November 2011
30 posts
2 tags
Night Travel
by Esther Belin
I. I like to travel to L.A. by myself My trips to the crowded smoggy polluted by brown indigenous and immigrant haze are healing. I travel from one pollution to another. Being urban I return to where I came from My mother survives in L.A. Now for over forty years.
I drive to L.A. in the darkness of the day on the road before CHP one with the dark driving my black truck invisible...
2 tags
Offering
by Joshua Rivkin
”[…] But, when you tell me
to get lost, I’ll pull up the anchors send my rowboats out to sea, erase my name from your night Dictaphones, gather my clothes
balled-up like sleepy children, to stand on the other side, hang my fingers in metal lattice. If I’m an exile, let me be yours.”
2 tags
After All This
by Richard Jackson
After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point still sweeps away the darkness with the brush...
2 tags
At Baia
by Hilda Doolittle
I should have thought in a dream you would have brought some lovely, perilous thing, orchids piled in a great sheath, as who would say (in a dream) I send you this, who left the blue veins of your throat unkissed. Why was it that your hands (that never took mine), your hands that I could see drift over the orchid heads so carefully, your hands, so fragile, sure to...
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Another Poem of the Gifts
by Jorge Luis Borges
I want to give thanks to the divine Labyrinth of causes and effects For the diversity of beings That form this singular universe, For Reason, that will never give up its dream Of a map of the labyrinth, For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses, For love, which lets us see others As God sees them, For the solid diamond and the flowing water, For Algebra, a palace of...
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The Real Work
by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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Feast
by Todd Boss
—Let me taste the kitchen in your skin.
Now that company’s gone & the kids are tucked in, let the real feasting begin.
Let me lay you out on the bed like a spread of bone
china.—Yes, I want a piece of you. Yes, I do.
Give me your garlic, and the sting of your pepper.
The plenty of your hair (cinnamon, cardamom).
Here a hint of coffee, & there, in the cup of your...
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A Happy Birthday
by Ted Kooser
This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride this day down into night, to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
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The Duffel Bag
by David Harsent
”[…] you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash… So it’s into the crapper and out...
2 tags
Babble
by Bill Yarrow
We had a family copy of Isaac Babel’s stories out of which my dad would read aloud when he was home, which owing to his employment issues was very often. I had no idea what I was listening to, but that’s just another way to fail to define childhood, I guess. Anyway, the stories were short, some just a page, and I let my imagination sail away on some word that jumped out at me (one...
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Oranges
by Gary Soto
The first time I walked With a girl, I was twelve, Cold, and weighted down With two oranges in my jacket. December. Frost cracking Beneath my steps, my breath Before me, then gone, As I walked toward Her house, the one whose Porch light burned yellow Night and day, in any weather. A dog barked at me, until She came out pulling At her gloves, face bright With rouge. I smiled,...
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The Wood
by Charlotte Bronte
But two miles more, and then we rest! Well, there is still an hour of day, And long the brightness of the West Will light us on our devious way; Sit then, awhile, here in this wood— So total is the solitude, We safely may delay. These massive roots afford a seat, Which seems for weary travelers made. There rest. The air is soft and sweet ...
2 tags
The White Fires of Venus
by Denis Johnson
We mourn this senseless planet of regret, droughts, rust, rain, cadavers that can’t tell us, but I promise you one day the white fires of Venus shall rage: the dead, feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each of us will have his resurrected one to tell him, “Greetings. You will recover or die. The simple cure for everything is to destroy all the stethoscopes that...
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Burning Trash
by John Updike
At night—the light turned off, the filament Unburdened of its atom-eating charge, His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low To touch a swampy source—he thought of death. Her father’s hilltop home allowed him time To sense the nothing standing like a sheet Of speckless glass behind his human future. He had two comforts he could see, just two.
One was the cheerful fullness of...
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The Mortgaged Heart
by Carson McCullers
The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone, Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim The lover’s senses, the mortgaged heart.
Watch twice the orchard blossoms in gray rain And to the cold rose skies bring twin surprise. Endure each summons once, and once again; Experience multiplied by two—the duty recognized. Instruct the quivering spirit,...
2 tags
the joyful news of your arrest
by Alice Walker
this sunday morning everything is bringing tears. in church this morning not a church anyone from my childhood would recognize as church a brother singing ecstatic about the bigness of love and then this moment news of your arrest on the steps of the supreme court a place of intrigue and distrust; news of the illegal sign you carried that you probably made yourself: Poverty Is The...
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A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allen Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow — You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my...
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Sunday: Outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee
by James Agee
There, in the earliest and chary spring, the dogwood flowers. Unharnessed in the friendly sunday air By the red brambles, on the river bluffs, Clerks and their choices pair. Thrive by, not near, masked all away bay shrub and juniper, The ford v eight, racing the chevrolet. They can not trouble her: Her breasts, helped open from the afforded lace, Lie like a peaceful lake; And on his...
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Epistle
by William Saroyan
To the man this humble word: Great soul, I your voice have heard. If in fact I stand alone, My clamor will the wrong atone.
Before your own my voice is small: You sing, while my poor words must fall Like so much sodden clay or mud Into the rush of thought’s swift flood.
Yours is the flowing of the ancient soul. While mine is but the lisping of the mind. Yet if music the...
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Ambition
by Loren Goodman
When music moves away From dance, atrophy sets in. When poetry moves away From music, atrophy sets in. I want one of those Trophies.
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Too Simple for Words
by Nirmala
Truth is too simple for words; before thought gets tangled up in nouns and verbs, there is a wordless sound a deep breathless sigh of overwhelming relief to find the end of fiction in this ordinary yet extraordinary moment when words are recognized as words, and truth is recognized as everything else.
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gentle men of gentle books, know this
by Billy Childish
gentle men of gentle books know this:
forgive me my dear if my smile is cracked ive been at war these 30 years past
forgive me if i demand atack! demand atack!
but when you take up the axe it grows hard to let it down and in the end it cums easyer to make war than peace
forgive me that i find it hard to give easy to take war not love formed me
ive been at war these 30 years...
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What Parents Do Not Yet Know
by Kay Boyle
The tree that lingers at the window is just sixteen, And you, uneasy parents of its wanton ways, Eavesdrop upon the whispering of three-fingered leaves.
The pale pink squirrel who dances in the nude, Chattering of nuts, with eyes that see five ways, Is not related to the tree’s anomalies, nor grieves
That you, tormented guardian of bark and roots And leaves, must seek for...
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For the Young Who Want to
by Marge Piercy
Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting.
Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job.
Genius is what they know you had after the third volume of...
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Antenna-Forest
by Rolf Jacobsen
Up on the city’s roofs there are large fields. That’s where silence crept up to When there was no room for it on the streets. Now the forest comes in its turn. It needs to be where silence lives. Tree upon tree in strange groves. They don’t do very well, because the floor is too hard. So they make a sparse forest, one branch toward the east, And one toward the...
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The Fly
by William Blake
Little fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away.
Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?
For I dance And drink and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life And strength and breath, And the want Of thought is death,
Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.
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Before an Examination
by Stephen Vincent Benet
The little letters dance across the page, Flaunt and retire, and trick the tired eyes; Sick of the strain, the glaring light, I rise, Yawning and stretching, full of empty rage At the dull maunderings of a long dead sage, Fling up the windows, fling aside his lies Choosing to breathe, not stifle and be wise, And let the air pour in upon my cage.
The breeze blows cool,...
2 tags
"The Trial" (With and Without) Kafka
by Igor Ursenco
“you could have been in turn: the useless defense lawyer the optimist corpse in your own body the prosecutor with the wig greasy from trials marathon of conscience and the formal guilty murderer you could have anytime been: at the court the person suspect of caution the depressive witness and often the weapon confessing the crime […]”
2 tags
Sonnet
by Jack London
A Trumpet call, a bursting of the sod, And lo! I flung aside the clinging clay Lifted my flight along the star-strewn way Among the white-robed saints that fled to God. And he that held the gate, with holy nod, Did bid me enter that my feet might stray Amid the flowers with those that God obey; The just, the good, and pure on earth there trod.
Dear heart: I questioned him if thou...
2 tags
Mirabeau Bridge
by Guillaume Apollinaire
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away And lovers Must I be reminded Joy came always after pain
The night is a clock chiming The days go by not I
We’re face to face and hand in hand While under the bridges Of embrace expire Eternal tired tidal eyes
The night is a clock chiming The days go by not I
Love elapses like the river Love goes by Poor life is...
