An ongoing collection of enjoyed poems, in no particular order.

Inventory

The -ah was more song
& she sang beyond the name. 
If the name were river, 
the -ah flooded its banks. 
Nonetheless, in its song 
the -ah signed the air, 
made the air mean. 
The -ah hitched & hinged 
its intimacy. Jaw-dropped, 
it crooned its diminutive— 
sang of class, filling 
a back-kitchen at lunch 
where a wok clangs 
& a knife trims the gristle. 
In the stockroom with her, i
t kept accounts, was ledger, 
an idea of order among 
Schlitz & Old Milwaukee. 
From tones in the pharynx, 
from lungs that hung 
like two clipboards, 
came the -ah’s inventory. 
She tied the -ah to my name 
like that old trick— 
tongue-tying cherry stem. 
Quipu or rosary, 
in the knot was knowing. 
She thread the eye to sow 
a threnody. Liturgy, the way 
she sang the vowel 
amid the till bell— 
a field song over produce. 
A nah, a nope, or uh-oh, 
it was abracadabra, 
an endnote, a colophon 
bearing the binder’s mark. 
It lingered incarnate 
in the cold walk-in, 
or ghosted the stocked aisles 
where I stood over cans 
of Ajax & Green Giant. 
The -ah was wavelength, 
a frequency-shape 
like a mountain range. 
It was the gesture’s aura, 
& like a varnish 
it lustered my name 
& diminished like a mark 
in the margin. It was whistlehouse, 
a star’s spur, and it could scold 
from the meat counter, 
where she priced the chuck 
with a grease pen tied to the scale. 
In her long breath, the -ah 
was money to burn, 
incense in a Folgers can. 
In the ear, as if in a mirror, 
I found myself listening 
& like all language 
it was a grave’s treats, 
singing of separateness 
& tracing something complete. 
Though not on a map, 
its lilt echoed the geographies, 
& she hummed it 
simply over a thin broth 
simmered daylong 
& suckled on a short rib.

- Brandon Som


Genuflection

I am always trying to have polite conversation
with my own guilt: rose tea with juniper berry.

Bitterness abrades a delicate thing. Blundering
old bully.  Marmoreal hypocrite.  I am unrelenting

even in the presence of my strong little girls. Oh,
you skinned knees of the world, I promise you—

who climb any tree at all, delighted by capability—
I want to be kind when exposed.  I knock back

my potential for invisibility.  Any day now
I will be bridled in a stampede, pressed close

by the bison as they abandon the valley.  I will go along:
I am always looking to be deconsecrated by nature.

Nobody wishes for boredom, debt.  I begin to suspect
there is no appropriate ointment.  To taste

a little of a poison thing is to reflect.  Put down
the Tiger Balm. I will give up my perfect height.

- Meghan Maguire Dahn

During the Middle Ages

O God I am so fat
I cry all the time
A kitten scrubbed with a toothbrush online makes me sob
I’m so heartless seven species of bees
Are now endangered and I didn’t do a thing
Didn’t even send any money
To anybody doing any good
And I can’t lose any weight I skipped yoga
I’m so hot all the time so broke
So pathetic no wise investments
Should’ve bought a 7-Eleven on a busy corner
When I was seven or eleven
Nobody wants to lick my neck
Nobody wants to hold my hand at the doctor’s office
Nobody to grow old with me I’m so crabby
To pluck my beard feed the cat I don’t have
And read me endless Russian novels at night
All the ones I still haven’t got to so greatly depressing
Where are you handsome? Are you
Driving in your car to come visit me
Bringing a bottle of wine & a present so gallant?
A new translation of Akhmatova? I love it!
No? Well, I guess it’s better than living
In the real Middle Ages when
Some shithead priest threatens you with hell
To pocket your last coin and there’s no Tylenol
So you have to suck on some skullcap seeds
And knights race around knocking you down
To take your maidenhood with pointy lances
And you have to work as a midwife with no birthing tub
Nobody washes their hands or votes
Nobody knows about DNA or PMS
There’s nothing to read even if you can read
Except boring doctrines or Spiritual ExercisesBy Gertrude the Great, I’m not even kidding
Yes, there’s Dante Chaucer and some sagas
But it’s not like you’d get near those books
You’d be lucky to have some jerk recite the latestBy Wulfstan the Cantor by campfire
Before he beheads your uncles
And forces you to rub salve on his abs
You know you’d be sweating in a field at twenty-two
Dying from your tenth pregnancy by the bailiff
Courtly love? Not a lot of it I bet
Some doctor would drill a hole in my head
To let the demons out because I’d be full
Of black bile as I am today
It would be a very hard time
When the sun revolves around the earth
And kings are just unbelievably selfish
And it’ll be a really long time before Pop Art
And meerkat videos and cotton candy
And Kurosawa and fish tacos and girl bands
Everything’s just so bad and you have buboes
Hopefully I’d get shoved into a nunnery
To have some ecstatic experience with mystical Jesus
Or better I could be a hardcore samurai
Laying down justice on the heads of corrupt lords
But that was tough work, dirty work
You’re working for nobility who at any period
In history are the worst people in the world
And to be an unemployed ronin was lonely
Even if all the brothel ladies offer to scrub your back
Sometimes you just want a nice nap
And some Neosporin on your wounds
If only I could be like the divine Sei Shōnagon
Resplendent in silks with seven-layered sleeves
Writing in my room about politics and my lovers
I wish okay I could be her servant
Dusting the ink stone and fluffing her pillow
But even she found many hateful things
About living in the middle ages
Like crying babies messy guests and mansplainers
So irritating even way back then
You better shut up and take your medicine

- Camille Guthrie


Iowa Blues / Iowa Greens

A mosaic of all possible greens becomesa premise in your eye—James Merrill 

It became profitable to turn rivers
Out, out from their old, mechanistic ways,
To things crackled with goo, algae, aluminum,
Perfluorooctaneoic acid, said to be
Emerging, so blooming, & all the
Treated shit, whole sheets of it, trillions
Of gallons, good chemicals, fertilizers,
& the beautiful guesswork of deterioration.
Utility has a way of unmaking
Through each invention; I wanted to stop
Want itself; or submit, to crunch the polymers good
Before swallowing them whole.
Take for example the hinge
As replacement for tinged or singed.
Oppen seems related to Oppenheimer,
Heimlich to hemlock, key to needle & thread.
Less say to the essay, more es—can an is-ness
Not become a body subject to labor
As liquidity (how nice a figuration), fitted like a pro,
Balloons for planetary takers, tycoons,
Rip-roarers, market watchers,
Gold-tongued gamblers, betters all extraordinary all?
Lol is punctuation; as stated previously
By a famous writer, suppose
Any corollary, puncture rupture,
Fissure, sure, fire, ur, um, fish for his—
A pragmatist writes an essay
About suicide as the freest possible act;
The streets shiver, trees sway in the ease of
Atomic collision. Chaos is not so bad.
So sayeth—weren’t we talking
About hydrogen, carbon, & fluorine? Wasn’t
I listening badly, poorly, unglued, & ugly?
Louisiana floods, Boston police (strong union reps)
Agree to wear cameras
Then don’t, hundreds of people slaughter pigs
With chainsaw-like saws forty miles away.
It’s a cheap bag of tricks—the Trinity Test
Wasn’t what I expected, but then again
The American Legacy wasn’t sold
By admitting to an extermination urge . . . let’s not.
Let’s look at the flowers, or the ants
Ripping apart the carcass of a praying mantis
Methodically, converting it to bite-sized chunks
Fit for consumption. For fuel.

- Jonathan W. Stout

Gravity

1
Upon the black hole Cygnus X-1 that wobbles
as if boffed by an invisible companion,
upon a silk stocking the color of bees
rolling itself up and down a leg, upon the soft dip
over the clavicles, which accept only tongued kisses,
upon the tongue that slowly drifts
into the other's mouth and chats
there with her opposite number,
gravity exerts the precise force needed.

2
In the wings of the Eskimo curlew
flapping through the thin air of the Andes,
in the sacral vertebrae of the widow
who stoops at the window to peer
behind the drawn blind, in the saggy skin
under the eyes of the woman
who is in love with a man incapable
of love, who lives in the heaviness
of emotional isolation, in the lavish
cascade of urine the rhino releases,
in the mouthwater of the child who waits
in shriek position for the dentist,
in the scradged skin dangling in shreds
from the children who lurched toward
the Nakashima River screaming, as if this were
the single aria they had ever rehearsed, gravity
shudders at its mathematical immensity.

3
As long as two kvetches remain alive,
because inside each is self-hatred so hardened
not even nonexistence can abide them,
as long as the hummingbird strikes
the air seventy-four times per second,
as long as the mound of earth remains heaped
beside the rectangular hole wanting to be filled,
gravity cannot be said to impose its will.

4
If the pilot ejects one second too late,
if the condemned man shrinks at seeing
the trapdoor gives way, if the man who stands
with fire at his back and a baby in his arms
hears the near neighbors cry,
"Drop her! Don't worry! We'll catch her,"
if the juggler gets behind in her count
and the bright object flies past the spot
where the other hand was to snatch it,
gravity cannot pause to rectify matters.

5
When a deer kenning us stands immobile,
and for one moment we know we exist
entirely within her thoughts, when cichlid fry,
sensing danger, empty their air bladders
and drop to the river bottom like pebbles,
when the snow goes and millions of leaves
reveal themselves pressed down over the contours
of earth to create her hibernation mask,
when a person in a military cemetery
among grave markers that spread to all the horizons
understands that all of existence has been destroyed
again and again, when depression after mania
causes clock hands to stick and days to crawl,
when the full moon's light creeps across a sleeper
calling to her atavistic soul, when a solider,
who has always known life is imperfect,
is wheeled to another hopeless attempt
at surgery—but, this time, resolves
to sleep and not wake again until such time
as time begins again—then gravity
grips us to the earth, and crosses its fingers.

6
In the case of the last ancient trees at Ypres
still turning out their terrified wood,
in the case of the concertina wire
hurled out in exuberant spirals and set down
between rich and poor, in the case of the howls
that fly off the earth through madhouse windows,
in the case of the word "heavenly"
when we remind ourselves that earth,
too, was a heavenly body once,
in the case of the numeral keys
totting up the number of humans
humans have killed, in the case of the man
who strays into a gravitational field where
the differential between the force on the scalp
and the force on the foot sole will stretch him
into an alimentary canal thin as a thread,
in the case of the child who has upset
his ink bottle while doing homework
and quickly snaps both arms down
to halt the lateral gush of the black juices,
gravity, if it could, would rescue itself.

- Galway Kinnell

Words for Love

for Sandy

Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn
this, my weakness, smites me. A glass
of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
ness of clouds at one o'clock obsess me.
I weep for all of these or laugh.

By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost
in dreams of lists, compiled by my self
for reassurance. Jackson Pollock René
Rilke Benedict Arnold I watch
my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.

At night, awake, high on poems, or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists
flow differently. Of words bright red
and black, and blue. Bosky. Oubliette. Dis-
severed. And O, alas

Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston
it is 2 pm. It is time to steal books. It’s
time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalpyse
the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

Only this. My poems do contain
wilde beestes. I write for my Lady
of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely
but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If
I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless

my heart still loves, will break.

- Ted Berrigan

Dear Robber

Robert Frost is hard for me to get 

excited about. Sacrilege you say? 

But I need him now. In order to write— 

don't know what— not sure how. He loved him. 

My father-in-law. Robert Frost. The world 

he wrote about. Educated on site. 

With a drill bit. And know how. I need him 

now. My father-in-law. To tell me how 

to tell my husband I need him now. 

To hold the world we've lost about. The loss 

we love about. I write it down. Nothing. 

Nothing Robert Frost about it. Nothing 

even. Odd love. Nothing Platonic. 

Something catatonic. Maple saplings 

aren't even. Three leaves tall. Leavings. Three 

leaves tall all about the base of the tree. 

Not even saplings yet. Not even 

saplings, yet leafing out. I pull one out 

of the lichen. I loved him. My father—

in-law. I loved him fatly. I loved 

his portly wobble through the forest. 

Gone now. Why I kite about it. A string. 

A white line between hand and flying thing. 

A white line spooling out of a hand 

at the raised end of a body beached. 

A raised body. Reclining. A friend 

I know barely. A friend I know barely 

dressed on this beach has lost her father. 

I take a lover. Rob Frost. Sacrilege 

you say? He took his own life. My husband's 

father. My husband's wife is afraid of— 

what? The drill bit? A robber? The frost? 

What we winter over all summer. 

The hammer and ten penny nails. What is 

written. What it costs.

- Jennifer Sperry Steinorth

Age of Beauty

This is not an age of beauty,
I say to the Rite-Aid as I pass a knee-high plastic witch
whose speaker-box laugh is tripped by my calf
breaking the invisible line cast by her motion
sensor. My heart believes it is a muscle

of love, so how do I tell it it is a muscle of blood?

This morning, I found myself
awake before my alarm & felt I’d been betrayed

by someone. My sleep is as thin as a paper bill
backed by black bars of coal that iridesce
indigo in the federal reserve of

dreams. Look, I said to the horse’s
head I saw severed & then set on the ground, the soft
tissue of the cheek & crown cleaved with a necropsy
knife until the skull was visible. You look more
horse than the horses

with names & quilted coats in the pasture, grazing unbothered

by your body in pieces, steaming

against the drizzle. You once had a name
that filled your ears like amphitheaters,
that caused an electrical

spark to bead to your brain. My grief was born
in the wrong time, my grief an old soul, grief re-
incarnate. My grief, once a black-winged

beetle. How I find every excuse to indulge it, like a child
given quarters. In the restaurant, eating alone,

instead of interrogating my own
solitude, I’m nearly undone by the old
woman on her own. The window so filthy,

it won’t even reflect her face, which must not be the same
face she sees when she dreams

of herself in the third person.

- Emilia Phillips

What the Cold Wants

Total mind control, obviously,
though it might start with a simple ceviche,
ample off-street parking, 
and a mostly believable alibi.
Generally speaking, what the cold wants 
is ridiculous. The problem with the cold 
is that it comes from more of it.
It’s divisible only by one and itself.
The cold is not invited 
to many weddings.
Among the cold’s lifetime 
achievements: every touch 
of a stethoscope, zero for sixteen 
from the floor, Shackleton’s last note.
According to experts, the average 
temperature of the entire universe
is negative 454.76 degrees.
Room temperature is a miracle.
More than anything else,
that’s what the cold wants you to believe,
that it’s perfectly normal, 
that it should be allowed to feel 
right at home as it seeps beneath the doors
in search of a meal whose first 
course is your bare toes.
Like a hungry predator,
the cold saves the warm, wet heart for last.
The cold is a form of surveillance.
It’s mostly just time.
Safe at headquarters, the scientist
listens to the batteries in the radio collar 
slowly die, but she knows 
the wolf is out there still.
From you, the cold wants nothing.
Only in.

- Dobby Gibson

when you steal blossoms that refuse to fruit: unbloom stricken out

Beached nonbody shrivel mountain hearts : keep lips locked to taste each

other’s memories. Would you hawk her bruised fruit? The bulbous cheeks,

sour lips spilling with ephemeral wonder. Graze her banana hip til you peel flesh.

Squeeze her so all life dissipates, juices spilt on flour; sickly waiting for us to

step in her makings.

Elated piece of bark, climbed my trees til branches split. If he spat out the seed
would he taste us for who we really are?

Putrid : unrotting bag of flesh : glorify our grotesque.

undress these wounds so bandages seem like tree-leafs tearing off skin to
seep us of our haunted backwood lingerings of mind.

We let him go rummage through our flowerbed, pick out the bits he didn’t
like and store the parts he did in mason jars to sit on a shelf for decades. We do not
fester but we want to. Waiting, gathering sweetness until we gag at sight of self. No
we do not these becomings desire, so we plunge glass off cliffside and shatter beneath,
letting floor dry us out until none of him is left.

- Nikkin Rader

self portrait as a tree

when you climb on top of me
I feel the soles of your feet in my teeth
lick the salt of your brow with breeze past my ribs

when you trim me
bush falls to ground
porcelain pubes tile tears
bloody drops on floor as you carve into my bark
skull meets concrete and we are children again

I swing with you when the wind blows north
and sing to you when the moon howls east
because your breasts are now budding so you don’t want to be held any longer
I want to spread roots into your eyes so you can’t stop looking
syrupy lips open wide for limbs and fingertips on molars tonguing ears with whispers
suckle my fruit I am limber you are limp
wood nymph in yellow eyes with brown hairs underarms

look at me in the night
praise beneath in day
draw me in your books
and paint me on your skin
I am within
of sin

- Nikkin Rader

Eleven Oxidations of Iron

A HORSE NAMED JUPITER / FeO

Ben got his fingernails pulled off
in the parking garage

AT THE HOTEL BAR / Fe 13 O 19

The boy peels oranges in the window
and the smell lingers on his fingertips
Throughout the day, he sniffs them

LOVE SONG / ε-Fe 2 O 3

The old couch has a sickly
floral pattern and slumps
in the middle

TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS / Fe 25 O 32

Kissed a stranger in a club she said
the power is due to go out

GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE / Fe 4 O 5
Sweat in your gatorade, sand in your eyes

THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE / Fe 5 O 7

The bunnies are trapped
in the irrigation system
No use trying to free them

HOW MUCH LONGER CAN WE FEEL LIKE
PROTOTYPES OF OURSELVES / β-Fe 2 O 3

How much longer can we feel
like prototypes of ourselves?

THE DIGITAL AGE / γ-Fe 2 O 3

Eyes like oil rigs,
an elastic attraction
I like it when our teeth touch

DEATH’S DOOR / Fe 5 O 6

The syrinx is the name
for the vocal organ of birds,
from the Greek for “pan pipes”

APPLAUSE / α-Fe 2 O 3

On a scale of 1 to 10,
how spicy do you like your curry?

JUPITER REDUX / Fe 3 O 4

The human being in a state
of heightened emotion conducts
electricity
Watch

- Connor Rice

Porcupine

        Into pelt and sheen, rattans bond, tight-

slatted. At rest, sheaved
        from the front, it is wickerwork, canebrake,
                quiver of arrows, but when
provoked it erupts as bayonets, asterisk, threshing floor,
                        Cupid in a fury.

        Its strategy is not precision, but exuberance—
                a briery boast. Let the arrows fly—
gold with lead. Florescent-
        quilled, in dark makeup, like the bass player
                in an 80s band, it announces its eccentricity—
        then fades, making meager

        its own spotlight. But no porcupine can shoot
its quills, so as in any romance, its
                pierce depends on flair and
proximity. Maligned by lumberjacks and commuters alike,
                        it has been maimed, poisoned,
        and shotgun-blared. They do not

accommodate you—your salt drive,
                your night-sleuthing, your implacable whiskers.
        But we all have unlidded nights; we all have
thorns. The same gaze that forgets
                the rose’s quills makes a bonfire
        out of yours. But thorniness

                is no more than an erratic
smooth. Your paws are polished
                and pebbled. The underside
of your tail, mildly bristled to gain
        purchase as it barnacles in the branches. Above the tail
                appears a bald spot with shorter barbs—

        a meadow, a rosette that, like an open
flower, broadcasts a pungent aroma—a warning that
                accompanies the splayed quills.
        I choose you, my escaped
convict—you run with your stripes still on you.
                Although you’re slow and nearsighted,

        when you unveil your ribbons, fantailed, I feel
                as though I am entering
lightspeed. From out of the bare serene, the stars
                all striate—and you arch in monochrome,
        like a rainbow above
                        a distant hill in a silent film.

- Adam Giannelli

Dedication

You whom I could not save 

Listen to me.   

Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.   

I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.   

I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree. 

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.   

You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,   

Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;   

Blind force with accomplished shape. 

Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge   

Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;   

And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave   

When I am talking with you. 

What is poetry which does not save   

Nations or people?   

A connivance with official lies,   

A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,   

Readings for sophomore girls. 

That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,   

That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,   

In this and only this I find salvation. 

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds   

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.   

I put this book here for you, who once lived   

So that you should visit us no more.   

Warsaw, 1945

- Czeslaw Milosz 

Historic Flaws

I am going to the mountains
where the alternating universe of autumn
descends over you at an erotic squat. Out of that blank
and meaningless Play-Doh of my psychic flesh
I am moving on. I am a pupil of fading antiquity.
Sprawled across the table, in a lament about healthcare
and the ineptitude of The System.
Nothing burns quite like The System. It comes at you
when you ask for help, displaying its super-talons
around a clutch of arrows, saying No.

“What deeds could man ever have done
if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud
of the unhistorical?” Nietzsche asks this morning
from a small pamphlet on my lap, issued in 1949
in New York City, which I am leaving now,
like a wife from her distant husband
who will not stop to ask her why she is weeping
while she slices apart his silk ties on the floor of the closet.

- Bianca Stone

My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981)

Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob,bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode ... These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese.Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa;mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu.For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trước.

Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia,
graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound
just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencils
after “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity —”
His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear.
His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue.

I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis.
He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Life
of Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old man
and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.”
My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages
and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out

his ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses.
1981 was the same year we vượt biển and came to America,
where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”).
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he murmurs
something about the “dark side of life how awful it can be”
as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source.

Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,”
a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes,
how could he not have been “vexed at her brown study / 
Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed
(I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake.
Lấy làm ngạc nhiên về is what it means to be astonished.

Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe.
“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness
in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes
us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house
she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future.
In “reeducation camp” he had to believe she was alive

because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.”
Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm
from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins,
I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading.
But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies.
Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk.

Then between pp. 896-97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,”
I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing
from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read:
For current job opportunities dial (612) 297-3180. Answered 24 hrs.
When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end
tells me I have reached a non-working number.

- Hai-Dang Phan

Solitaire

That summer there was no girl left in me.
It gradually became clear.
It suddenly became.

In the pool, I was more heavy than light.
Pockmarked and flabby in a floppy hat.
What will my body be

when parked all night in the earth?
Midsummer. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I am not on the oxygen tank.

Twice a week we have sex.
The little girls poolside I see them
at their weddings I see them with babies their hips

thickening I see them middle-aged.
I can't see past the point where I am.
Like you, I'm just passing through.

I want to hold on awhile.
Don't want to naught
or forsake, don't want

to be laid gently or racked raw.
If I retinol. If I marathon.
If I Vitamin C. If I crimson

my lips and streakish my hair.
If I wax. Exfoliate. Copulate
beside the fish-slicked sea.

Fill me I'm cold. Fill me I'm halfway gone.
Would you crush me in the stairwell?
Could we just lie down?

If the brakes don't work.
If the pesticides won't wash off.
If the seventh floor pushes a brick

out the window and it lands on my head.
If I tremor, menopause. Cancer. ALS.
These are the ABCs of my fear.

The doctor says
I don't have a pill for that, dear.
Well, what would be a cure-all, ladies,

gin-and-tonics on a summer night?
See you in the immortalities! O blurred.
O tumble-rush of days we cannot catch.

- Deborah Landau

You Did It

How long will you demand I love you?

I’m through, I won’t make
any more flowers for you

I judge you as the trees do

by dying.

- Margaret Atwood

Urban Puberty

That I have to go to the gynecologist

in Brooklyn, because I chose the cheaper 

health insurance plan. That I will sit 

speculum-sore for ages, waiting for the L. 

That there’s no heat in my bedroom 

(sexual or otherwise). That I have to go 

to Bushwick to admit this to a stranger. 

That I can blow smoke upon waking. 

That I spent money on Sharon Olds 

Anne Sexton, Victoria Redel, and wine 

instead of chicken or peaches or beans. 

That I did everything 

I wasn’t supposed to (but only last Sunday). 

That the ceiling fell 

into the shower and I stood naked 

on the deck to get clean. That no one saw. 

♦ 

That I learned indifference by watching 

a mouse hemorrhage internally in glue. 

That my laundry man has only one eye 

and three teeth. That he said to call him Tony. 

That I know what chemical to use 

to disintegrate the body 

of a pigeon, trapped and died in the wall. 

That I held an accidental séance 

because of all the candles and incense. 

That I’ve considered the $5 psychics 

selling fortunes on Canal street. 

That I can recognize black mold. 

That I recognize faces on the M72. 

That I am recognized. That I am not.

- Lucia Stacey

Axiom

Axiom: you are a sea.
Your eye-
lids curve over chaos

My hands, where they touch you, create
small inhabited islands

Soon you will be
all earth: a known
land, a country.

- Margaret Atwood

Thymus

I.

Gulch of affection the gully
of fumigation. Sweet-throated

the courage gorge. The sweetly bred
sublingual cultivar.

*
Feisty-hearted, the meat-
propagating gullet.

From the juicy acorn ripens
a warty excrescence.

*
Cheeky the rude clump!

Buttress-rooted, vulgaris—
eye-sorry carbuncle.

A scrunch of pungent
chump change.

II.

Thymus the field-drab. The aromatic bromide. History of dark sea, old
moss, laurel. Absinthe; the gray-green, gently absenting itself.

Thymus the shrinking mass in aid of breath and exhalation [Cooper].
Thymus the mystery organ [Galen]. Organ of vicarious respiration
[Meckel]. Protective thoracic cushion [Vesalius].

Small planet of the solar plexus. From the Greek thymos, for thyme; to
stand in line for the lungs, to burn in sacrifice.

- Sylvia Legris

Why I Am Not a Good Kisser

Because I open my mouth too wide
Trying to take in the curtains behind us
And everything outside the window
Except the little black dog
Who does not like me
So at the last moment I shut my mouth.

Because Cipriano de Rore was not thinking
When he wrote his sacred and secular motets
Or there would be only one kind
And this affects my lips in terrible ways.

Because at the last minute I see a lemon
Sitting on a gravestone and that is a thing, a thing
That would appear impossible, and the kiss
Is already concluded in its entirety.

Because I learned everything about the beautiful
In a guide to the weather by Borin Van Loon, so
The nature of lenticular clouds and anticyclones
And several other things dovetail in my mind
& at once it strikes me what quality goes to form
A Good Kisser, especially at this moment, & which you
Possess so enormously—I mean when a man is capable
Of being in uncertainties, Mysteries & doubts without me
I am dreadfully afraid he will slip away
While my kiss is trying to think what to do.

Because I think you will try to read what is written
On my tongue and this causes me to interrupt with questions:
A red frock? Red stockings? And the rooster dead?
Dead of what?

Because of that other woman inside me who knows
How the red skirt and red stockings came into my mouth
But persists with the annoying questions
Leading to her genuine ignorance.

Because just when our teeth are ready to hide
I become a quisling and forget the election results
And industrial secrets leading to the manufacture
Of woolen ice cream cones, changing the futures
Of ice worms everywhere.

Can it be that even the greatest Kisser ever arrived
At his goal without putting aside numerous objections—

Because every kiss is like throwing a pair of doll eyes
Into the air and trying to follow them with your own—

However it may be, O for a life of Kisses
Instead of painting volcanoes!

Even if my kiss is like a paintbrush made from hairs.
Even if my kiss is squawroot, which is a scaly herb
Of the broomrape family parasitic on oaks.
Even if a sailor went to sea in me
To see what he could see in me
And all that he could see in me
Was the bottom of the deep dark sea in me.

Even though I know nothing can be gained by running
Screaming into the night, into the night like a mouth,
Into the mouth like a velvet movie theater
With planets painted on its ceiling
Where you will find me, your pod mate,
In some kind of beautiful trouble
Over moccasin stitch #3,
Which is required for my release.

- Mary Ruefle

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

- James Wright

Question

Body my house

my horse my hound   

what will I do

when you are fallen

Where will I sleep   

How will I ride   

What will I hunt

Where can I go

without my mount   

all eager and quick   

How will I know   

in thicket ahead

is danger or treasure   

when Body my good   

bright dog is dead

How will it be

to lie in the sky

without roof or door   

and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift   

how will I hide?

- May Swenson

The Lazy Susan

The lazy Susan, in antiquity, would have been a fire.Drinking all night, the parents never get drunk.This is an ancient brew, with nuts, seeds, fruitto fuel the hours, to light a center.The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds us:they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinesewhile we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here.They’re telling stories we don’t bother to recordbecause the nights are long. We’ve heard them before.We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tired.They live this way because of us.

We live this way because of them.We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tiredbecause the nights are long. We’ve heard them before,telling stories we don’t bother to record.While we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here,they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinese.The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds usto fuel the hours, to light a center.This is an ancient brew, with nuts, seeds, fruit.Drinking all night, the parents never get drunk.The lazy Susan, in antiquity, would have been a fire.
- Adrienne Su

from Sherman Alexie's The Sasquatch Poems

After D. B. Cooper hijacked the commercial jet
and parachuted 30,000 feet into the Cascades
where he and his newly acquired money disappeared

we can only assume that he lived
because his death would kill the mystery.
Our only certainty: D. B. Cooper is not Sasquatch.

...

If we sit in John F. Kennedy’s limousine on November 22, 1963
and then we look back over our shoulder just as the first shot is fired
we will see a shadowy figure in the sixth-floor window of the
Depository.

Moving closer, we can see the rifle, a gold ring, and brown eyes.
We can see a bead of sweat fall from forehead to gun stock, soaking
into the finely-grained wood. We can see the fine smoke rise.

We do know that Sasquatch did not shoot JFK
but we wonder if the man who pulled the trigger
was hired by the same men who pay the scientists.

...

Do you take the bread and wine
because you believe it to be the body and blood?
I do, as other Indians do, too
because that colonial superstition is as beautiful
as any of our indigenous superstitions.

...

Sasquatch did not kidnap the Lindbergh baby.
Sasquatch did not bury the empty coffin of Heinrich Müller.
Sasquatch did not kill the prostitutes in White Chapel.
Sasquatch did not fly with Amelia Earhart.
Sasquatch did not roll the stone away from Jesus’s tomb.
Sasquatch did not build the pyramids.
Sasquatch did not create the Ghost Dance.
Sasquatch did not drop the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sasquatch did not descend from the Missing Link.
Sasquatch did not drag boulders across Easter Island.
Sasquatch did not crash-land in Roswell, New Mexico.
Sasquatch did not walk across the Bering Strait.
Sasquatch did not sink Lemuria.
Sasquatch did not write Shakespeare’s plays.


Kissinger at the Louvre (Three Drafts)

     1

Kissinger in black-tie shuffles to the town car

idling at the museum complex edge

between where the glum Pei pyramid rises

and the gardens begin. "Is that—" I say,

and "Yes," says Jim, baby in his arms,

me shoving the empty stroller to get home

by naptime. Nobody notices, clicking

at each other through camera phones, Kissinger

looking matchlessly neat, clean, ugly and

dressed by servants. His driver's at the door,

arms stretched wide as in a fish-this-big tall tale

in welcome. The ear-wired bodyguard,

hand on Kissinger's gray-fur head so it won't

scrape the door-frame, bends him into the car.

If I were a different kind of poet, I'd put

Kissinger in front of The Raft of the Medusa

blinking at the father weeping for his son

lying dead over his lap as the sails

of the ship that will rescue them are

sighted on the horizon and the top man

in the spout of survivors waves his ragged

undershirt. Or I'd put him gazing reflectively

at The Death of Sardanapalus, a Potentate

presiding amid an exorbitance of fabrics

over his imminent suicide by fire,

slaves bringing in, in order of importance,

horses, gems, plate and favored concubines

for slaughter. I'm not that kind of poet.

     2

Kissinger totters befuddled by culpability,

luncheon champagne and dotage. The car

eats him. I won't pretend the bodyguard's

Vietnamese or Cambodian, though that's

the obvious truth-in-lies move—he's French,

that ratface-handsome, smoked-out look—

and doesn't care merde for history. He makes

the old man bow, same move with which

the beat cop, our public servant, submits

the petty criminal to the patrol car,

same move the anguished teenager got—

half-protective, half-corrective or coercive,

half-kind—after the arraignment for leaving

her newborn to die in a rest stop dumpster.

Anybody can understand the girl, and even

the purse-snatcher. Bodyguard bends Kissinger

gently in, portly little Kissinger, gloves his head—

anything hurt will be the hand of the servant.

Ecru upholstery with oxblood accents, minibar

something like a safe, CNN muted to newscrawl

and the anchor's frozen-flesh face. The latest assistant,

gender irrelevant, busy with a BlackBerry across from him,

root beer-colored eyes and preternaturally neat hair

of La belle ferronière, keeps the lap desk, emergency

Magic Wand Stain Remover Stick, eyebrow brush

and dossier of Opinions in what looks like

"the football"—the nuclear war plan suitcase

Presidential aides carry at all times—but isn't.

     3

The one camera flash as he got in

gave Kissinger a headache. As they start

for his Avenue du President Wilson hotel,

the Rue de Rivoli sliding by in a haze,

he falls uncomfortably asleep to the anodyne

glow and murmur ("tournez à gauche") of the driver's

GPS device. The relieved assistant

opens an Imagist anthology. In Osaka, Oslo or Wasilla,

Alaska some weeks later, a woman at her kitchen table

uploads Paris vacation photos to her laptop.

"Who's that behind me?" A dark figure. "He looks familiar."

"How should I know," says her husband.

"I'm trying to get Baby to eat more potato."

"Oh well. I look fat in it," she says. And deletes.

- Daisy Fried

Cryptography

I cannot talk to you right now.

I can’t part my lips

and spill conversations out:
the sentences grow barbs,
my mouth doesn’t work,
my tongue seizes up,
and the words catch.
I am choking on them
and I can’t spit them out.
to you is in code.
that I am growing moth wings,
that the deep blue Atlantic
is writhing under my ribs,
that the butterflies in my stomach
are trying to bite their way out
and I am swallowing bottlefuls
of hornets to sting them quiet.
and have started being a pillar of salt
trying to learn how to rain dance.
but I think the cipher is written
on the marrow of my bones
and I don’t want to know
what you’ll need to do
to crack me.

The only way I can speak

I have to tell you

That I have stopped being a man

That I am eating smoke.

I am trying to tell you something

- Gabriel Gadfly

Ode to Pepper Vinegar

You sat in the tomb

of our family fridge
for years, without

fail. You were all

I wanted covering
my greens, satisfaction

I’ve since sought

for years in restaurants
which claimed soul, but neither

knew you nor

your vinegar prayer.
Baby brother

of bitterness, soothsayer,

you taught
me the difference between loss

& holding on. Next to the neon

of the maraschino cherries,
you floated & stayed
constant as a flame

on an unknown soldier’s grave—
I never did know

how you got here

you just were. Adrift
in your mason jar

you were a briny bit of where

we came from, rusty lid
awaiting our touch

& tongue—you were faith

in the everyday, not rare
as the sugarcane

my grandparents sent north

come Christmas, drained
sweet & dry, delicious, gone

by New Year’s—

no, you were nearer,
familiar, the thump

thump of an upright bass

or the brass
of a funeral band

bringing us home.

- Kevin Young

The Crocodile

1.
What I wanted was to lift my body in unnatural postures
High above the earth, to dance,
To live beyond ideas.
Imagine feeling assured you were beautiful.
Girls wanting to run their fingers on my skin, also guys; I bit off their
hands.

If called to, I could wait beneath the water a long time.
I could let a bird pick leeches from my tongue.

So in the moment of youth when other people embrace passion
I fell back on discipline. My throat
Was capable of many different sounds but the pleasure
Was in keeping silent, letting parts of me be seen.
Sometimes a plover mistook me for a log
But that's not deception; I really look like a log.

I survived the great extinctions,
I pretended to be myself.
To let you know me, I need only move my eyes.

2. Like me, you had a father and a mother,
You grew up in a particular place, a particular time.
Your skin displays the scars of that place.

You've decapitated chickens, eviscerated live fish.
You carry yourself with what, to other people, seems aplomb,
But the impulse driving such behaviors,
Necessary in themselves, has infiltrated daily life. In arguments
You'll drag another person under water till he drowns.

Though I grew very large, though I developed great capacity of mind,
I was afraid of my mother. Afraid not just of scrutiny
But of being the object of someone's pride.
What was I protecting?
She was willful, yes,
But tiny, generous to a fault.

In Egypt, the family crocodiles were adorned
With bracelets, earrings of molten gold.
Then mummified, laid out in the tombs.
The word itself is from the Greek:Krokodeilus, pebble worm.

3.
What manner of thing is your crocodile?
*
It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is broad as it has breadth; it is just so
high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which
nourishes it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.
*
What color is it of?
*
Of its own color, too.
*
'Tis a strange serpent.
*
"Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.
("Antony and Cleopatra," II, 7)

4.
When I was a child, I was given a stuffed crocodile.
Don't think this strange; most humans have dolls resembling themselves.
My sister had one, too.

Tiny marbles filled the sockets of its eyes.
The skin was stitched together up the belly, where it's soft,
And though it was only a foot, perhaps ten inches long,
The jaws were clamped together with a tack.

Presumably this kept the little row of teeth from hurting you,
But the tack protruded from the bottom of its chin,
Sharper than any tooth.
I remember rubbing over it, back and forth.

When my mother died,
I was right beside her.
She'd been unconscious for a day.
My sister and my father were there, too.

I leaned down close to her left ear, I whispered,
Thank you for everything you did for me,
Thank you especially for what you did for our girls.

Then, immediately, the color left her face,
She was no longer in her body,
And she sank beneath the lagoon.

5.
Picture, by way of analogy, a mountain range.
Some interruption of traffic, perhaps a flood, has blocked the roads,
But communication between the villages is maintained over steep
footpaths,
The kind used ordinarily by hunters, originally by their prey.

Some people speak more openly by inefficient means.
And the stepper the path, the more
Arduous the climb,
The more likely we are to believe.

Someday I won't be hungry.
I'll watch an egret stepping through the reeds.

The miser imagines there's a certain sum to fill his heart,
But for sorrow there's no remedy.
It requires what it cannot hope.
We've known each other, earth, a long time.

When the light rests low on the Nile, the Ganges, the Everglades—
I could be anywhere—
Day is discontinued, motionless.
A voice is what you have.

- James Longenbach


Table Talk

Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—
asked if any of us had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

The differences between these two figures
were much more striking than the differences
between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.

If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows.
No, the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their endless approach.
St. Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.

I think I'll have the trout, I told the waiter,
for it was now my turn to order,
but all through the elegant dinner
I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing

the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian
a fleet of them perpetually halving the tiny distances
to his body, tied to a post with a rope,
even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.

And I thought of the bullet never reaching
the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.

The theories of Zeno floated above the table
like thought balloons from the fifth century before Christ,
yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
delivery morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,

and after we all talked and ate and lifted our glasses,
we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,

where people get where they are going—
where the train pulls into the station in a cloud of vapor,
where geese land with a splash on the surface of the lake,
and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms—

and yes, where sharp arrows will pierce a torso,
splattering the groin and the bare feet of the saint,
that popular subject of European religious painting.
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.

- Billy Collins


Black Wine

Have you ever drunk the black wine—vino negro—
of Alicante? The English dubbed it Red Biddy
and consumed oceans of it for a pence a flagon.
Knowing nothing—then or now—about wine,
I would buy a litre for 8 pesetas—12 cents—
and fry my brains. Being a happy drunk,
I lived a second time as a common laborer
toiling all night over the classic strophes
I burned in the morning, literally burned,
in an oil barrel outside the Palacio Güell,
one of the earliest and ugliest of Gaudí's
monuments to modernismo. Five mornings
a week the foreman, Antonio, an Andalusian,
with a voice of stone raked over corrugated tin,
questioned the wisdom of playing with fire.
He'd read Edgar Allan Poe in the translations
of Valle-Inclán and believed the poets
of the new world were madmen. He claimed an affair
with Gabriella Mistral was the low point
of his adolescence. As the weeks passed
into spring and the plane trees in the courtyard
of the ancient hospital burst into new green,
I decided one morning to test sobriety,
to waken at dawn to sparrow chirp and dark clouds
blowing seaward from the Bultaco factory,
to inhale the particulates and write nothing,
to face the world as it was. Everything
was actual, my utterances drab, my lies
formulary and unimaginative.
For the first time in my life I believed
everything I said. Think of it: simple words
in English or Spanish or Yiddish, words
that speak the truth and no more, hour after
hour, day after day without end, a life
in the kingdom of candor, without fire or wine.

- Philip Levine


Orpheus at The Second Gate of Hades

My lyre has fallen & broken,
but I have my little tom-toms.
Look, do you see those crows
perched on the guardhouse?
I don't wish to speak of omens
but sometimes it's hard to guess.
Life has been good the past few years.
I know all seven songs of the sparrow
& I feel lucky to be alive. I woke up at 2:59
this morning, reprieved because I fought
dream-catchers & won. I'll place a stone
in my mouth & go down there again,
& if I meet myself mounting the stairs
it won't be the same man descending.
Doubt has walked me to the river's edge
before.I may be ashamed but I can't forget
how to mourn & praise on the marimba.
I shall play till the day's golden machinery
stops between the known & the unknown.
The place was a funeral pyre for the young
who died before knowing the thirst of man
or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair
wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine
in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture
poised over Tiyus' liver. I could see
Ixion strapped to a gyrating wheel
& Sisyphus sat on his rounded stone.
I shall stand again before Proserpine
& King Pluto. When it comes to defending love,
I can make a lyre drag down the moon & stars
but it's still hard to talk of earthly things—
ordinary men killing ordinary men,
women & children. I don't remember
exactly what I said at the ticket office
my first visit here, but I do know it grew
ugly. The classical allusions didn't
make it easier. I played a tune
that worked its way into my muscles
& I knew I had to speak of what I'd seen
before the serpent drew back its head.
I saw a stall filled with human things, an endless
list of names, a hill of shoes, a room of suitcases
tagged to nowhere, eyeglasses, toothbrushes,
baby shoes,dentures, ads for holiday spas,
& a wide roll of thick cloth woven of living hair.
If I never possessed these reed flutes
& drums, if my shadow stops kissing me
because of what I have witnessed,
I shall holler to you through my bones,
I promise you.

- Yusef Komunyakaa


Epithalamium

You're beeswax and I'm bird shit.
I'm mostly harmless. You're irrational.
If I'm iniquity then you're theft.
One of us is supercalifragilistic.

If I'm the most insane disgusting filth
you're hardly curiosa.
You're bubble wrap to my fingertips.
You're winter sleep and I'm the bee dance.

And I am menthol and you are eggshell.
When you're atrocious I am Spellcheck.
You're the yen. I'm the Nepalese pound.
If I'm homesteading you're radical chic.

I'm carpet shock and you're the rail.
I'm Memory Foam Day on Price-Drop TV
and you're the Lord of Misrule who shrieks
when I surface in goggles through duckweed,

and I am Trafalgar, and you're Waterloo,
and frequently it seems to me that I am you,
and you are me. If I'm the rising incantation
you're the charm, or I am, or you are.

- Nick Laird


Catfish

It nuzzles oblivion, confuses
itself with mud. A creature

of familiar taste, it ambushes
from its nest of ooze the pond's

brighter fish, clears its palate
with their eggs, lumbers fat

and stagnant into winter, lulled
into dreams of light sinking until

light drowns, and all is as before.

- Claudia Emerson


Cultural Studies

They were in the air on chairs,
the bride and groom, when of course
they needed a table so we lifted

a table, a dishwasher
and our shoulders were strong enough,
a sofa and I began to understand

the demands of Judaism
when we let go and they stayed, decades,
their children balloons

who've risen even higher,
O love, that makes us want to live
in the sky with the hawks,

the clouds, the pollen, the dust,
the planes, the satellites, the moon,
the clear, the clear, the blue

- Bob Hicok


A Night Out

I told the waiter there was schmutz
on my machete. He informed me
I wasn't sitting in the Yiddish section.
Being bilingual, I told the waiter
there was gunk on my machete. Oh, he apologized
then and brought me straight away
a new machete, with which I sliced
the brisket as if clearing a path
through a forest to a temple in a life
more glamorous than the four dollars
and thirty-two cents in my pocket
with which I couldn't possibly pay
what I owe Jean-Paul Sartre for writing
"No Exit," since walking out on that play
introduced me as if for the first time
to the moon. Try feeling crushed
by the void of existence while staring
at a waxing moon with our without
a full stomach before or after
cleaning your machete on your sleeve.
Yes, that's a dare, a double-dog dare,
to talk as kids used to talk in a time
of innocence that certainly never existed.

- Bob Hicok


Tree Heart/True Heart

The hearts of trees
are serially displaced
pressed annually
outward to a ring.
They aren't really
what we mean
by hearts, they so
easily acquiesce,
willing to thin and
stretch around some
upstart green. A
real heart does not
give way to spring.
A heart is true.
I say no more springs
without you.

– Kay Ryan


Looking Back

A fist through the pane of our picture window and everything
broken between us. The ancient glass shattered, and my wife

rose from her separate bed wanting to know what happened.
But how could I explain the radiator's cracked gasping that

kept me from sleep, the secret life, how I had taken up
smoking just for the excuse of some small heat, and then tonight

when the winter-warped window would not lift, how I let loose that
helpless hook? Wind flowed through the room, blowing white

across the column of snow still pillared against the screen.
She crossed the freezing tile toward my silence and held my hand

now sequined with shards lodged deep in the chapped knuckles.
And, Jesus, how easily she massaged each piece of glass

from the skin, applying the sting of iodine with a swab as if
to bring back every feeling. But when she unrolled the gauze

like a sacred scroll and wrapped my hand in it, I had to turn to her,
had to touch her flushed, half-feverish cheeks once more.

I had to trust those clear streaks cutting tracks down her face
were more than simply the tricks of weak streetlight trying to shine.

Never mind that kind of turning back has always been
punished. Didn't Lot too, just once more, want not only to look

back, but also to return to the arms of his lost wife, that
metaphorical salt? Didn't he want one more kiss, one last taste

to see him through the rest of that endless desert, now alone?

- James Crews


The Mass Has Ended Go In Peace

—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference,
but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses
stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing
the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves,
drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged
as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the waft
of earth to heaven, is nearly imperceptible, a touch of fish-rot
and smoke. (I asked, Lord, for stillness and lack of concern.)
The town here could be wiped clean from the land—
no streak or smear of roofs, no smudge of walls.
But the people go on painting the village white.
The weathered wood chokes on its dust; the new whiteness
laughs through fog. I asked for acceptance and got the reek
of paint and a bright house. I can see inside the house: a woman,
sweating and bent, putting away the rollers and the cans.

- K. A. Hays


Happy (Freytag's Pyramid)

In One we met. The conflict
was my old one, love. I had it for him.
He had it for him, too.

In Two the conflict entered stage left:
another woman. There was some lively dialogue
to represent sex.

In Three he chose against me—the other girl
had some get-up of veils, and smoke wafted in from the wings
when she appeared. Even I was beguiled.

The intermission offered no relief;
I spent it locked in a bathroom,
lying on the comfort of cold tile.

In Four I walked around a pretend meadow
as I monologued on and on
about how hard it is to be me—­

it's what I thought a sad girl
is supposed to do for her audience.

In Five it was over,
and the audience filed out, orderly;
the cast shared cabs to the wrap party.
By then, everyone had either been murdered or married.

- Courtney Queeney


Spare Us

Spare us the spring.
Spare us its garish light.
Spare us the nerve-thumping
rhythms of hopping balls:
empty vessels, sterile leather eggs.

Spare us the false optimism,
the short-term vision, the hint
that winter has been dealt a fatal blow,
that days will keep on stretching,
an economy in boom.

Spare us the emotion of
the choked-up lawnmower
champing at resurgent grass.

And spare us, no less, the need
for wonder: it demands
too much suspension of belief.

Spare us our jaundiced view
of daffodils, those clichéd ingénues
that wizen limply into spineless stalks.

Spare us the tawdry pink
of cherry blossoms,
so precariously attached
to branches
they are bound to fall to pieces,
crumble at the first
blusterings of a gale.

Spare us the shivering snowdrops,
paling quickly to insignificance,
their holier-than-thou aura
melting like Communion hosts.

Spare us the scare tactics
of invading dandelions,
that urine splash from which
no clump of grass,
no roadside verge is safe.

Lump in the leaves—it will be left to us
to pick up their pieces, rummage
through their trash when the tree market
crashes and stocks are in freefall.

And spare us lilacs, scent so over-ripe
suspicion of some cover-up is strong.

Spare us the lambs—bouncing
with complete abandon, needing
no counsel of a carpe diem nature,
peeking from the milk-white fleece
of their mothers’ blanket coverage,
or savouring mint-green grass
—on whom we pin dark,
raddle-marked declarations of intent.

Spare us the ardent couples
conferring at the paint store, torn
conspiratorially between Dewberry Frost
emulsion and velvet-finish Moonlight Bay.

Spare us the bees raiding every flower in sight,
leaving no anther pocket unturned.
And the tantrum-throwing wasps,
in venomous mood, headbutting glass.

Spare us the spurned bird, egg on its face,
its singsong persistence in soliciting a mate,
its loutish whistling at wing-batting females.

And spare us the dawn chorus
that outwears its welcome
like a loquacious breakfast guest.

Spare us, therefore, the spring,
its fake sincerity, its unethical
marketing strategies, its deceptive
pledges, its built-in obsolescence,
its weeds breeding like flies.

- Dennis O'Driscoll


Élan Vital

In case you can imagine
a time when the cattail
marsh goes silent
and blackbirds
forget to flex their
red-winged armor
and insects
no longer live
to flicker
like ghosts adrift
in slants of crepuscular
light, beg the wind
which right now
sucks your hair
out the window
of this speeding
red car
while one hand
strives to gather
and the other
to control
to keep pumping
the bellows
fueling whatever it is
that keeps us aflame,
tongues licking
for its fire.

- Denise Banker


Linguistics

i.
The orderly aisle: fettuccini, fusilli, rigatoni,
round, folded orecchietti, edible ears;
cappellini's wispy strands, trumpets, wagon wheels, screws;
for white clam sauce,
I choose linguini.

ii.
In amphibia—the frog who nestles her filmy eggs
in your koi pond, the toad hunched among your hostas—
it is fixed at the front, free behind, the better
to dart forward, lick up mosquitoes, gnats,
curl itself around black flies. In the house sparrow
you overlook, searching
for finches, orioles, ladderback woodpeckers, it is pointed,
hard as a toenail. In anteaters it wriggles,
wormlike, burrowing toward lunch.
In humans it tapers, muscular, fleshy, permits us
to invent words: luculent, disciple, nocturnal, to label
our opponents taciturn.

iii.
Moses objected that his slow tongue
stumbled over strong words,
urged God to find another
prophet, but God
suggested Aaron speak
for Moses—Aaron, eloquent as a poet
though but a priest.

iv.
She sells seashells by the seashore.
The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.
A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse.

v.
For no good reason, I'm skeptical
of Pliny's legend, gluttonous Romans
dining sumptuously on flamingo tongue.
I believe I've seen
colonies glide into brackish Florida estuaries,
dip their beaks, hunting, hunting.
Once I woke from a dream,
panicked shrimp roiling in my mouth, my lips
slick with brine. But didn't I see
a crèche of five thousand young, their plumage
deeply pink, their eager bills, though each
seems more impression than memory.
Haven't we all seen rotting herds
shot from trains,
taken for their tongues alone? We shot
nothing, refuse
our ancestors' guilt, yet every night our dreams
resound with the gavel's bang.

vi.
Every gift of tongues
shall be accompanied
by the gift of interpretation.

vii.
Ancient bestiaries reveal how serpents
sting with their tongues' fiery edge. A boy's skin
burns, flame rippling up his forearm, the scar
crimson, undulant. Serpents
die ten thousand times but die finally
if a birthmarked girl drips her thimbleful
of blood outside its den.

viii.
Pentecost, the sanctuary swirled
with red-and-yellow banners as gossamer doves
swept over our heads. Veni Sancti Spiritus
we heard, each in our own language.
Weren't we each lighted with fire, weren't we each
burnt, consumed, our tongues
tongues of flame?

ix.
Today, English serves
as lingua franca for those who profess
a common language. I mention
Lake Michigan, remembering
its endless cool invitation, my urge
to drift, oblivious of shore or depth,
waves lifting my shoulders, then hips, my thighs,
currents tugging my body away, away, but you
grimace, for your brother
did drown, tempted by your dare:
dive right in. You imagined
his blond hair flashed red with blood
before the lake washed him clean.
Because your mother never speaks
his name, you whispered it once, then swore
me to silence.

x.
Too often I've held my tongue, afraid,
aswarm with darkness. Here
are all the ways you could do it—No,
I won't say it.

xi.
Medieval monks slept
in their coffins. Cash Bundren sawed
planks for his mother's coffin, planed their edges
as Dewey Dell fanned flies from her face, and she lay
remembering why she named one son Jewel.
No one has written
why I followed a man I knew
only as Mr. Jewel into his barn,
how he pointed out the forged, square nails, each stall's
tongue-and-groove construction, how the next day he looped
his rope over a weathered beam, climbed
onto a milk crate, kicked
it away.

xii.
When the man asked
to be cured of his faulty speech, Jesus
touched his tongue, pressing his calloused forefinger
against its fleshy center. The man felt
words well within him, words
of the law and prophets; he felt
creatures swirling in his mouth, and when he opened
his lips, they soared like doves, their soft feathers
brushing his neighbors' ears, every word
perfectly clear and yet still
sounding like miracle, miracle, miracle.

- Lynn Domina


Claustrophilia

It’s just me throwing myself at you,
romance as usual, us times us,

not lust but moxibustion,
a substance burning close

to the body as possible
without risk of immolation.

Nearness without contact
causes numbness. Analgesia.

Pins and needles. As the snugness
of the surgeon’s glove causes hand fatigue.

At least this procedure
requires no swag or goody bags,

stuff bestowed upon the stars
at their luxe functions.

There’s no dress code,
though leg irons

are always appropriate.
And if anyone says what the hell

are you wearing in Esperanto—
Kion diable vi portas?—

tell them anguish
is the universal language.

Stars turn to train wrecks
and my heart goes out,

admirers gush. Ground to a velvet!
But never mind the downside,

mon semblable, mon crush.
Love is just the retaliation of light.

It is so profligate, you know,
so rich with rush.

- Alice Fulton


Sestina

You
used
to
love
me
well.

Well,
you—
me—
used
love
to ...

to ...
well ...
love.
You
used
me.

Me,
too,
used ...
well ...
you.
Love,

love
me.
You,
too
well
used,

used
love
well.
Me,
too.
You!

You used
to love
me well.

- Ciara Shuttleworth

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

- Rilke

Thanks

With the night falling we are saying thank you
We are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
We are running out of the glass rooms
With our mouths full of food to look at the sky
And say thank you
We are standing by the water looking out
In different directions
Back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
After funerals we are saying thank you
After the news of the dead
Whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
In a culture up to its chin in shame
Living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
Over telephones we are saying thank you
In doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
Remembering wars and the police at the back door
And the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
In the banks that use us we are saying thank you
With the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
Unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
With the animals dying around us
Our lost feelings we are saying thank you
With the forests falling faster than the minutes
Of our lives we are saying thank you
With the words going out like cells of a brain
With the cities growing over us like the earth
We are saying thank you faster and faster
With nobody listening we are saying thank you
We are saying thank you and waving
Dark though it is.

- W.S. Merwin


Second Sight

Turning the corner I
Realize that I have read this before.
It is summer. The sun
Sits on the fire-escape while its children
Tear their voices into little shreds.
I wish I could remember how it ended.

This is the passage where the mirrors
Are embarking at the ends of the streets.
The drawn shades are waving
From empty rooms, and the old days
Are fanning themselves here and there on the steps.
The fact is, I have come back
Again and again, as a wish on a postcard, only
This time the jewels are turning
In the faces, and it seems I should know
The motive for the laundry, and the name
Of the man with the teeth, at intervals saying
You want to bide your time.

I feel this is a bit that I know how it goes;
I should be able to call
Most of the windows
By their Christian names, they have whole
Chapters to themselves
Before the pigeons give up, and the brightest
Are reflections of darkness. But no,
They've got it wrong, they've got it wrong,
Like anywhere else.

It's the old story,
Every morning something different is real.
This place is no more than the nephew of itself,
With these cats, this traffic, these
Departures
To which I keep returning,
Having tasted the apple of my eye,
Saying perenially
Here it is, the one and only,
The beginning and the end.
This time the dials have come with the hands and
Suddenly I was never here before.
Oh dust, oh dust, progress
Is being made.

- W.S. Merwin

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

- Wallace Stevens

Lament

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road...
When did it start?...
I would like to step out of my heart
an go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city...

- Rilke

Epiphany

While you’re gazing in the mirror all the names change.
It will all be all right, you’ve said, when push comes to shove
And the snow’s sheer mortal diamond will have left us
Its legacy of watergallop and what-have-you: it will be
A question of reflection, not this heartlessness of lightbreak,
The horrid jag edge of shadow.

Take, for instance, this morning:
Beneath the ice-clamp of Casperkill Creek you saw clear water
Run into its own life against the odds, making (the way things
Will) a fresh start. Just as a raucous, high-minded, truth-telling
Matter-of-fact congregation of crows comes tumbling.

- Eamon Grennan

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

- Wallace Stephens


Hunter-Gatherer

1.
Snow falling on the roof falls like it used to do
when freeze and thaw hardened to a satin sheen
and nothing moved in the offing but the lighthouse beam.

And so this morning is the morning of the heart
in which the vodka, talking shit all night,
dissolves into pure sunlight, purer thought,

and I’m not a whore and I’m not a bastard
and I wake clear-headed and see
above the clouds like a swept-bare prison yard

each cool hard instant of nothing but blank sky.
No sound of the All Clear, no need for intensity
or all the fake drama of some TV war. Just the eye

of the ocean staring through a neighbor’s window
with a sense of absolution no one younger can ever know.

2 .
Your snipers crouch on rooftops, your oil derricks
and McMansions gleam . . . You made it all from plastic,
scrounging water bottles at dawn with the other derelicts

and then cutting and gluing in the studio
your own slum of alabaster, your shining city
on the hill. Remember when I told you

in my aspiring bad boy way, how I found
in a footnote to “Of Plymouth Plantation”
the dissenter put to death with the cow he sodomized?

As if I’d made a dare, your eyes met mine,
then you went back to your drawing, your concentration,
now made perfect, cutting me down to size.

And the brown and blue ink flowing from your hand
mingled into lines only the ink could intend.

3.
I want to see you put on those boots again,
those ones we bought from the Farmers’ Co-op
to tramp around mud-spattered fields.

I want to see you bend down and shove your toe
and thick sock into that green rubber sleeve
sheathing your foot and calf up to the knee

while you lean against me to steady your balance,
the two of us braced against each other
in sway and countersway, trust moving against chance

but nothing more at stake than what was always
at stake, life making its extensions,
then pulling back away—there we go across the water meadows

in slip and slop, hand in hand to see the manor house
the lord and lady pulled the roof off against the taxes.

4.
Light plashes down on your white plastic plain—
and no one knows the end, or how this war comes out,
or who’s a casualty and who’s not.

Your snipers take aim. Rifles gleam in the spotlights.
Your shantytowns transfigure into lustrous flows
of shadow that make the enemy hard to spot:

everything is camouflaged in light,
in hard-to-see-through veils of glare and dazzle.
And then the first shot’s fired and in the split-second lull

before light explodes itself against light
and every light goes out, I see your careful silhouette,
head cocked to the side measuring the effect

of just how far is too far, how close too close
before such warring luminosities turn friend into foe.

- Tom Sleigh


At Lake Scugog

1.
Where what I see comes to rest,
at the edge of the lake,
against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am
maintains an uneasy truce
with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin’s shade the gap between
the words I said
and those I remember saying

is just wide enough to contain
the remains that remain
of what I assumed I knew.

2.
Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were
gingerly trades spots
with the person you are

and what I believe I believe
sits uncomfortably next to
what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you
what I want you to want,
you heard, or desired to hear,

something else. As, over and in the lake,
the cormorant and its image
traced paths through the sky.

- Troy Jollimore


The Coffin Store

I was lugging my death from Kampala to Kraków.
Death, what a ridiculous load you can be,
like the world atremble on Atlas’s shoulders.

In Kampala I’d wondered why the people, so poor,
didn’t just kill me. Why don’t they kill me?
In Kraków I must have fancied I’d find poets to talk to.

I still believed then I’d domesticated my death,
that he’d no longer gnaw off my fingers and ears.
We even had parties together: “Happy,” said death,

and gave me my present, a coffin, my coffin,
made in Kampala, with a sliding door in its lid,
to look through, at the sky, at the birds, at Kampala.

That was his way, I soon understood, of reverting
to talon and snarl, for the door refused to come open:
no sky, no bird, no poets, no Kraków.

Catherine came to me then, came to me then,
“Open your eyes, mon amour,” but death
had undone me, my knuckles were raw as an ape’s,

my mind slid like a sad-ankled skate, and no matter
what Catherine was saying, was sighing, was singing,
“Mon amour, mon amour,” the door stayed shut, oh, shut.

I heard trees being felled, skinned, smoothed,
hammered together as coffins. I heard death
snorting and stamping, impatient to be hauled off, away.

But here again was Catherine, sighing, and singing,
and the tiny carved wooden door slid ajar, just enough—
the sky, one single bird, Catherine—just enough.

- C.K. Williams


Dearborn Suite

1.
Middle-aged, supremely bored
with his wife, hating his work,
unable to sleep, he rises
from bed to pace his mansion
in slippers and robe, wondering
if this is all there ever
will be to becoming Henry Ford,
the man who created

the modern world. The skies
above the great Rouge factory
are black with coke smoke, starless,
the world is starless now, all
because he remade it in
his image, no small reward.

2.
Monday comes, as it must, with a pale
moon sinking below the elms.
They told us another dawn was
on the way, possibly held up
by traffic on Grand Boulevard
or by Henry, master of Dearborn,
who loathes sharing the light
with the unenlightened among us.

That was 60 years ago.
The day arrived, a weak sun
but none the less an actual
one, its sooty light bathing
walls, windows, eyelids while
old pal moon drifted off to sleep.

3.
As a boy I’d known these fields
rife with wild phlox in April,
where at night the red-tailed fox
came to prey and the horned owl
split the air in a sudden rush
for its kill. I loved that world
with its little woods that held
their darkness and the still ponds,

clear as ice, that held the stars
each night until the dawn broke
into fenced plots of land,
claimed and named, barns and stables,
white houses with eyes shut tight
against the intrusion of sight.

4.
Hell is here in the forge room
where the giant presses stamp
out body parts and the smell
of burning skin seeps into
our hair and under our nails.
The old man, King Henry, punches in
for the night shift with us,
his beloved coloreds and Yids,

to work until the shattered
windows gray. There is a justice
after all, there’s a bright anthem
for the occasion, something
familiar and blue, with words we
all sing, like “Time on My Hands.”

- Philip Levine


Warrior: 5th Grade

I don’t remember who had set it up,
but I knew, all day, that when night came,
at the sleepover, at Dinny Craviotto’s,
I would challenge Shelly Ashby to a fight
for picking on Betty Jean Hadden. I knew
public opinion was behind me, my mouth and
fists and lungs were swollen, slightly,
with nobleness. All day I was modest,
eyes cast down in righteousness, I was
the scourge of the John Muir Brownie Troop, I was a
moral instrument. I was very happy,
that night I would get to hit someone.
I had had a couple of fights, before,
and I loved the slight give of the body, the
contraption of the fist, like a small dollhouse
filled with erasers and rocks, and the free
swing through the air, that sideways plummet,
and the hit, the crunching noise, the rubbery
curve of the ribs, their spring, I wanted
to hurt someone, someone bad,
and be hurt, I wanted to be hit when I
could hit back. I wasn’t thinking of
my mother’s blows, which anyway weren’t
flesh on flesh, she kept the token
tortoise carapace between us, but she
swung with passion, I wanted to be
like her, and hit, and hit, and hit.
I had my style decided on –
left arm whirling, David’s sling,
my fist its stone, right arm jabbing
out and back, fast, I was a
threshing-machine of punishment, I would
move across the Craviotto living-room un-
beatable, I would harvest Shelly Ashby,
bitter Brownie with the pouting bee-bit lips.
And I don’t remember what came next, I remember
a circle of faces, an outer circle
of trussed-up sleeping-bags, lumps,
camels kneeling in the desert, I remember
nothing about it for years, until
it came to me that I thought that my lover was too
gentle – I was twenty – I realized that I wanted to be
fucked blind, pummelled half dead with it.

- Sharon Olds


Song of Repulse to a Vain Lover

Keep away
Just a little touch of you
is sufficient.

- Makah


Chove Chuva

Chove Chuva
Constant is the Rain
Chove-Chove-Chove Chuva
Endless is the Pain

As I stand here
I remember
That once our hearts were one
And everyday
Was spring to me
'til you left and took away the sun.

Now the days are lonely
And the song of love is still
They say that I'll forget you
But I say I never will

And it hurts with such a pain
To be alone and lonely in the rain

And it hurts with such a pain
To be alone
And lonely in the rain.

- Jorge Ben


Untitled

Those were sad
times
When without
you
I watched worlds
and days
Come up
And then again
go down.

- Izumi Shikibu


The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

- Rihaku / Ezra Pound


Gouge, Adze, Rasp, Hammer

So this is what it's like when love
leaves, and one is disappointed
that the body and mind continue to exist,

exacting payment from each other,
engaging in stale rituals of desire,
and it would seem the best use of one's time

is not to stand for hours outside
her darkened house, drenched and chilled,
blinking into the slanting rain.

So this is what it's like to have to
practice amiability and learn
to say the orchard looks grand this evening

as the sun slips behind scumbled clouds
and the pears, mellowed to a golden-green,
glow like flames among the boughs.

It is now one claims there is comfort
in the constancy of nature, in the wind's way
of snatching dogwood blossoms from their branches,

scattering them in the dirt, in the slug's
sure, slow arrival to nowhere.
It is now one makes a show of praise

for the lilac that strains so hard to win
attention to its sweet inscrutability,
when one admires instead the lowly

gouge, adze, rasp, hammer--
fire-forged, blunt-syllabled things,
unthought-of until a need exists:

a groove chiseled to a fixed width,
a roof sloped just so. It is now
one knows what it is to envy

the rivet, wrench, vise -- whatever
works unburdened by memory and sight,
while high above the damp fields

flocks of swallows roil and dip,
and streams churn, thick with leaping salmon,
and the bee advances on the rose.

- Chris Forhan