February 2012
29 posts
3 tags
Tattoo
by Tod Davis
”[…] Language is the animal we’ve trained to pick up the scent of meaning. It’s why when the boy hears his father yelling at the door he sends the dog that he’s kept hungry, that he’s kicked, then loved, to attack the man, to show him that every word has a consequence, that language, when used right, hurts.”
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Abandonment Under the Walnut Tree
by D.A. Powell
Something seems to have gnawed that walnut leaf.
You face your wrinkles, daily, in the mirror. But the wrinkles are so slimming, they rather flatter.
Revel in the squat luck of that unhappy tree, who can’t take a mate from among the oaks or gums.
Ah, but if I could I would, the mirror version says, because he speaks to you. He is your truer self all dopey in the glass. He...
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Transcendental
by Geoff Page
Transcendental, she said. Bells and sandals. Unpersuaded, I weather a three day stay and set her on the bus then walk back through the frost-clear streets of Sunday morning. Young trees, clean-limbed and straight from concrete, rise to catch the sun. In the city square is nothing else but slanting light and the trees that hold it; and the only sound, the cries of seagulls, sailing...
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Demeter, Waiting
by Rita Dove
No. Who can bear it. Only someone who hates herself, who believes to pull a hand back from a daughter’s cheek is to put love into her pocket— like one of those ashen Christian philosophers, or a war-bound soldier. She is gone again and I will not bear it. I will drag my grief through a winter of my own making, refuse any meadow that recycles itself into hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry...
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The Parakeets
by Alberto Blanco
They talk all day and when it starts to get dark they lower their voices to converse with their own shadows and with the silence.
They are like everybody —the parakeets— all day chatter, and at night bad dreams.
With their gold rings on their clever faces, brilliant feathers and the heart restless with speech…
They are like everybody, —the parakeets— the ones that talk...
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Visiting the Graveyard
by Mary Oliver
When I think of death it is a bright enough city, and every year more faces there are familiar but not a single one notices me, though I long for it, and when they talk together, which they do very quietly, it’s in an unknowable language - I can catch the tone but understand not a single word - and when I open my eyes there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees. There are the...
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Her Voice
by Oscar Wilde
The wild bee reels from bough to bough With his furry coat and his gauzy wing. Now in a lily-cup, and now Setting a jacinth bell a-swing, In his wandering; Sit closer love: it was here I trow I made that vow,
Swore that two lives should be like one As long as the sea-gull loved the sea, As long as the sunflower sought the sun,— It shall be, I said, for eternity ‘Twixt...
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Topography
by Sharon Olds
After you flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time...
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My Life in Robes
by Leonard Cohen
After a while You can’t tell If it’s missing A woman Or needing A cigarette And later on If it’s night Or day Then suddenly You know The time You get dressed You go home You light up You get married
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Quasar (Future Biology)
by Theodoros Chiotis
We will have become ourselves yet no one will recognize us: the future will carve itself in stone in its attempt to steal our form on the day we return from the cities in the centre of the world. In this boundless space we will pick spots where there will be no reflection– sticker ads will seal off the fractures where the cities join with one another; we will have become...
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A Few Words About My Wife
by Vladimir Mayakovsky
I have married the moon and she combs the water, the beaches of uncharted seas. She’s my lunar lady, she has long red hair and she drives a herd of horses through a screaming streak of stars! She gets married every evening in a greasy garage and she kisses all the pictures on the newspaper stands. Her pretty boy winks, he wraps the Milky Way around her, he gets glitter on...
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A Letter to the Playground Bully, from Andrea (Age...
by Andrea Gibson
maybe there are cartwheels in your mouth maybe your words will grow up to be a gymnast maybe you have been kicking people with them by accident
I know some people get a whole lot of rocking in the rocking chair and the ones who don’t sometimes get rocks in their voice boxes, and their voice boxes become slingshots. maybe you think my heart looks like a baby squirrel.
but you...
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The Listeners
by Walter de la Mare
“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grass Of the forest’s ferny floor; And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; “Is there anybody there?” he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No...
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For Example, a Flower
by Arkaye Kierulf
We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves. The earth’s roots and brown-black blood are busy covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves. Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands washes off the streets to the gutters death’s thick surprise. The automatic shutter of the eye never fails, the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of...
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Antilamentation
by Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your...
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Sonnet II
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
But only three in all God’s universe Have heard this word thou hast said,—Himself, beside Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied One of us…that was God,…and laid the curse So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce My sight from seeing thee,—-that if I had died, The deathweights, placed there, would have signified Less absolute...
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47th Birthday
by Alice Notley
Exactly the color of a grey tear the sky is still trees a torn yellow color and black leftover dahlias maybe or mum not to look at… Inside there is the delicate frame of a three-month-old fetus perlite skeletons of Siamese twins inside there the meek dead and deormed have been adequately investigated.
I have a self in my own hollow face a seeing that floats within my bones...
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Instrument
by Clay Matthews
”[…] Bless this mess you have made, O Lord. We’ve been practicing praying lately at dinner, careful not to ask for things (although we ask for things inside)—I’m trying to be more thankful, more blesséd than beast, I’m trying to come to terms with my place in the world, my feet in the soil, the grass of Tennessee rising up through my toes and I’m trying not to...
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Address to the Moon
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
How sweet the silver Moon’s pale ray, Falls trembling on the distant bay, O’er which the breezes sigh no more, Nor billows lash the sounding shore. Say, do the eyes of those I love, Behold thee as thou soar’st above, Lonely, majestic and serene, The calm and placid evening’s Queen? Say, if upon thy peaceful breast, Departed...
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The New Old Dress
by Heather Groot
Someone could have died in that Peeled from a corpse Hung on a rack or An ill-fitted gift Tags already torn Could not take back Never worn or Perhaps she got fat Ditched it before she knew it would fit again after the baby was born or He fell in love with a girl in a blue sundress and she couldn’t bear the sight of it after he left Maybe A memory stays caught in the cloth to...
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A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami,...
by Donald Justice
Risen from rented rooms, old ghosts Come back to haunt our parks by day, They crept up Fifth Street through the crowd, Unseeing and almost unseen, Halting before the shops for breath, Still proud, pretending to admire The fat hens dressed and hung for flies There, or perhaps the lone, dead fern Dressing the window of a small Hotel. Winter had blown them south— How many?...
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Weaponry
by Kim Addonizio
”[…] The mammals were easier—
a bucket of water for submerging the cat, a poisoned word thrown to the dog.
For love, only a kitchen match […]”
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My Love for You Is So Embarrassingly
by Todd Boss
grand…would you mind terribly, my groundling, if I compared it to the Hindenburg (I mean, before it burned)—that vulnerable, elephantine
dream of transport, a fabric Titanic on an ocean of air? There: with binoculars, dear, you can just make me out, in a gondola window, wildly
flapping both arms as the ship’s shadow moves like a vagrant country across the country where you...
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Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith
Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around. And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was...
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The Song of Wandering Aengus
by William Butler Yeats
I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire aflame, But something rustled on the floor,...
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If
by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can...
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The Highwayman
by Alfred Noyes
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding— Riding—riding— The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin, A coat of the...
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Sonnet II
by William Shakespeare
When forty winters shall beseige thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held: Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies, Where all the treasure of thy lusty days, To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes, Were an all-eating shame and thriftless...
5 tags
Matins I
by Louise Glück
The sun shines; by the mailbox, leaves of the divided birch tree folded, pleated like fins. Underneath, hollow stems of the white daffodils, Ice Wings, Cantatrice; dark leaves of the wild violet. Noah says depressives hate the spring, imbalance between the inner and the outer world. I make another case—being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately attached to the living...
