I’d given myself a perfect gift. I imagined the gun at rest
in a velvet sack next to its dainty box of bullets. I wouldn’t need many.
And no sequined wrapping paper could have been more beautiful
than the brown waxed sheet the clerk had unrolled
and cut along the steel edge in one long, smooth stroke.
When I finally slit through the layers to open it,
the paper was as delicate and rich as sheets of pastry
in baklava, with a mass of dark chocolate in the center.
I’d never touched a gun. I loved how perfectly its handle fit
my hand: centuries of engineering and design
coming together in the “unit,” and I knew it would work.
Unlike toys, religious rituals, erotic techniques, and works of art,
I could depend on it. The only other device I own
that fulfills its function so well is my reading glasses,
and I used a soft gray cloth just like the one I clean them with
to wipe the oil from my fingertips
as I dropped the bullets one by one
into the somber chambers. I just need to know it’s there,
like the extra purse I keep hidden in the closet
with a money clip and a neatly folded change of clothes.
I don’t need a class in safety or marksmanship.
If I ever use it, it will be at close range.
It may be the only way to get rid of the stranger inside.
It may be the only way
to get inside someone I love
when every other route has been systematically barred.
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The Second Coming--W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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An Hour Is Not a House--Jane Hirshfield
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.
Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.
Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.
My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
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The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives--Mary Karr
Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote
all last night’s infomercials — an anorectic son
who bought with Daddy’s Amex black card
the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,
plus a steak knife that doth slice
the inner skin of his starving arms.
Poor broken child of Eve myself,
to me, the flightless fly,
the listing, blistered, scalded.
I am the rod to their lightning.
Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.
At my altar the blouse is torn open
and the buttons sailed across
the incensed air space of the nave,
that I may witness the mastectomy scars
crisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers.
To me, the mother carries the ash contents
of the long-ago incinerated girl.
She begs me for comfort since my own son
was worse tortured. Justice,
they wail for — mercy?
Each prostrate body I hold my arms out for
is a cross my son is nailed to.
#Poem#Poetry#Mary Karr#The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives
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