Perhaps

Tara
Susan Atefat Peckham

Perhaps it was the length of his torso or the sway
of his legs like long slow reeds against wind, or
perhaps it was the tilt of his head when he first
greeted her, whatever it was, my cousin led
him to her bed, forgetting her husband, her child,
because this man meant more at that moment
than anything, than even the years it took
to build a life of pianos, and fine furniture,
rugs upon rugs, and silver. She must have known
he was too good for her, even then, she must
have known it watching him pore over the keys
with Tara, teaching her which songs to play
when she was grown, must have known that
no life like his would change for a woman
like her, after all, a man like that doesn't give
his life to a woman like her, and she curses
the day they met, curses that she ever made
love to him, curses the moment she kissed
the freckles on his shoulders, curses the very
floor they stood on when he said he loved her
the first time,
now, from a jail cell where Postars
have made her wait, now, Tara, her daughter,
in her husband's custody because that is how
it's done when a woman is unfaithful. And
the bars must look to her like the very lines
of memory, or music, or the passageways
between long legs, or the distances between
parallel lives, carefully measured, like comfort,
and obedience, and it doesn't matter anymore
what is said or what is left to be said, because
she thinks if she really tries she can make herself
disappear into the spaces between them, starts
by losing four pounds, then four more, so what
happens next makes no difference, and what
happens next, she's too far gone to notice,
her daughter is gone, her husband, gone, and
her lover kisses his own wife, who sits thick
with child eight months while he's unable
to shake this feeling he's responsible for
the entire world.
Yet he can easily choose one
woman over the other, and I wonder, how
easy decisions can come to a man, when they
come so slowly to me, the world, two hands
on my shoulders, my cousin, her prison,
a rifle, or a reed, a child, or, even, God, who
says one thing I hear a long while, I made
the moral choice.
I say, the right choice?
when the bars, the bars are not enough to punish
us clean, to close us in, to hold us back.

A Quartet from Nebraska

Four poems by Nancy McCleery:

What we’re doing, first
and foremost

writes Colette, when we seek friendship
or give it is to cry “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”
That cry….the best thing in us.

The gift of presence, fragrant as cinnamon,
dry leaves of a sycamore, ritual applause,
a cloister for celebration.

Of sanctuary, Colette advised
that we keep the rest dark
as long as we possibly can.

*

Shape of a friend, guise of a foreigner.

That one, and the other.

§

December Notes

The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks

The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,

Filigree threads of chickadee.
And wing patterns where one flew

Low, then up and away, gone
To the woods but calling out

Clearly its bright epigrams.
More snow promised for tonight.

The postal van is stalled
In the road again, the mail

Will be late and any good news
Will reach us by hand.

§

Why

are you
casting your line
into fast moving waters

when there
in the small quiet pool
the one in shadow

you are
the one fish
you must catch

§

When It Is Over

The back arches
the arms thrown overhead

then the words

"Your electric days
are in my dying hands"

Hearing this
the face lifts to the sun
falls golden

It is meant for each of us
life in such arms
that when it is over
we go in a cry of passion

A Trio by Joy Kogawa

In the Forest
Joy Kogawa

in the forest the tree
perfectly balances its hours
in the time of its brances
no branch is accidental

in the forest our arms
perfectly balance the breeze
in the time of our departures
no leaving is accidental

in autumn
in the bare room
by a crack in the window
a curtain moves

as the woodsman arrives
precisely beyond time

§

Old Man in the Library

old now and
nameless for me this
man in the library

like a beheaded flower
he blooms here briefly
in my mind's bowl
his stems leaves roots
elsewhere in a room perhaps
nearby

fingers of both hands
cut to the knuckles
he adjusts his glasses
smooths his newspaper
opens and closes his mouth
making short clucking sounds

patiently slowly he
tries several times to
turn the page

§

Finally That There Is

no corner left in which to hide
the mouse, the cat
the empty room
the one defence left
is not to move at all
not to write
not to think
not to send you this letter

finally in the cat's jaws
i remember the secret door
listen for your tunnelling
realise finally that
you are the cat
you are the mouse
you are the room without doors
you are the secret tunnel

finally this fatal defence
fangs sharp with belief
back arched and clawing
the heart's walls

In Memory of Strayed Things

The Black Mitt (Elegy)
Rhea Tregebov

The black mitt curled, coiled, dirty against the dirty snow,
its thumb chewed to a ragged stump. The pair of brown loafers
resting, on the lowest, broken, branch of a balsam shrub,
in an aspect of expectation, the left one slightly askew,
as though their owner had lifted off, and they were the last traces
of some secular Assumption. What wanders the world:
keys, scarves, umbrellas; hair clips, hubcaps, bicycle locks.
The belt loose in the gutter, the dog’s leash without dog,
without owner. Things get away though others collect
in the backs of closets, on windowsills; in empty yogurt
containers, biscuit tins: ticket stubs from baseball games,
empty spools for thread, the wooden ones; plastic balls
the colour of candy that you almost want to bite into;
a Pez container with a Goofy head, its rectangular candies
long gone or gone stale; screws belonging to what?; inscrutable
trapezoidal nuggets of black plastic; the mateless sock, mitt. Us.

Teaching Distance

Learning the Bicycle
for Heather
Wyatt Prunty

The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she'll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.

Emptied and Filled

A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach
Fleda Brown

Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own

skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,

dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab

shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding

a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.

Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making

intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.

§

Sometimes, I am aware of distances, of how little we convey with words, images, brush-strokes of fingers against skin . . . Sometimes, I am cognizant of how simple it is to build bridges. (Easy to build, easy to burn.) A postcard, a message left in voice mail while the recipient-to-be is sleeping, a scattering of text typed for no reason save to create a connection. A few lines, sent to share a world.

The Scents of Ash and Smoke

Homework Assignment on the Subject of Angels
Tadeusz Rozewicz
(translated from the Polish by Magnus J Krynski and Robert A Maguire)

Fallen
angels

resemble
flakes of soot
abacuses
cabbage leaves stuffed
with black rice
they also resemble hail
painted red
blue fire
with a tongue of gold

fallen angels
resemble
ants
moons that press
beneath the green nails of the dead

angels in paradise
resemble the inside of the thigh
of an adolescent girl

they are like stars
they shine in shameful places
they are pure like triangles and circles
they have in the middle
stillness

fallen angels
are like the open windows of a mortuary
like the eyes of cows
like the skeletons of birds
like falling airplanes
like flies on the lungs of fallen soldiers
like strings of autumn rain
that tie lips with a flight of birds

a million angels
wander
over a woman's palm

they lack a navel
on sewing machines they type
long poems in the shape
of a white sail

their bodies can be grafted
on the stump of an olive tree

they sleep on ceilings
they fall drop by drop

On the Day

The Break Away
Anne Sexton

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as we did yearly
under the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break
into two cans ready for recycling,
flattened tin humans
and a tin law,
even for my twenty-five years of hanging on
by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,
and all the other torn
enduring the bewilderments
of their division.

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish,
sucking with love at the coral of our love.
Yet they wait,
in their short time,
like little utero half-borns,
half killed, thin and bone soft.
They breathe the air that stands
for twenty-five illicit days,
the sun crawling inside the sheets,
the moon spinning like a tornado
in the washbowl,
and we orchestrated them both,
calling ourselves TWO CAMP DIRECTORS.
There was a song, our song on your cassette,
that played over and over
and baptised the prodigals.
It spoke the unspeakable,
as the rain will on an attic roof,
letting the animal join its soul
as we kneeled before a miracle--
forgetting its knife.

The daisies confer
in the old-married kitchen
papered with blue and green chefs
who call out pies, cookies, yummy,
at the charcoal and cigarette smoke
they wear like a yellowy salve.
The daisies absorb it all--
the twenty-five-year-old sanctioned love
(If one could call such handfuls of fists
and immobile arms that!)
and on this day my world rips itself up
while the country unfastens along
with its perjuring king and his court.
It unfastens into an abortion of belief,
as in me--
the legal rift--
as on might do with the daisies
but does not
for they stand for a love
undergoihng open heart surgery
that might take
if one prayed tough enough.
And yet I demand,
even in prayer,
that I am not a thief,
a mugger of need,
and that your heart survive
on its own,
belonging only to itself,
whole, entirely whole,
and workable
in its dark cavern under your ribs.

I pray it will know truth,
if truth catches in its cup
and yet I pray, as a child would,
that the surgery take.

I dream it is taking.
Next I dream the love is swallowing itself.
Next I dream the love is made of glass,
glass coming through the telephone
that is breaking slowly,
day by day, into my ear.
Next I dream that I put on the love
like a lifejacket and we float,
jacket and I,
we bounce on that priest-blue.
We are as light as a cat's ear
and it is safe,
safe far too long!
And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window
and peer down at the moon in the pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide.

I will observe the daisies
fade and dry up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow)
snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.

It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds
and their little half-life,
their numbered days
that raged like a secret radio,
recalling love that I picked up innocently,
yet guiltily,
as my five-year-old daughter
picked gum off the sidewalk
and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.

For me it was love found
like a diamond
where carrots grow--
the glint of diamond on a plane wing,
meaning: DANGER! THICK ICE!
but the good crunch of that orange,
the diamond, the carrot,
both with four million years of resurrecting dirt,
and the love,
although Adam did not know the word,
the love of Adam
obeying his sudden gift.

You, who sought me for nine years,
in stories made up in front of your naked mirror
or walking through rooms of fog women,
you trying to forget the mother
who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door
as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss
through the keyhole,
you who wrote out your own birth
and built it with your own poems,
your own lumber, your own keyhole,
into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,
you, who fell into my words, years
before you fell into me (the other,
both the Camp Director and the camper),
you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams,
and calls and letters and once a luncheon,
and twice a reading by me for you.
But I wouldn't!

Yet this year,
yanking off all past years,
I took the bait
and was pulled upward, upward,
into the sky and was held by the sun--
the quick wonder of its yellow lap--
and became a woman who learned her own shin
and dug into her soul and found it full,
and you became a man who learned his won skin
and dug into his manhood, his humanhood
and found you were as real as a baker
or a seer
and we became a home,
up into the elbows of each other's soul,
without knowing--
an invisible purchase--
that inhabits our house forever.

We were
blessed by the House-Die
by the altar of the color T.V.
and somehow managed to make a tiny marriage,
a tiny marriage
called belief,
as in the child's belief in the tooth fairy,
so close to absolute,
so daft within a year or two.
The daisies have come
for the last time.
And I who have,
each year of my life,
spoken to the tooth fairy,
believing in her,
even when I was her,
am helpless to stop your daisies from dying,
although your voice cries into the telephone:
Marry me! Marry me!
and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight:
The love is in dark trouble!
The love is starting to die,
right now--
we are in the process of it.
The empty process of it.

I see two deaths,
and the two men plod toward the mortuary of my heart,
and though I willed one away in court today
and I whisper dreams and birthdays into the other,
they both die like waves breaking over me
and I am drowning a little,
but always swimming
among the pillows and stones of the breakwater.
And though your daisies are an unwanted death,
I wade through the smell of their cancer
and recognize the prognosis,
its cartful of loss--

I say now,
you gave what you could.
It was quite a ferris wheel to spin on!
and the dead city of my marriage
seems less important
than the fact that the daisies came weekly,
over and over,
likes kisses that can't stop themselves.

There sit two deaths on November 5th, 1973.
Let one be forgotten--
Bury it! Wall it up!
But let me not forget the man
of my child-like flowers
though he sinks into the fog of Lake Superior,
he remains, his fingers the marvel
of fourth of July sparklers,
his furious ice cream cones of licking,
remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth
when I sweat into the bathtub of his being.

For the rest that is left:
name it gentle,
as gentle as radishes inhabiting
their short life in the earth,
name it gentle,
gentle as old friends waving so long at the window,
or in the drive,
name it gentle as maple wings singing
themselves upon the pond outside,
as sensuous as the mother-yellow in the pond,
that night that it was ours,
when our bodies floated and bumped
in moon water and the cicadas
called out like tongues.

Let such as this
be resurrected in all men
whenever they mold their days and nights
as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine
and planted the seed that dives into my God
and will do so forever
no matter how often I sweep the floor.

Rest and Respite

A Clear Midnight
Walt Whitman

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson
done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the
themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

More Stars

Constellations
Steven Heighton

After bedtime the child climbed on her dresser
and peeled phosphorescent stars off the sloped
gable-wall, dimming the night vault of her ceiling
like a haze or the interfering glow
of a great city, small hands anticipating
eons as they raided the playful patterns
her father had mapped for her — black holes now
where the raised thumb-stubs and ears of the Bat
had been, the feet of the Turtle, wakeful
eyes of the Mourning Dove. She stuck those paper
stars on herself. One on each foot, the backs
of her hands, navel, tip of nose and so on,
then turned on the lamp by her bed and stood close
like a child chilled after a winter bath
pressed up to an air duct or a radiator
until those paper stars absorbed more light
than they could hold. Then turned off the lamp,
walked out into the dark hallway and called.

Her father came up. He heard her breathing
as he clomped upstairs preoccupied, wrenched
out of a rented film just now taking grip
on him and the child’s mother, his day-end
bottle of beer set carefully on the stairs,
marking the trail back down into that evening
adult world — he could hear her breathing (or
really, more an anxious, breathy giggle) but
couldn’t see her, then in the hallway stopped,
mind spinning to sort the apparition
of fireflies hovering ahead, till he sensed
his daughter and heard in her breathing
the pent, grave concentration of her pose,
mapped onto the star chart of the darkness,
arms stretched high, head back, one foot slightly raised —
the Dancer, he supposed, and all his love
spun to centre with crushing force, to find her
momentarily fixed, as unchanging
as he and her mother must seem to her,
and the way the stars are; as if the stars are.

Three for Sorrow

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
T’were profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.


§


Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.


§


Bone

Claudia Emerson

It was first dark when the plow turned it up.
Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-ruddled, nothing
but itself, the tendon's bored eye threading
a ponderous needle. And yet the pocked fist
of one end dared what was undone
in the strewing, defied the mouth of the hound
that dropped it.
The whippoorwill began
again its dusk-borne mourning. I had never
seen what urgent wing disembodied
the voice, would fail to recognize its broken
shell or shadow or its feathers strewn
before me. As if afraid of forgetting,
it repeated itself, mindlessly certain.
Here.
I threw the bone toward that incessant claiming,
and watched it turned by rote, end over end over end.

Another Triad

Three by Margaret Atwood:

Death of a Young Son by Drowning

He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth

on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.

His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water

and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes' thin glass bubbles

he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.

There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,

cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.

It was spring, the sun kept shining, the new grass
leapt to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.

After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.

I planted him in this country
like a flag.



Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age

I know I change
have changed

but whose is this vapid face
pitted and vast, rotund
suspended in empty paper
as though in a telescope

the granular moon

I rise from my chair
pulling against gravity
I turn away
and go out into the garden

I revolve among the vegetables,
my head ponderous
reflecting the sun
in shadows from the pocked ravines
cut in my cheeks, my eye-
sockets 2 craters

among the paths
I orbit
the apple trees
white white spinning
stars around me

I am being
eaten away by light



. . . and lastly, in fondish recollection of an ingrate of a snapper called Shylock:



Elegy for the Giant Tortoises

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon
the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:
everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation
upon the giant tortoises
withering finally on a remote island.

I concentrate in subway stations,
in parks, I can’t quite see them,
they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there;
already the event
like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize
plodding past me in a straggling line
awkward without water

their small heads pondering
from side to side, their useless armour
sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed
lumbering up the steps, under the archways
toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,
the relics of what we have destroyed,
our holy and obsolete symbols.

Uncompassed

67
Han Shan
translated by David Hinton

The cold in these mountains is ferocious,
has been every year since the beginning.

Crowded peaks locked in perennial snows,
recluse-dark forests breathing out mists,

grasses never sprout before the solstice
and leaves start falling in early August.

This confusion includes a lost guest now,
searching, searching—no sky to be seen.

Memories of Rest

Great Sleeps I Have Known
Robin Becker

Once in a cradle in Norway folded
like Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir
as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla

Once on a mountain in Taos after making love
in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver

After your brother walked into the Atlantic
to scatter your mothers ashes his khakis soaked
to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing

At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm
once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude

Immediately following lunch
against circadian rhythms, once
in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains

Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming
A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses

The last night in the Katmandu guest house
where I saw a bird fly from a monk's mouth
a consolidated sleep of East and West

Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick
I woke up singing
as in the apocryphal story of my birth
at Temple University Hospital

On the mesa with the burrowing owls
on the mesa with the prairie dogs

Willing to be lucky
I ran the perimeter road in my sleep
entrained to the cycles of light and dark
Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams

Once on the beach in New Jersey
after the turtles deposited their eggs
before my parents grew old, nocturnal

There are worse endings.

Requiem
Robert Louis Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

For my friends, without whom I would not be.

For Friendship
Robert Creeley

For friendship
make a chain that holds,
to be bound to
others, two by two,

a walk, a garland,
handed by hands
that cannot move
unless they hold.

The Things I Want Decided
Izumi Shikibu
translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani

Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things-
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?

SomeNow (not soon, but somenow)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Three by Jorie Graham

At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body
Jorie Graham

See how they hurry
to enter
their bodies,
these spirits.
Is it better, flesh,
that they

should hurry so?
From above
the green-winged angels
blare down
trumpets and light. But
they don't care,

they hurry to congregate,
they hurry
into speech, until
it's a marketplace,
it is humanity. But still
we wonder

in the chancel
of the dark cathedral,
is it better, back?
The artist
has tried to make it so: each tendon
they press

to re-enter
is perfect. But is it
perfection
they're after,
pulling themselves up
through the soil

into the weightedness, the color,
into the eye
of the painter? Outside
it is 1500,
all round the cathedral
streets hurry to open

through the wild
silver grasses...
The men and women
on the cathedral wall
do not know how,
having come this far,

to stop their
hurrying. They amble off
in groups, in
couples. Soon
some are clothed, there is
distance, there is

perspective. Standing below them
in the church
in Orvieto, how can we
tell them
to be stern and brazen
and slow,

that there is no
entrance,
only entering. They keep on
arriving,
wanting names,
wanting

happiness. In his studio
Luca Signorelli
in the name of God
and Science
and the believable
broke into the body

studying arrival.
But the wall
of the flesh
opens endlessly,
its vanishing point so deep
and receding

we have yet to find it,
to have it
stop us. So he cut
deeper,
graduating slowly
from the symbolic

to the beautiful. How far
is true?
When one son
died violently,
he had the body brought to him
and laid it

on the drawing-table,
and stood
at a certain distance
awaiting the best
possible light, the best depth
of day,

then with beauty and care
and technique
and judgment, cut into
shadow, cut
into bone and sinew and every
pocket

in which the cold light
pooled.
It took him days,
that deep
caress, cutting,
unfastening,

until his mind
could climb into
the open flesh and
mend itself.



The Geese

Today as I hang out the wash I see them again, a code
as urgent as elegant,
tapering with goals.
For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese

as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading.
Sometimes I fear their relevance.
Closest at hand,
between the lines,

the spiders imitate the paths the geese won't stray from,
imitate them endlessly to no avail:
things will not remain connected,
will not heal,

and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds

the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush,
as if, at any time, things could fall further apart
and nothing could help them
recover their meaning. And if these spiders had their way,

chainlink over the visible world,
would we be in or out? I turn to go back in.
There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling

without the sense that you are passing through one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,

your body an arrival
you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,

this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.



To A Friend Going Blind

Today, because I couldn't find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town's entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch. The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns. Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain, the built-in
limits. It's only as an afterthought she asks
and do you think it's beautiful?
Her measuring tapes hang down, corn-blond and endless,
from her neck.
When I look at her
I think Rapunzel,
how one could climb that measuring,
that love. But I was saying,
I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cashcrop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object,
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her. She puts it on.

All Roads Lead

The Street
Robert Pinsky

Streaked and fretted with effort, the thick
Vine of the world, red nervelets
Coiled at its tips.

All roads lead from it. All night
Wainwrights and upholsterers work finishing
The wheeled coffin

Of the dead favorite of the Emperor,
The child's corpse propped seated
On brocade, with yellow

Oiled curls, kohl on the stiff lids.
Slaves throw petals on the roadway
For the cortege, white

Languid flowers shooting from dark
Blisters on the vine, ramifying
Into streets. On mine,

Rockwell Avenue, it was embarassing:
Trouble--fights, the police, sickness--
Seemed never to come

For anyone when they were fully dressed.
It was always underwear or dirty pyjamas,
Unseemly stretches

Of skin showing through a torn housecoat.
Once a stranger drove off in a car
With somebody's wife,

And he ran after them in his undershirt
And threw his shoe at the car. It bounced
Into the street

Harmlessly, and we carried it back to him;
But the man had too much dignity
To put it back on,

So he held it and stood crying in the street:
"He's breaking up my home," he said,
"The son of a bitch

Bastard is breaking up my home." The street
Rose undulant in pavement-breaking coils
And the man rode it,

Still holding his shoe and stiffly upright
Like a trick rider in the circus parade
That came down the street

Each August. As the powerful dragonlike
Hump swelled he rose cursing and ready
To throw his shoe--woven

Angular as a twig into the fabulous
Rug or brocade with crowns and camels,
Leopards and rosettes,

All riding the vegetable wave of the street
>From the John Flock Mortuary Home
Down to the river.

It was a small place, and off the center,
But so much a place to itself, I felt
Like a young prince

Or aspirant squire. I knew that Ivanhoe
Was about race. The Saxons were Jews,
Or even Coloreds,

With their low-ceilinged, ubeleivably
Sour-smelling houses down by the docks.
Everything was written

Or woven, ivory and pink and emerald--
Nothing was too ugly or petty or terrible
To be weighed in the immense

Silver scales of the dead: the looming
Balances set right onto the live, dangerous
Gray bark of the street.

And Dazzled

Train Journey
Judith Wright

Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
I looked and saw under the moon's cold sheet
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;
and the small trees on their uncoloured slope
like poetry moved, articulate and sharp
and purposeful under the great dry flight of air,
under the crosswise currents of wind and star.
Clench down your strength, box-tree and ironbark.
Break with your violent root the virgin rock.
Draw from the flying dark its breath of dew
till the unliving come to life in you.
Be over the blind rock a skin of sense,
under the barren height a slender dance...
I woke and saw the dark small trees that burn
suddenly into flowers more lovely that the white moon.

Sometimes, Simplicity is Enough.

Three by William Carlos Williams

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

The Things That Speak Us

Scars
William Stafford

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

Live, Eternal

1933
Lynda Hull

Whole countries hover, oblivious on the edge
of history and in Cleveland the lake
already is dying. None of this matters
to my mother at seven, awakened from sleep

to follow her father through darkened rooms
downstairs to the restaurant emptied
of customers, chairs stacked and steam glazing
the window, through the kitchen bright with pans,

ropes of kielbasa, the tubs of creamy lard
that resemble, she thinks, ice cream.
At the tavern table her father's friends
talk rapidly to a man in a long gray coat,

in staccato French, Polish, harsh German.
Her mother stops her, holds her shoulders, and whispers
This is a famous man Remember his face.
Trotsky—a name like one of her mother's

fond, strange nouns. He looks like the man
who makes her laugh at Saturday matinées,
only tired. So tired. Her father pours the man
another drink of clear, bootleg gin, then turns

smiling to her. She has her own glass.
Peppermint schnapps that burns and makes her light,
cloudy so grown-ups forget her when she curls
on a bench and drifts then wakes and drifts again.

At the bar, her mother frowns, braids shining
round her head bent to the books, the columns
of figures in her bold hand and the smoke, voices
of men, a wash of syllables she sleeps upon

until her father wakes her to the empty room.
The men are gone. A draft of chill air lingers
in her father's hair, his rough shirt,
and together they walk the block to morning Mass.

Still dark and stars falter, then wink sharp
as shattered mirrors. Foghorns moan
and the church is cold. A few women in babushkas
kneel in the pews. Still dizzy, she follows

the priest's litanies for those who wait within
life's pale, for those departed, the shades humming
in the air, clustered thick as lake fog in the nave.
The priest elevates the wafer, a pale day moon

the spirit of God leafs through, then it's
a human face—her father's, the tired man's
and she is lost and turning through fragrant air.
Her lingers entwined make a steeple, but

all she sees is falling: the church collapsing
in shards, the great bell tolling, tolling.
1933 outside and some unwound mainspring has set
the world careening. The Jazz Age

ended years ago. Lean olive-skinned men
sport carnations and revolvers, and in the country
of her father, bankers in threadbare morning coats
wheel cartloads of currency to the bakeries

for a single loaf. The men who wait each night
outside the kitchen door have a look she's seen
in her father's eyes, although it's two years
until he turns his gentle hand against himself.

But now he touches her face. Her father stands
so straight, as if wearing a uniform he's proud of.
She watches him shape the sign of the cross.
She crosses forehead, lips, and breast, and believes,

for a moment, her father could cradle the world
in his palm. When they leave the church and its flickering
votive candles for market, it is dawn. The milkman's
wagon horse waits, patient at the curb, his breath

rosettes of steam rising to the sky that spills
like a pail of blue milk across morning. She prays
that God take care of the man in the gray coat,
that her father will live forever.

Hull, whose poem prays for a father's eternal life, died at the age of thirty-nine in a car accident in Massachusetts. She produced a body of work and received recognition in her time. Still, it is a sorrow that she did not have a longer life. There are many such sorrows, and many joys, and the world has need of poets who can sing them all beyond the span of one life's time.

Creed

First Do No Harm
Bob Hicok

While trying to extract a fly from a spider web,
I pulled one of its legs off.
There is the thought of small prosthetics, image
of a tiny hospital, tiny being too big a word
for the nano-this and micro-that, calipers
and scalpels and whats-its.
Once I grant soul, it’s hard to stop.
Does a carrot have any, and if any,more than cucumber
but less than squash?
Philosophy should lead to salad.
I was trying to help. By this phrase
we have watch fob, atomic bomb, the Red Cross, how often
does anyone believe otherwise, does anyone say,
I was trying to muck things up.
A limping fly.
Were I a Hindu, I’d say it was or will be me.
I like that as the name of a river:Wasorwillbe.
TheWasorwillbe flooded, hundreds were killed.
Six months later,
the best crop of wheat in a century.
I see a boat, a man asleep in the boat, his hand asleep
on the water, a fly asleep on his hand.

Waiting for the Call

If the Owl Calls Again
John Haines

at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it's not too cold,

I'll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.

We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.

And then we'll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,

while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.

And when the morning climbs
the limbs
we'll part without a sound,

fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.

Plain Extraordinary

In Celebration of Surviving
Chuck Miller

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

There are poems galore singing the joys of romance and other forms of love, delights sensual and spiritual, and other extremes and extravagances. As all too many people know, sometimes survival merits celebration in and of itself.

Everywhere, Now, Forever

the corgis of queen elizabeth
Diane Wald

the corgis of queen elizabeth
on wednesday september 10th 2003 i was visiting my friend larry
who is chronically ill
larry knows everything about the corgis
and queen elizabeth
who now has five or six corgis
who mill about her feet and the feet of her dressmakers
and all the kings and queens before elizabeth
and he knows what the corgis have for breakfast
and he knows that they get fresh vegetables not raw
and they get turkey
in little silver bowls
cut up in little cubes not slices
and queen elizabeth serves them their meals herself
she had a favorite corgi named daisy
whom she buried somewhere on the palace grounds
with a little corgi funeral
and i do not mean to make fun of that
because i am happy she loved her corgi
but let’s be clear it does not always mean
that a person who loves a different kind of creature
is totally good
as i understand hitler loved canaries
and not to compare her to hitler
but queen elizabeth also indulges in hunting
and we all know about those presidential dogs

while larry is talking i’m thinking this is very fascinating
but i’m also watching the digital clock
over his shoulder
which displays hours minutes weather wind velocity
and alerts you whenever the airport closes in boston
if there are disasters of any kind
this is a very special clock
that he bought with part of the money that he received
from his suit against the massachusetts bay transit authority
occasioned by a trolley driver closing the door of the trolley
on his already painful foot
as part of his affliction is a dreadful neuropathy
to which he rarely refers
although that trolley incident really pissed him off
because the driver could have easily seen his crutches

he tells me the corgis have their own bedroom
next to the bedroom of queen elizabeth and prince philip
yes the queen does sleep with the prince even now
except on the nights when he’s out very late
and comes home after she has retired
when politely he goes and sleeps on a special princely bed
right in his dressing room
the corgis however always sleep in their own room
just next to the queen’s own queenly bedroom
and recently when a man
was somehow able to break into the palace
and walk boldly into the queen’s suite of rooms
finding the queen cloaked and crowned in terrycloth
as she had just taken her queenly evening bath
and was carrying her gin tray and a big yellow towel
the queen was most relieved that the corgis were not able
to get out of their bedroom
because she feared that they would have used
their little diamond-sharp teeth
to shred the silly man like turkey
so loyal and so fierce (but so sweet) are those corgis

and while larry is telling me about the queen and the corgis
and throwing in a lot of extra information about prince charles
and camilla and how camilla and her father
actually have suites of rooms in one of the royal buildings
where diana’s sons now live
i cannot understand how this can be true
but larry swears it is
in any case all this amazing information pours out of larry
in a way that i never would have believed possible
since he is normally a rather circumspect fellow
and while i’m watching the airport clock
over his right shoulder
i’m watching over his left shoulder
his tiny television
which for some unknown reason he has set to show captions
for the hard of hearing
they are showing newly released tapes from al qaeda
showing pictures of osama bin laden
or someone made up to look like osama bin laden
walking up and down the hillsides
somewhere
looking a lot like a shepherd
from the old testament
and underneath the captions are reading
“is it osama?
is it not osama?”
there is an investigation to try to find out
whether the tape is real or a hoax
and whether the soundtrack (or what shows on larry’s tv
as italicized captions) was added to the tape after the video
was shot and i’m thinking
what difference does that make
it doesn’t mean that it isn’t really osama
or even that it isn’t really
a shepherd from the old testament

and perhaps it’s all happening in cleveland or barcelona or honolulu
and not in afghanistan or iraq or hollywood
or any of the places we’re always being conditioned to think
are the only places anything of significance ever happens
when really everything is happening right here
right here with the corgis and queen elizabeth and larry
and the trolley driver and the lawyer who handled larry’s case
and the democratic presidential candidates
and the people who are sitting out on their stoops
just the way people did fifty years ago
on washington street in jamaica plain
but it’s right here and not twenty years ago or five years from now and

everything’s happening right here
right here where you hear or read this and make up your mind
about it
right here and right now and not anywhere else forever

Beyond the Love

The Silence
for RJ
Philip Schultz

You always called late and drunk,
your voice luxurious with pain,
I, tightly wrapped in dreaming,
listening as if to a ghost.

Tonight a friend called to say your body
was found in your apartment, where
it had lain for days. You'd lost your job,
stopped writing, saw nobody for weeks.
Your heart, he said. Drink had destroyed you.

We met in a college town, first teaching jobs,
poems flowing from a grief we enshrined
with myth and alcohol. I envied the way
women looked at you, a bear blunt with rage,
tearing through an ever-darkening wood.

Once we traded poems like photos of women
whose beauty tested God's faith. 'Read this one
about how friendship among the young can't last,
it will rip your heart out of your chest!'

Once you called to say J was leaving,
the pain stuck in your throat like a razor blade.
A woman was calling me back to bed
so I said I'd call back. But I never did.

The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine
behind your stone house, you strumming
and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade,
as if each syllable tasted of blood,
as if you had all the time in the world. . .

You knew your angels loved you
but you also knew they would leave
someone they could not save.

What We Mourn

Spring and Fall
to a young child
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.