"These are poems I like" 2013

7/29/2019 "These are poems I like" 2013

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these are poems I like

Bryce. Sept 13


2/58

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill

and spreads his red-gold wings,

I wake, thinking it is the sun

and call Juanita, hearing her answer,

but only in my mind.

I know she is already outside,

breaking the cane off at ground level,

using only her big hands.

I get the machete and walk among the cane,

until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt.

Juanita, dead in the morning like this.

I raise the machete

what I take from the earth, I give back

and cut off her feet.

I lift the body and carry it to the wagon,

where I load the cane to sell in the village.

Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,

tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;

it is grief.

If you eat too much of it, you want more,

you can never get enough.

Cuba, 1962, Al


3/58

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has retired from public life due to worsening lymphatic

cancer. Recently, he sent this farewell letter.

If for a moment God were to forget that I am a rag doll and granted me a

piece of life, I probably wouldn't say everything that I think; rather, I would

think about everything that I say.

I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would

sleep less, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our

eyes, we lose sixty seconds of light.

I would walk when others hold back, I would wake when others sleep, I would

listen when others talk.

And how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream!

If God were to give me a piece of life, I would dress simply, throw myself face

first into the sun, baring not only my body but also my soul.

My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to

show. Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh dream a Benedetti poem,

and a Serrat song would be the serenade I'd offer to the moon.

I would water roses with my tears, to feel the pain of their thorns and the red

kiss of their petals... My God, if I had a piece of life... I wouldn't let a single day

pass without telling the people I love that I love them.


4/58

I would convince each woman and each man that they are my favorites, and I

would live in love with love.

I would show men how very wrong they are to think that they cease to be in

love when they grow old, not knowing that they grow old when they cease to

be in love!

To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own. I would

teach the old that death does not come with old age, but with forgetting.

So much have I learned from you, oh men ... I have learned that everyone

wants to live at the top of the mountain, without knowing that real happiness

is in how it is scaled.

I have learned that when a newborn child first squeezes his father's finger in

his tiny fist, he has him trapped forever.

I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when

he has to help the other get to his feet.

From you I have learned so many things, but in truth they won't be of much

use, for when I keep them within this suitcase, unhappily shall I be dying.

To Sleep Less and Dream More, Gabriel Marquez


5/58

I thought I knew something

about loneliness but

you go to the stockyards

buy a pig's ear and sew

it on your couch. That, you

said, is my best friend--we

have spirited talks. Even

then I thought: a man of

such exquisite emptiness

(and you cultivated it so)

is ground for fine flowers.

Epithalamion for Tyler, James Tate


6/58

It was everywhere in my childhood: in restaurants,

on buses or planes. The teacher's lounge looked like

London under fog. My grandmother never stopped

smoking, and walking in her house was like diving

in a dark pond. Adults were dimly lit: they carried

matches in their pockets as if they might need fire

to see. Cigarette machines inhaled quarters and

exhaled rectangles. Women had their own brands,

long and thin; one was named Eve and it was meant

to be smoked in a garden thick with summer flowers.

I'm speaking of moods: an old country store where

my grandfather met friends and everyone spoke

behind a veil of smoke. (My Uncle Bill preferred

fragrant cigars; I can still smell his postal jacket ...)

He had time to tell stories because he took breaks

and there was something to do with his hands.

My mother's bridge club gathered around tables

with ashtrays and secrets which are best revealed

beside fire. Even the fireplaces are gone: inefficient

and messy. We are healthier now and safer! We have


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exercise and tests for breast or colon cancer. We have

helmets and car seats and smokeless coffee shops

where coffee has grown frothy and complex. The old

movies are so full of smoke that actors are hard to see

and they are often wrapped in smoking jackets, bent

over a piano or kiss. I miss the places smoke created.

I like the way people sat down for rest or pleasure

and spoke to other people, not phones, and the tiny fire

which is crimson and primitive and warm. How long

ago when humans found this spark of warmth and made

their first circle? What about smoke as words? Or the

pipes of peace? In grade school we learned how it rises

and how it can kill. We were taught to shove towels

under our closed doors: to stop, drop, and roll. We had

a plan to meet our family in the yard, the house behind

us alive with all we cannot put out...

Smoke, Faith Shearin


8/58

you are a horse running alone

and he tries to tame you

compares you to an impossible highway

to a burning house

says you are blinding him

that he could never leave you

forget you

want anything but you

you dizzy him, you are unbearable

every woman before or after you

is doused in your name

you fill his mouth

his teeth ache with memory of taste

his body just a long shadow seeking yours

but you are always too intense

frightening in the way you want him

unashamed and sacrificial

he tells you that no man can live up to the one who

lives in your head

and you tried to change didnt you?

closed your mouth more

tried to be softer

prettier

less volatile, less awake

but even when sleeping you could feel


9/58

him travelling away from you in his dreams

so what did you want to do love

split his head open?

you cant make homes out of human beings

someone should have already told you that

and if he wants to leave

then let him leave

you are terrifying

and strange and beautiful

something not everyone knows how to love.

For Women Who are Difficult to Love, Warsan Shire


10/58

The plan was to play hard to get, thats right.

I wasnt just gonna go giving myself away. Im no easy catch.

Can you really see me in fishnets?

No.

I always find myself slippin out the holes, swimmin back out to sea.

Id never been anybodys sushi roll.

But she, has lips like wasabi.

My eyes water every time we kiss.

Makes me wish we had a porch swing and a little home.

Makes me wish I could (write)/right wrongs, instead of poems.

The heart is a bullet thats terrified of blood.

Love is a windshield wiper in a hurricane; nothing is ever clear.

You mistake her name for the moon, mistake porchlights for the stars and

sometimes they are.

Her constalliations lead me home, ten thousand shades of open.

And if theres one thing in this world Ive ever known for sure its that this girl

is gonna crush me like a small bug.

Leave me so frickin broken therell be body bags beneath my eyes from

nights I cried so hard

the stars died, but Im like, go ahead.

Im all yours.

I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm cause Id

rather be left for dead than left to wonder what thunder sounds like.


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Im not lookin for someone who can save me.

Life rafts might keep you afloat but they rarely get you anywhere and Ive got

places I wanna go.

So break me in two, peel back my rib cage and cover every page of my heart

with love poems

you will burn someday.

The most fertile lands were built by the hands of volcanoes,

And I wanna know what grows beneath the drone of Hallmark and roses.

I want your goodbye to feel like explosives,

Your lips, a burning building without fire escapes.

Your hips the gates of hell if I know if heaven exists,

But this will do just fine.

I wanna feel you like lifelines on the palms of Jesus when the nails went

through is that really, really creepy?

Just in case it is, let me also say I want you sleepy-eyed in the morning,

Waking at my side like a warm summer sky born from so much softness the

horizon cries every time nightfall comes to take you.

Let me also say I wanna make you sandwiches,

And soup,

And peanut butter cookies.

Though, the truth is peanut butter is actually really bad for you cause they

grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil.

But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you.


12/58

Let me also say Ive never seen anything more gorgeous than you were that

night.

The moon, bending through the window blinds,

I told time by the light casting shadows across your face while you told me

this story:

My grandparents were married for 63 years.

On the day my grandfather died he laid in bed and said nothing

but love, love, love love

then he puckered his lips and kissed my grandmother for the last time.

Love, love, love, love is like sunshine:

Sometimes you have to get burned to know you were there.

I wanna know that Im here, every single part of me,

My heart, open as the rivers eyes the first time it sees the ocean.

My god, look at those waves!

Listen to that thundering tide.

Can you imagine anything more frightening?

Can you imagine anything

More

Alive?

Wasabi, Andrea Gibson


13/58

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--


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and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely


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tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck


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it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Sunflower Sutra, Allen Ginsberg


17/58

Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.

My house was on a cliff. The thing could take

Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.

Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

And far too large for my feet to step by.

I hoped that various buildings were brought low.

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed.

The guarded tourist makes the guide the test.

Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No.

Taxi for her and for me healthy rest.


The language problem but you have to try.

Some solid ground for lying could she show?


None of these deaths were her point at all.

The thing was that being woken he would bawl

And finding her not in earshot he would know.

I tried saying Half an Hour to pay this call.



18/58

I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie.

Till you have seen what a threat holds below,


Tell me again about Europe and her pains,

Whos tortured by the drought, who by the rains.

Glut me with floods where only the swine can row

Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains.


A bedshift flight to a Far Eastern sky.

Only the same war on a stronger toe.


Tell me more quickly what I lost by this,

Or tell me with less drama what they miss

Who call no die for a god for a throw,

Who says after two aliens had one kiss


But as to risings, I can tell you why.

It is on contradiction that they grow.


Up was the heartening and the strong reply.

The heart of standing is we cannot fly.

Aubade, William Empson


19/58

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake

and dress them in warm clothes again.

How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they

forget that they are horses.

It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,

it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,

how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days

were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple

to slice into pieces.

Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means

we're inconsolable.

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

These, our bodies, possessed by light.

Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Scheherazade, Richard Siken


20/58

She pole-dances to gospel hymns.

Came out to her family in the middle of Thanksgiving grace.

I knew she was trouble

two years before our first date.

But my heart was a Labrador Retriever

with its head hung out the window of a car

tongue flapping in the wind

on a highway going 95

whenever she walked by.

So I mastered the art of crochet

and I crocheted her a winter scarf

and one night at the bar I gave it to her with a note

that said something like,

I hope this keeps your neck warm.

If it doesnt give me a call.

The key to finding love

is fucking up the pattern on purpose

is skipping a stitch,

is leaving a tiny, tiny hole to let the cold in

and hoping she mends it with your lips.

This morning I was counting her freckles.

She has five on the left side of her face, seven on the other

and I love her for every speck of trouble she is.


21/58

Shes frickin awesome.

Like popcorn at a drive-in movie

that neither of us has any intention of watching.

Like Batman and Robin

in a pick-up truck in the front row with the windows steamed up.

Like Pacman in the eighties,

she swallows my ghosts.

Slaps me on my dark side and says,

Baby, this is the best day ever.

So I stop listening for the sound of the ocean

in the shells of bullets I hoped missed us

to see there are white flags from the tips of her toes

to her tear ducts

and I can wear her halos as handcuffs

cause I dont wanna be a witness to this life,

I want to be charged and convicted,

ear lifted to her song like a bouquet of yes

because my heart is a parachute that has never opened in time

and I wanna fuck up that pattern,

leave a hole where the cold comes in and fill it every day with her sun,

cause anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds

knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay than to go.

And I want to grow

strong as the last patch of sage on a hillside


22/58

stretching towards the lightning.

God has always been an arsonist.

Heaven has always been on fire.

She is a butterfly knife bursting from a cocoon in my belly.

Love is a half moon hanging above Baghdad

promising to one day grow full,

to pull the tides through our desert wounds

and fill every clip of empty shells with the ocean.

Already there is salt on my lips.

Lover, this is not just another poem.

This is my goddamn revolt.

I am done holding my tongue like a bible.

There is too much war in every verse of our silence.

We have all dug too many trenches away from ourselves.

This time I want to melt like a snowman in Georgia,

til my smile is a pile of rocks you can pick up

and skip across the lake of your doubts.

Trust me,

I have been practicing my ripple.

I have been breaking into mannequin factories

and pouring my pink heart into their white paint.

I have been painting the night sky upon the inside of doorframes

so only moonshine will fall on your head in the earthquake.


23/58

I have been collecting your whispers and your whiplash

and your half-hour-long voice mail messages.

Lover, did you see the sunset tonight?

Did you see Neruda lay down on the horizon?

Do you know it was his lover who painted him red,

who made him stare down the bullet holes

in his countrys heart?

I am not looking for roses.

I want to break like a fever.

I want to break like the Berlin Wall.

I want to break like the clouds

so we can see every fearless star,

how they never speak guardrail,

how they can only say fail.

Pole Dancer, Andrea Gibson


24/58

sometimes I am so in love with you / like a little clock that trembles on the

edge of the hour

Untitled, Joey Cannizzaro


25/58

Lisa and I made a fort that summer,

Way back behind the houses and the garden

With the rhubarb patch at the end:

Way out where the folks couldnt see us.

We were full of great ideas.

We imagined scenarios in which our fathers

Would be slain in their suits by flocks

Of wild geese, and we dreamed up equally absurd

And violent films, or TV showsmost of which

Have now been filmed, or have happened

In real life. I guess we had our fingers on the pulse

Of the New Horizon, though lots of others did too;

But every generation thinks its the Lost Generation,

And we were bored. By August, me and Lisad

Taken to smoking her mothers cigarettes,

Long and tarry and smelly, and Lisa could blow

Smoke rings. I couldnt. Shed put one up there,

And say, "Dont let it die a virgin!" and wed stick


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Our cigarettes through it like cocks, and giggle.

And then shed kiss me,

Pressing me down into the rhubarb and my pulse

Would quicken: desire, the might-be of getting

Caught, the horizon I saw from my pinned-down side

Spanning out in frontiers of pinks and off-pinks.

Now, I can hardly remember the details of all that,

Only that I didnt let it die a virgin,

In any case,

And to this day I associate the scents

Of cigarette smoke and sexthose and chlorine,

Of us swimming and laughing in the neighbors pool

Before going in, with the sun going down,

Trying to get it all off.

Dont Let It Die a Virgin, Kevin McGowan


27/58

The last line should strike like a lovers complaint.

You should never see it coming.

And you should never hear the end of it.

On Last Lines, Suzanne Buffam


28/58

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk

into your room, and pick you up,

and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me

hard,

as if clinging could save us. I think

you think

I will never die, I think I exude

to you the permanence of smoke or stars,

even as

my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell

the sun, don't go down, I have stood by

as you told the flower, don't grow old,

don't die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,

I would suck the rot from your fingernail,

I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,

I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,


29/58

I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,

I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,

I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen

feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,

and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,

and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,

and iron twists weapons toward the true north,

and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,

and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,

and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the

dark, O corpse-to-be ...

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,

this the nightmare you wake screaming from:

being forever

in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone

quietly eating, you clambered up

on my lap: to all

the mouthfuls rising toward

all the mouths, at the top of your voice


30/58

you cried

your one word, caca! caca! caca!

and each spoonful

stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering

steam.

Yes,

you cling because

I, like you, only sooner

than you, will go down

the path of vanished alphabets,

the roadlessness

to the other side of the darkness,

your arms

like the shoes left behind,

like the adjectives in the halting speech

of old men,

which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,

some impossible Tuesday

in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out

among the black stones


31/58

of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying

over their one word, ci-gt, ci-gt, ci-gt,

and the raindrops

hitting you on the fontanel

over and over, and you standing there

unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens

you find yourself with someone you love

in a caf at one end

of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar

where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error

of thinking,

one day all this will only be memory,

learn,

as you stand

at this end of the bridge which arcs,

from love, you think, into enduring love,


32/58

learn to reach deeper

into the sorrows

to come to touch

the almost imaginary bones

under the face, to hear under the laughter

the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss

the mouth

which tells you, here,

here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon

sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once

in my father's eyes, a tiny kite

wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel

of all mortal things lets go the string.

7


33/58

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings:farewell.

Your eyes close inside your head,

in sleep. Already

in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,

when I come back

we will go out together,

we will walk out together among

the ten thousand things,

each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages

of dying is love.

Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell


34/58

These are my politics

12:05 PM eastern standard time, the Muslims have vanished. Check for

yourself if you don't believe me. Where have they gone to?

There is speculation, of course. Scientists mention a cosmic storm that

passed the Earth on January 20. A man says they are all in caves. Certain

groups lament a faulty Rapture. A woman says he has taken their power and

absorbed it into himself. She means Barack Obama. I doubt it, but he does

seem somehow taller. The ground rumbles at times. The breaking news says

WASHINGTON DC, with red concentric circles. I'm uneasy, but what can we

do? Terror is defeated and if Obama were a Muslim, he'd be just as gone as

them. There's no cause for alarm.

Within months, Barack Obama has declared a war on vague unease. It's a

good idea, because frankly we could all use some peace of mind. Approval

rating is higher than ever now that the Muslims had left, but I don't think we

are happy yet. His eyes are shining sometimes, as a deer's eyes shine in a

flashlight beam. Small fissures criss-cross the pavement. Trees are swaying,

but the breeze is gone. Something is changing in our world.

Aeroplanes don't exist anymore. Scientists explain that the density of the air

is too low to support their wings. Then how do we breathe?! We should have

died by now, but I think we are evolving. Our bodies haven't changed, but the

atmosphere..


35/58

One man says it was the rapture after all, and we have since entered the

Kingdom of God. Barack is now the size of an oak tree. He sleeps outside

since the rains have ceased, and his skin is thick to bullets. Now he wanders

through he countryside impassively. He ignores a rural photo-op. He studies

a leaf for twenty days. Only a fool would call this Heaven.

Satellites fall to earth like rain used to. No friction burns them away, so we

trudge past countless flecks of solar panel and ribbons of golden cloth. It's a

silent car crash every few hours, though cars themselves no longer run. No

oxygen remains to ignite their fuel. Obama strides across the landscape,

taller than the Freedom Tower. We've given up on assassination; all men are

immortal now, and guns no longer fire.

I'm starting to wish the Muslims were back.

We found them with a telescope. Images of a colony on the right side of the

moon. See the parts that jut from the lower right? I think they're mosques.

Soon they are visible to the naked eye, but how? Their cities are enormous.

We watch them as they live and die. They have our former atmosphere; the

moon is fringed with blue. "Look at how they wield their guns," writes a man.

"I always said he'd take our guns away." They eat and sleep like we once did,

building worthless ziggurats. We have everything we wanted, but oh how we

envy their strife!

It's long been clear that Obama brought this uncomfortable perfection upon

us, but I can't bring myself to blame him for it. He's reminded us all of how


36/58

our lives had been discarded out of fear. I know now why he grows each day.

In time, when we are ready he will reach out into space. He will raise us up in

his great hand, to this new Earth that gleams like a frozen star. And if Obama

does not carry us, we can climb...

Obama, Anonymous


37/58

I mistook a garbage truck for thunder.

The morning after the first night we made love,

I dreamt thunder was chasing rain

through your neighborhood,

flooding the streets and keeping the two of us

indoors for days or even weeks,

until some old prophet could drop, by in an ark,

to take us and the rest of the paired-up animals

to a very high place, or an island maybe,

where we could just

sleep naked for a living.

But the thunder was a garbage truck.

And when my eyes woke up

a note on your pillow said:

"Good morning, Sparkle Boy!

I'll be back around noon.

You--make yourself at home."

And so I did.

Maybe.

I'm saying maybe I put on your slippers,

which were as comfortable as bunnies

because they were bunnies,


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and then shuffled over my new favorite

hardwood floor to the bathroom

where maybe I took a bubble bath,

which is not something I can do at my place

because, frankly, my tub is way too skanky

to ever sit my bare ass down in.

And then maybe I got so caught up in the romance of the suds

I started quoting old Latin poetry from my college days

like: "fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles..."

You know: "Verily a bright sun does favor me this morning...muthafucka!"

And then maybe I...played with myself.

But its not what youre thinking--

Im saying possibly I just sorta

stuck my hand up from the water, going:

hand!(HERE I HOLD MY HAND UP LIKE A SOCK PUPPET

hand!WITHOUT THE SOCK AND MY HAND TEASES ME

hand!IN A HIGH, SMUTTY VOICE):

HAND: "Somebody got laid last night!

Ha-ha-haaaa!

It was youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!"

Or whatever.


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And then maybe I...played with myself,

and it's exactly what you're thinking.

But if I did, it was only to put

the mental motion picture of our naked night together

on replay and replay and replay

so touching myself was just like...

Tivo in a way.

And yes, I was still wet when I borrowed your bathrobe.

And yes, I baked apples in your oven

and then ate them with your honey, honey.

And yes, I scared the birds away from your balcony

with my antics, dancing full-blast

to your old Prince CD's--

but please lets just keep that my little secret,

because nothing is as private as a solitary dance

unless--maybe--it's standing in front of a full-length mirror

in a borrowed pair of bunny slippers,

slipping off a bathrobe and then wishing to a lightbulb

that my name, or my game, or my whatever were bigger,

wondering: "What kind of woman wants this skinny kid for her warrior?"

And so I made for you a kite, enormous,

out of coat hangers, brown paper bags

and the masking tape from that drawer in your kitchen,

and I hung it in the hallway


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where you couldnt hardly miss it,

and I tagged that kite with my words,

I wrote:

Just so you know--

My weird mind wanders and my brave heart breaks.

I've nailed some milestones, but I've made mistakes,

Cuz I got more faults than a map of California earthquakes.

I am taking a nap beneath your covers.

Wake me if you like me.

Wake me if you want me

Wake me if you need another poem.

Your once and future lover

has made himself at home.

Kite, Rives


41/58

When I had no roof I made

Audacity my roof. When I had

No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made

Care my father. When I had

No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made

Quiet my friend. When I had no

Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made

My voice my temple. I have

No priest, my tongue is my choir.


42/58

When I have no means fortune

Is my means. When I have

Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment

Is my strategy. When I had

No lover I courted my sleep.

Samurai Song, Robert Pinksy


43/58

The argument had smoldered for a week,

Long enough for the fine points of fire,

Banked from the start against self-righteousness,

To have blurred in the pale ash of recrimination.

I couldn't tell which wound would be the deeper

To stay on, behind the slammed door,

Forcing you to listen to me talk about it

With others, or to leave you altogether.

What caused the argumentanother crumpled

Piece of paper with a phone number on it

Felt at last as lost as all the bright

Beginnings, years back. And then. . .

And then

You were standing at the sink with your back to me

And must have sensed me there behind you, watching.

Suddenly you turned around and I saw in your eyes

What all along had been the reason I loved you

And had come to this moment when I would be forced

To choose but could not because of what I had seen,

As when the master of the tea ceremony,

Determined to embody his ideal,

Had constructed a room of such simplicity

That only a decade of deliberating its angles

And details was in the end required of him,

A wooden floor so delicately joined


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That birds still seemed to sing in its branches,

Three salmon-dyed silken cushions

On which the painted quince petals trembled,

A pilled iron kettle disguised as a sea urchin,

Each cup the echo of cloud on wave,

And on the long low wall, a swirling mural

Of warlords and misty philosophers,

The Ten Most Famous Men in the World,

Floating at its center the gold-leafed emperor. . .

Who, rumors having reached the court,

Was invited to come approve the great design,

But when he saw himself as merely one

Of ten, declared that because the master's

Insult was exceeded only by his skill

He would be allowed to take his own life

And have a month to plan the suicide.

The master bowed, the emperor withdrew.

At the month's end, two aged monks

Received the same letter from their old friend,

The master, who had now built his final teahouse

An improvisation, a thing of boards and cloth

On the mountain in the province of their childhood

Inviting them for one last cup together.

The monks too wanted nothing more,

The sadness of losing their friend to his ancestors

Eased by the ordinariness of his request.


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But they were feeble and could not make the climb.

Again the master wrote, begging them

To visithe was determined to die the very day

They came and in their company, and besides,

He reminded them, from the mountain they would have

A view of the sea, its round immensity

The soul's own, they could never elsewhere command.

The two monks paused. Their duty to a friend

Was one thing, but to have at last a view of the sea,

A wish since each had been a boy bent

Over pictures of its moonswept midnight blue. . .

So they agreed and undertook the difficult journey,

Sheer rock, sharp sun, shallow breaths until

They reached the top. The master was waiting for them,

The idea of leaving life already in his looks,

A resignation half solemn, half smiling.

He led them past a sapling plum he noted

Would lean in the wind a hundred years hence.

A small ridge still blocked the sea, but the master

Reassured them it would be theirs, a memory

To return with like no other, and soon, soon.

They came to his simple house, a single room,

But surrounded by stunted pines and thick hedges

They could not see beyond. Patience was urged.

Inside, they were welcomed with the usual silences,

With traditional bows and ritual embraces.


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At the far end of the room, the two cups of water

On the floor, the master explained, were for them

To purify their mouths with before the tea was served.

They were next told to lie on their bellies and inch

Towards the cups, ensuring a proper humiliation.

The monks protestedthey had come to see their friend

Through to the end, to see his soul released,

Poured like water into waterand where, after all,

Was the unmatched view he had promised them?

They would, he countered, all have what they wished

If they yielded as they must to his ceremony.

The master waited. The monks slowly, painfully

Got to their knees, then to the straw mat,

Their arms outspread as they had been instructed,

And like limbless beggars made their way across

The floor, their eyes closed in shame, until

They reached the cups. With their lips they tipped

The rims back so the water ran over their tongues.

Now, the master whispered, now look up.

They opened their eyes. They raised their heads a little.

And when they did, they saw a small oblong

Cut into the wall, and beyond that another

Cut through the hedge, and beyond that was what

They had waited for all their lives, a sight

So sublimely composedthree distant islands

Darkly shimmering on boundlessness


47/58

That in the end they saw themselves there,

In their discomfort, in a small opening,

In a long-planned accidental moment,

In their rapture and their loss, in a view of the sea.

A View of the Sea, J.D. McClatchy


48/58

Sometimes I think

we could have gone on.

All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didnt fill

the desert with pyramids.

They just built some. Some.

Theyre not still out there,

building them now. Everyone,

everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not

diabolize time. Right?

We must not curse the passage of time.

On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love, Jennifer M. Hecht


49/58

you said: you know, i can't remember

if you ever told me we were doomed from

the beginning.

but it sounds like something you would say.

but when you find yourself experimenting in

my skin, i will feel obliged to mention the pulse

that pulls my strings, the fact that i am not

your personal puzzle, but something foreign and

frail and not even worth your exasperated sighs.

i am button eyes and uneven stitches and i

said: please shut the door behind you when

you leave,

and you did not catch the inflection in my tired

flatblack eyes, the weary thread of my shaking

mouth, the "when" instead of "if".

you said: this has to stop.

and i had to remind you that i am just less.


50/58

and i felt your cheshire eyes on my sutured back,

prickly with what should have been ancient

history, but when you traced my seams with your

cold fingertips it was yesterday,it was now,now.

and the raconteurs of our age wrote you letters

heavy with ink and implications, fears accrued over

years like the metaphors in my gut, the similes

skipping through my twisted genes

and you

stopped.

you said:

i hated the parasite growing in my womb, hoped it

had nightmares but fed it on my knees, prayed for

its destruction but nourished my hungry cancer while

it tore the meat from my bones,

because it was something you'd given me and i

said: this is what i want, everything i want,

and added the negatives silently. you didn't

wait for the elevator and i hung myself on a tangent


51/58

in preparation for the war that would bring me peace,

at last and i said: i am the tumour and the destroyer but

you drew the iron alloys through my lungs, lovingly

trailed this interrupted symbolism between my ribs and

i said: i am everything less beautiful than two hundred

and six frighteningly fragile human pieces and i

am running and running and running

out of breath and i said, i said: i never told you that, but i'll

say it now and you

are tossing me down the stairwell and forgetting how

to run at all and i

said and you

stopped

and i

said: i have never seen you from

this perspective

and you said:

the red queen effect, Ilisi


52/58

If I could

hold light

in my hand

I would

give it

to you

and watch it

become

your shadow.

Present Light, Charles Ghigna


53/58

(Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)

god my darling

do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law

Janabai, tr. Arun Kolatkar

Chewing slowly,

Only after Id eaten

My grandmother,

Mother,

Son-in-law,

Two brothers-in-law,

And father-in-law

(His big family included)

In that order,

And had for dessert

The towns inhabitants,

Did I find, says Kabir,

The beloved that Ive become

One with.

Chewing Slowly, Kabir


54/58

(Translated from Portuguese by Atsuro Riley)

Children grow in secret. They hide themselves in the depths and darker

reaches of the house to become wild cats, white birches.

One day when youre only half-watching the herd as it straggles back in with

the afternoon dust, one child, the prettiest of them all, comes close and rises

up on tiptoe to whisper I love you, Ill be waiting for you in the hay.

Shaking some, you go to find your shotgun; you spend whats left of the day

firing at rooks and jackdaws, uncountable at this hour, and crows.

The Children, Eugnio de Andrade


55/58

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To

people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder

how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like

that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much

at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother

likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and

I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one

go, Im really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight,

and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up

and away. You were never sweet, my mother says.

In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-

wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates

how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me

about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning

down the farm. Jimmys crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That

was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The

baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there's his

mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough, he says. Tough. When

Chicagos Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand

in her apron, grabbed my grandfatherthen fiveand took him to deliver

the money. That's all you'll ever get, she said, and dont touch my kids or Ill kill

you.

My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I dont have to tell

him that ballerina-fable. He knows Im three and mean. He knows it for his


56/58

whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her,

abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate

prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he wont

tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm,

far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife hed send for her,

and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met

up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She

wasnt pretty. She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine.

Her sons loved her. She was mean.

Mean, Colette Labouff Atkinson


57/58

the difference between a cigarette holder

and cigarette case,

the pleasure of a lorgnette over spectacles,

of a fortnight over

two weeks, of a spiral over graduated stairs,

of the frisson of crying

like pouty boys, and of the way to walk a lobster

on a leash: drag it,

its exoskeleton rapping on the cobbles

through the rabble

of Montparnasse, as if lugging luggage.

We did what could not

gain us a week of rent or even a plate of fish,

yet we managed to eat

sickening amounts, to hate on our patroness,

the Princess de Polignac,

though, and I am sorry, she had bought us wine.

Once, in the chamber

before an evening concert, I hid a sack of bees

in the white baby grand,

and when ball-gowned Polignac raised the leaf

they swarmed through the strings

to the chandelier and the Princess saw a living sun

and felt a little less dreary

and a little less proud of being bored.

We had decided with Cocteau, Christopher Shannon


58/58

I tell her I love her like not killing

or ten minutes of sleep

beneath the low rooftop wall

on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,

when she opens it,

of bolt oil and burned powder

and the things it says.

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,

that war is just us

making little pieces of metal

pass through each other.

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, Kevin C. Powers

Documents

"These are poems I like" 2013