April 2012
30 posts
3 tags
The Mermaid
by W.B. Yeats
A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.
3 tags
Swan and Shadow
by John Hollander
Dusk
Above the
water hang the
loud
flies
Here
O so
gray
then
What A pale signal will appear
When Soon before its shadow fades
Where Here in this pool of opened eye
In us No Upon us As at the very edges
...
3 tags
The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy
by Jeffrey McDaniel
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end
of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about
and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets,...
3 tags
Days End
by Alden Nowlan
for Anne
I have worked since daylight in the hayfields. We walked home at dusk, following the horses. For supper, I ate hot bread and spiced ham, onions and tomatoes. Now I kneel over a basin of cold water and a woman washes my hair — a strong woman whose knuckles rake my scalp. Her hands smell of soap, I am naked to the waist, she leans her weight against me; ...
3 tags
Tonight
by Andrea Gibson
Offer your body as a burning building without fire escapes.
I want to feel you like lifelines on the palms of Christ when the nails went through.
3 tags
Untitled
by Chou Nu Er
When I was young I’d never tasted sorrow, But I loved to climb the highest tower, but I loved to climb the highest tower, To sit and try and write of the taste of sadness. But now I have tasted sorrow, I would like to talk about it, but cannot, I would like to talk about it, but cannot. And so I only say “The day is cool, the autumn is fine.”
3 tags
I Cannot
by Anna Świrszczyńska
I envy you. Every moment You can leave me.
I cannot leave myself.
3 tags
Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive
by Raymond Chandler
Miss Margaret Mutch she raised her crutch With a wild Bostonian cry. “Though you went to Yale, your grammar is frail,” She snarled as she jabbed his eye. “Though you went to Princeton I never winced on Such a horrible relative clause! Though you went to Harvard no decent larva’d Accept your syntactical flaws. Taught not to drool at a Public School (With a capital P...
3 tags
A Little While
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A little while a little love The hour yet bears for thee and me Who have not drawn the veil to see If still our heaven be lit above. Thou merely, at the day’s last sigh, Hast felt thy soul prolong the tone; And I have heard the night-wind cry And deemed its speech mine own. A little while a little love The scattering autumn hoards for us Whose bower is not yet...
3 tags
The TV Is On the TV Is On the TV Is On the TV
by Matt Hart ”[…] so I look at it for eleven seconds trying to imagine the most honest way to tell you an orange, but then I realize that the most honest way has nothing to do with the imagination, at which point I realize that honesty isn’t the best policy, but also that that orange sure looks delicious […]”
3 tags
December 21st, 2002
by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
It’s said it takes seven years to grow completely new skin cells. To think, this year I will grow into a body you never will have touched.
3 tags
Dreams in War Time
by Amy Lowell
I. I wandered through a house of many rooms. It grew darker and darker, Until, at last, I could only find my way By passing my fingers along the wall. Suddenly my hand shot through an open window, And the thorn of a rose I could not see Pricked it so sharply That I cried aloud.
II. I dug a grave under an oak-tree. With infinite care, I stamped my spade Into the heavy grass. The...
3 tags
As I Walked Out One Evening
by W.H. Auden
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: ‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street,
...
3 tags
My God, It's Full of Stars
by Tracy K. Smith
In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001 When Dave is whisked into the center of space, Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid, Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off, Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent And vague, swirls in, and on and on….
In those last...
3 tags
What Women Deserve
by Sonya Renee Taylor
Culturally-diversified biracial girl with a small diamond nose ring and a pretty smile poses besides the words “Women Deserve Better”. and I almost let her non-threatening grin begin to infiltrate my psyche until I read the unlikely small print at the bottom of the ad: Sponsored by the US Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities and the Knights of Columbus On a bus in a...
3 tags
96 Vandam
by Gerald Stern
I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets; I am going to push it across three dark highways or coast along under 600,000 faint stars. I want to have it with me so I don’t have to beg for too much shelter from my weak and exhausted friends. I want to be as close as possible to my pillow in case a dream or a fantasy...
3 tags
Spring Comes to Ohio
by Joseph Campana
“The first gesture is despair because the snowdrops have fled and the cold came back anyway. You are far from your love and you will be nothing but the space between the hand and what it is accustomed to grasping […]”
3 tags
Holiness
by Oliver de la Paz
The first word in our catechism was “holy,” and we would march up the aisle, boys matched with girls, our hands folded while we soaked in grace from the blue light of stained glass. We were a river of blessings. I wanted to be “holy,” and I had practiced my prayers before a mirror until I looked like a statue or a ghost. No one could deny me this office and I walked with my...
3 tags
One Interpretation of Your Silence
by Bob Hicok
Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings. How I said a thing, how I held a lamp to the night. These should walk without us— words, the dark—is perhaps your view of existence. I can’t know,
you provide no puppet theater, no tumbling routine for me to engage in spirited discourse. That a face comes with every body, and a body with every name, makes it seem
like we’re the same...
3 tags
Moments Unnoticed
by Naed Rellek
moments unnoticed between words, thoughts, images, imaginations, angst and turmoil action yes, action to occupy to avoid to comfort ideas clung to, believed in, made important, obsessed about boundaries. look into the gaps, smile on the space between things. what is left when they are allowed to fall away?
3 tags
Scree
by Heidy Steidlmayer
I have seen the arrested shrub inform the crag with grief. Lichens crust the rocks with red. Thorns punctuate the leaf.
Sorrow is not a desert where one endures the other— but footing lost and halting step. And then another.
3 tags
A Broken Appointment
by Thomas Hardy
You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure loving kindness’ sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come. You love not me, And love alone can lend you loyalty; -I know and knew...
3 tags
Here's a Poem
by Susan Sherman
to the poets who die unknown who live their poems day by day bare the chaos of lost words Here’s to the poems that never get published that lie fallow in someone’s veins that burned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Vietnam New York City Portland, Maine Here’s to the poets in Nicaragua Cuba South Africa El Salvador in the southern countryside of all the Americas and in the northern...
3 tags
How Like an Island
by Heather Christie
How like an island we are in love encouraging moss & like an island we are barely moving Just to exist takes much concentration & like an island in love we have a house in our two imaginations & they intersect It strengthens the house & our feelings Unlike an island we wake up An island never sleeps That is its duty & ours to remain in love barely...
3 tags
Vision Test
by Patricia Kirkpatrick
”[…] The tumor pressed a lobe, charging the amygdala, emotional core of the self. In school they taught us that soil covers core and mantle; mythology explains creation and change. Now age drapes childhood; my hair, the incision. I see a light but forget to click. I didn’t remember dreams for a year. How I’ve changed may not be apparent.”
3 tags
Morning
by Frank O’Hara
I’ve got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet...
3 tags
How to Find the Underworld
by Traci Brimhall
Enter the serpent’s mouth, and sadness will walk in you like a pilgrim through the desert. The descent feels something like your devotion
to empty rooms, and something like a ladder. There are demons, of course, and stone owls on the entrance to frighten away crows.
If you go deep enough you will recognize the dead by their sins. Hornets and forsaken children attend...
3 tags
The Mower's Song
by Andrew Marvell
My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay, And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine, That not one blade of grass you spied, But had a flower on either side; When Juliana came,...
3 tags
XVII
by Adrienne Rich
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should...
3 tags
Small Wire
by Anne Sexton
My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web, as doth the vine, twiggy and wooden, hold up grapes like eyeballs, as many angels dance on the head of a pin.
God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love. As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be...
