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Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it— the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly like a book an old love sent with an inscription in his hand, whatever it meant, After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . . —the script of it like the way my self felt learning German words by chance—Mitgefühl, Unheimlichkeit—and the trailing off that happened because I knew only the feelings, abstract and international, like ghosts or connotations lacking a grammar, a place to go: this was the way my self felt when it started falling apart: each piece of it clipped from a garden vaguely remembered by somebody unrecognizable— such a strange bouquet that somebody sent to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.

Deirdre O'Connor

Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Reading & Books

The Age of Dinosaurs

There are, of course, theories about the wide-eyed, drop-jawed fascination children have for them, about how, before he's learned his own phone number or address, a five-year-old can carry like a few small stones the Latin tonnage of those names, the prefixes and preferences for leaf or meat. My son recites the syllables I stumble over now, sets up figures as I did years ago in his prehistory. Here is the green ski slope of a brontosaur's back, there a triceratops in full gladiator gear. From the arm of a chair a pterodactyl surveys the dark primeval carpet. Each has disappeared from time to time, excavated finally from beneath a cabinet or the sofa cushions, only to be buried again among its kind in the deep toy chest, the closed lid snug as earth. The next time they're brought out to roam the living room another bone's been found somewhere, a tooth or fragment of an eggshell dusted off, brushing away some long-held notion about their life-span or intelligence, warm blood or cold. On the floor they face off as if debating the latest find, what part of which one of them has been discovered this time. Or else they stand abreast in one long row, side by scaly side, waiting to fall like dominoes, my son's tossed tennis ball a neon yellow asteroid, his shadow a dark cloud when he stands, his fervor for them cooling so slowly he can't feel it— the speed of glaciers, maybe, how one age slides into the next.

James Scruton

Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Philosophy

Torcello

Offshore, the Apocalypse stays contained to one island and its church. Venice's ruler's out wedding himself to the ocean while I'm ankle deep in the Adriatic, eyes raised to a book unencumbered by words: A Bible that reads from East to West. Guidebooks want only to see it as ceiling—the Basilica San Marco, where Christ's hands open on wounds embedded with rubies, and priests hold back the sea with brooms. I'm taking on incense, bowing at altars dragged out of Constantinople, sloshing across marble sacked from Jerusalem. Offshore, the sea's a bride bought with a fist full of diamonds the Doge throws into the deep— a sign of his true and perpetual dominion. Then why does walking into this church mean stepping into the ocean? The sea is a dog— Priests throw in bones just to placate it. The year's nearly 2000, but the millennium already hit once on the island Torcello, a kind of plague the Venetians contained. 999 years, and the dead still crawl from dirt towards their radiant bodies, they still gather up missing limbs: arms, legs, hands sharks and beasts keep regurgitating. We do what we know— But Christ never wanted to manage resurrections in Venice. Underdressed in the flesh from dead civilizations, he moves among us in Byzantine skin. I'm getting close to this God worshiped only by tourists. He picks at the wounds on his crucified body, the injury scabbed over with jewels.

Catherine Sasanov

Religion,Christianity,Faith & Doubt,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

In Time

As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them—I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect machine from 1948, at the latest, and made of shining plastic with the numbers sharp and clear and slightly magnified in that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely small and yet his tiny brain alert for he is the one who will crow and not that broken buzzing relic, though time is different now and dawn is different too, you were up all night and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting to see what direction you should face and if you were born in time or was it wasted and what the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.

Gerald Stern

How We Made a New Art on Old Ground

A famous battle happened in this valley. You never understood the nature poem. Till now. Till this moment—if these statements seem separate, unrelated, follow this silence to its edge and you will hear the history of air: the crispness of a fern or the upward cut and turn around of a fieldfare or thrush written on it. The other history is silent: The estuary is over there. The issue was decided here: Two kings prepared to give no quarter. Then one king and one dead tradition. Now the humid dusk, the old wounds wait for language, for a different truth: When you see the silk of the willow and the wider edge of the river turn and grow dark and then darker, then you will know that the nature poem is not the action nor its end: it is this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet, on the steering wheel shaft: it is an aftermath, an overlay and even in its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen And as I write valley straw, metal blood, oaths, armour are unwritten. Silence spreads slowly from these words to those ilex trees half in, half out of shadows falling on the shallow ford of the south bank beside Yellow Island as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion begins to be complete: what we see is what the poem says: evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and whin bushes and a change of weather about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are for this moment free of one another.

Eavan Boland

Arts & Sciences,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

My Century

The year I was born the atomic bomb went off. Here I'd just begun, and someone found the switch to turn off the world. In the furnace-light, in the central solar fire of that heat lamp, the future got very finite, and it was possible to imagine time-travelers failing to arrive, because there was no future. Inside the great dark clock in the hall, heavy brass cylinders descended. Tick-tock, the chimes changed their tune one phrase at a time. The bomb became a film star, its glamorous globe of smoke searing the faces of men in beach chairs. Someone threw up every day at school. No time to worry about collective death, when life itself was permeated by ordeals. And so we grew up, beneath an umbrella of acceptance. In bio we learned there were particles cruising through us like whales through archipelagoes, and in civics that if Hitler had gotten the bomb he'd have used it on the inferior races, and all this time love was etching its scars on our skins like maps. The heavens remained pure, except for little white slits on the perfect blue skin that planes cut in the icy upper air, like needles sewing. From one, a tiny seed might fall that would make a sun on earth. And so the century passed, with me still in it, books waiting on the shelves to become cinders, what we felt locked up inside, waiting to be read, down the long corridor of time. I was born the year the bomb exploded. Twice whole cities were charred like cities in the Bible, but we didn't look back. We went on thinking we could go on, our shapes the same, darkened now against a background lit by fire. Forgive me for doubting you're there, Citizens, on your holodecks with earth wallpaper— a shadow-toned ancestor with poorly pressed pants, protected like a child from knowing the future.

Alan Feldman

Living,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Market Forecast

Adjectives continue their downward spiral, with adverbs likely to follow. Wisdom, grace, and beauty can be had three for a dollar, as they head for a recession. Diaphanous, filigree, pearlescent, and love are now available at wholesale prices. Verbs are still blue-chip investments, but not many are willing to sell. The image market is still strong, but only for those rated AA or higher. Beware of cheap imitations sold by the side of the road. Only the most conservative consider rhyme a good option, but its success in certain circles warrants a brief mention. The ongoing search for fresh metaphor has caused concern among environmental activists, who warn that both the moon and the sea have measurably diminished since the dawn of the Romantic era. Latter-day prosodists are having to settle for menial positions in poultry plants, where an aptitude for repetitive rhythms is considered a valuable trait. The outlook for the future remains uncertain, and troubled times may lie ahead. Supply will continue to outpace demand, and the best of the lot will remain unread.

Alexa Selph

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

[Over a Cup of Coffee]

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or walking the dog, he would recall some incident from his youth—nothing significant—climbing a tree in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's swing, sitting in a parked car with a girl whose face he no longer remembered, his hand on her breast and his body electric; memories to look at with curiosity, the harmless behavior of a stranger, with nothing to regret or elicit particular joy. And although he had no sense of being on a journey, such memories made him realize how far he had traveled, which, in turn, made him ask how he would look back on the person he was now, this person who seemed so substantial. These images, it was like looking at a book of old photographs, recognizing a forehead, the narrow chin, and perhaps recalling the story of an older second cousin, how he had left long ago to try his luck in Argentina or Australia. And he saw that he was becoming like such a person, that the day might arrive when he would look back on his present self as on a distant relative who had drifted off into uncharted lands.

Stephen Dobyns

Living,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Philosophy

Christmas Tree Lots

Christmas trees lined like war refugees, a fallen army made to stand in their greens. Cut down at the foot, on their last leg, they pull themselves up, arms raised. We drop them like wood; tied, they are driven through the streets, dragged through the door, cornered in a room, given a single blanket, only water to drink, surrounded by joy. Forced to wear a gaudy gold star, to surrender their pride, they do their best to look alive.

Chris Green

Nature,Winter,Religion,Christianity,Christmas

To Luck

In the cards and at the bend in the road we never saw you in the womb and in the crossfire in the numbers whatever you had your hand in which was everything we were told never to put our faith in you to bow to you humbly after all because in the end there was nothing else we could do but not to believe in you still we might coax you with pebbles kept warm in the hand or coins or the relics of vanished animals observances rituals not binding upon you who make no promises we might do such things only not to neglect you and risk your disfavor oh you who are never the same who are secret as the day when it comes you whom we explain as often as we can without understanding

W. S. Merwin

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

My Dog Practices Geometry

I do not understand the poets who tell me that I should not personify. Every morning the willow auditions for a new role outside my bedroom window—today she is Clytemnestra; yesterday a Southern Belle, lost in her own melodrama, sinking on her skirts. Nor do I like the mathematicians who tell me I cannot say, "The zinnias are counting on their fingers," or "The dog is practicing her geometry," even though every day I watch her using the yard's big maple as the apex of a triangle from which she bisects the circumference of the lawn until she finds the place where the rabbit has escaped, or the squirrel upped the ante by climbing into a new Euclidian plane. She stumbles across the lawn, eyes pulling her feet along, gaze fixed on a rodent working the maze of the oak as if it were his own invention, her feet tangling in the roots of trees, and tripping, yes, even over themselves, until I go out to assist, by pointing at the squirrel, and repeating, "There! There!" But instead of following my outstretched arm to the crown of the tree, where the animal is now lounging under a canopy of leaves, catching its breath, charting its next escape, she looks to my mouth, eager to read my lips, confident that I—who can bring her home from across the field with a word, who can speak for the willow and the zinnia— can surely charm a squirrel down from a tree.

Cathryn Essinger

Relationships,Pets,Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Dignity of Ushers

Their authority did not unfold from ironed white shirts and thin ties or from the funereal seriousness that struck their acne-splashed faces but because they stood heir to our native faith in light. So we followed the thin white waver of beams they pointed down aisles to seats we never thought of refusing. It was the first job I wanted, especially after birthday outings far from home showed me the glowing outfits worn by big-city ushers, their get-ups a blend of doorman and military dictator, as gaudy and fine as the plots of movies my Saturdays were swallowed by. None of us knew, as they took us into the artificial light of the cinema, that they walked the path of the pin setter, the blacksmith or elevator operator, professions reduced to curiosity by wandering time. Only in the quick steps of floor salesmen, the slim backs of hostesses bringing us to our tables, do they remain, the artful flutters of their flashlights lost in dark we are left to find our own way through.

Al Maginnes

Living,Time & Brevity,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Class,Popular Culture

Tenderness and Rot

Tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over. No lessons can be drawn from this however. One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting. It is important to stay sweet and loving.

Kay Ryan

Love,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Three Poets

1. THE PLAGIARIST Careless of his debts, he never credits submissions to the magazine he edits. 2. THE TAXIDERMIST Her father's dead at last, the lout— but now he's all she writes about. 3. THE ASSASSIN His verse means less to the world of letters than the bad reviews he gives his betters.

Robert West

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets

Cleaning an Attic

The day had finally come when everything there seemed misplaced or out of place as an ex's box of things. The unused beside the irreplaceable, the easy- to-assemble uncomplicated now by disuse. Some hand of randomness leaving behind its lampshades stained like ancient maps, its ladders still climbing upward, and enough old tools to restart a world. Every drawer filled with the other half of things. Everything care embraced, and held once as new, left too ragged for another winter to wear. Its ring of keys dangling by a nail for rooms left long ago. And whatever I said I'd never forget found, just as it seemed completely forgot—all its letters beginning with Dear....

Brent Pallas

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Activities,Indoor Activities,Relationships,Home Life

Unusually Warm March Day, Leading to Storms

Everything is half here, like the marble head of the Roman emperor and the lean torso of his favorite. The way the funnel cloud which doesn't seem to touch ground does— flips a few cars, a semi— we learn to walk miles above our bodies. The pig farms dissolve, then the small hills. As in dreams fraught with irrevocable gestures, the ruined set seems larger, a charred palace the gaze tunnels through and through. How well we remember the stage— the actors gliding about like petite sails, the balustrade cooling our palms. Not wings or singing, but a darkness fast as blood. It ended at our fingertips: the fence gave way to the forest. The world began.

Francesca Abbate

Nature,Weather

Thought

To George Herbert Aspiration's breath, millennial trance, two-pointed ladder propped in a void; busy buzzard claws, verbs on a leash, slow blush of brain damage on a plate. Stunned journey of dust. A holey sock. Grind of an afternoon's axles, abandoned juggernaut in a field; inhabited interval with a pencil stub, curved strips of silence: postbox for the inner ear. Tarantula's footstep, a weight of light: inadvertent sky in the skull. Wishbone couture: promiscuous secret, peepshow in the street. Paraphrase of planets. Ocean in a tablespoon. Ordinary in the ordinary: nothing come of anything, matter unpossessed.

Thomas Pfau

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets

Bel Canto

The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp, And salty light reveals the Mayan School. The Irish hope their names are on the harp, We see the sheep's advertisement for wool, Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp, From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule. Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again. Fateful connections that we make to things Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives! How sidewise news of light from darkness springs, How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives And make the honey while the queen bee sings Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives— How long ago I saw the misted pine trees And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry! Stendhal, at fifty, gazing as it happened On Rome from the Janiculum, decided That one way he could give his life a stipend Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter And get to know himself. Here he had ripened Accomplished, loved, and lived, was a great writer But never had explored in true detail His childhood and his growing up. So he set sail Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard But in five hundred pages scarcely got Beyond his seventeenth year, for it is hard To take into account what happens here And fit it all onto an index card. Even one moment of it is too hot, Complex and cannibalistically connected To every other, which is what might be expected. Sterne's hero has a greater problem, never Getting much past his birth. I've had a third one. My autobiography, if I should ever Start out to write it, quickly seems a burden An I-will-do-that-the-next-time endeavor. Whatever life I do write's an absurd one As if some crazy person with a knife Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life. In any case a life that's hardly possible In the conditions that we really live in, Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible Mountainy places where love is a given And misery, if there, infinitesimal, Are quite the norm. Here none by pain is driven That is not curable by the romanza That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza. Whatever, then, I see at this late stage of My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant Of that great book I've strained to write one page of Yet always hoping my page was significant. Be it or not, for me and for the ages I leave it as it is. Yet as a figurant Who has not stopped, I'm writing in addition More lines to clarify my present disposition. One person in a million finds out something Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge. Newton, Copernicus, Einstein are cunning. The rest of us just rise and go to college With no more hope to come home with the bunting Than a stray dachshund going through the village. However, what a treat our small successes Of present and of past, at various addresses! To be in all those places where I tarried Too little or too late or bright and early To love again the first woman I married To marvel at such things as melancholy, Sophistication, drums, a baby carriage, A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully— How my desire when young to be a poet Made me attentive and oblivious every moment! Do you remember Oceanview the Fair? The heights above the river? The canoes? The place we beached them and the grass was bare? Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce? The crooked line of pantry shelves, with pear And cherry jam? And Pancho, with his noose? Do you remember Full and Half and Empty? Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry? Do you remember thought, and talking plainly? Michel and I went walking after Chartres Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly By giving us an insight into Barthes. Michel said he was capable of feigning Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part, Like this cathedral's artificial forces That press a kind of artless thought into our faces. And yet— The moor is dark beneath the moon. The porcupine turns over on its belly And new conceptions rap at the cocoon. Civilization, dealing with us fairly, For once, releases its Erectheion Of understanding, which consoles us, nearly. Later we study certain characteristics That may give us a better chance with the statistics. How much I'd like to live the whole thing over, But making some corrections as I go! To be a better husband and a father, Be with my babies on a sled in snow. By twenty I'd have understood my mother And by compassion found a way to know What separates the what-I-started-out-as From what-I-sometimes-wished-I-was-when-in-the-mountains. To be once more the one who what was worthy Of courtship courted—it was quite as stressful As trying to, er, as they say, give birth to A poem and as often unsuccessful, But it was nice to be sublime and flirty With radiant girls, and, in some strange way, restful. I could be everything I wasn't usually— And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually! In poems the same problem or a similar. Desire of course not only to do old things But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors And of the melancholy finch be co-finch In singing songs with such a broad parameter That seamstresses would stare, forget to sew things, Astronauts quit the sky, athletes the stadium To hear them, and the rest of what they hear be tedium. Such wild desires, I think it's recognizable Are part and parcel of the Human Image And in a way, I'd say, no less predictable Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach. Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible, All pre-determined, what about the language That teases me each morning with its leanings Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings? Are you, O particles, O atoms, nominatives Like Percevals and Stendhals, set in motion By some Ordaining Will that is definitive? Is this invading chill and high emotion, This tendency to know one is regenerative, Is this, all, tidal take-home like the ocean? Be what you may, my thanks for your society Through the long life I've had, your jokes and your variety, The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature That I can live with, and the strength you've shared with me In arms and legs—and for your part in literature, What can I say? It is as if life stared at me And kissed my lips and left it as a signature. Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me For love itself, and friendship, its co-agent. Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.

Kenneth Koch

Living,Growing Old,Relationships,Home Life,Religion,God & the Divine,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Candles

If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra To honor the memory of someone who never met her, A man who may have come to the town she lived in Looking for work and never found it. Picture him taking a stroll one morning, After a month of grief with the want ads, To refresh himself in the park before moving on. Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother, Then still a girl, will be destined to step on When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic If he doesn't stoop down and scoop the mess up With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can. For you to burn a candle for him You needn't suppose the cut would be a deep one, Just deep enough to keep her at home The night of the hay ride when she meets Helen, Who is soon to become her dearest friend, Whose brother George, thirty years later, Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store Doesn't go under in the Great Depression And his son, your father, is able to stay in school Where his love of learning is fanned into flames, A love he labors, later, to kindle in you. How grateful you are for your father's efforts Is shown by the candles you've burned for him. But today, for a change, why not a candle For the man whose name is unknown to you? Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home With friends and family or alone on the road, On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside And hold his hand, the very hand It's time for you to imagine holding.

Carl Dennis

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Men & Women

Arrowhead Hunting

The land is full of what was lost. What's hidden Rises to the surface after rain In new-ploughed fields, and fields stubbled again: The clay shards, foot and lip, that heaped the midden, And here and there a blade or flakes of blade, A patient art, knapped from a core of flint, Most broken, few as coins new from the mint, Perfect, shot through time as through a glade. You cannot help but think how they were lost: The quarry, fletched shaft in its flank, the blood Whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood, Not just the meat, but what the weapon cost— O hapless hunter, though your aim was true— The wounded hart, spooked, fleeting in its fear— And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

A. E. Stallings

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Nomadology

In the beginning, a word, move; then a plan and then the reasons, which I do not remember exactly. I remember clearly only the clothes we were given for the journey and the last, silent meal we ate. We left the place as lightly as we had come, so many years before. From a sunlit state of innocence where white sheets were hung to dry like clouds over paradise; from eucalyptus-scented earth, a red house with a yard swung between dreaming hills, pillaged by raccoons, framed with lilies like trumpets of the archangels, we moved: into history, a river slowed by many bends, a village of peacocks with a hundred eyes; a low house among fields, with an iron stove, a winter shrine; a fireplace blackened by time, the fragile bones of a sparrow frozen in the shape of its flight. When father played his trombone in the attic, schoolchildren tittered in the street. In the late afternoon, the cows assembled at the gate, witless, waiting for a farmer's son. Home, the children conjugated verbs, found variables and drew diagrams of the human heart. Evenings, the round kitchen table, lit by a low Dutch lamp, summoned poets, players, horsethieves, to glasses of jenever. An incense of gossip rose slowly, blackening the walls. Outside, horses pawed the darkness, breathing delicate feathers of ice. We courted the favors of spiders, mice and moles. Our words grew small and porous as fossiled bones, our gestures groaned with the cold. The will-less world of water, wood and stone taught us when to yield. When it came time to move along again, we were four strangers waving at each other, in slow motion, across a deafening expanse of ocean.

Alissa Leigh

Living,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Philosophy

Casanova's Bossa Nova

The dance shoes, seduction and coercion, owned by male feet, roam floors that beg for chandeliers. In search of flat-footed beauty and a bed, where ever they might be, the handsome conversation attracts female followers trading on the smiles of curves. The next steps are dizzying and leave dresses dipped and hung over with a purse and heart opened at their tops. The wallflowers can't say when the tango with the rag doll began, but witnesses toasted a conga line of would-be brides that transcend a retirement community in Florida, each giving up their precious moments on Earth to fandango's flimflam.

Rich Murphy

Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Theater & Dance

Dear Mr. Merrill

I hope you'll pardon the informality of this letter, postmarked Olympia (Greece, not Washington), its task not simple: crossing lines you've crossed, time, mortality, to find you, who spent a lifetime crossing lines out, twisting, polishing them to shine cool and lustrous as the statue I fell in love with yesterday. I'm sure you saw him too, that perfect Hermes by Praxitelis, full lips, hips contrapposto. I wished to draw him down, latter-day Pygmalion, and embrace him. Or barring Eros (and the guards) I'd trace his face, the supple muscle of the marble. I had a student who resembled him— yes, Angelos—arrogant and beautiful. I never touched him though he touches me in dreams. Eros dangles his perfection in our faces like one-armed Hermes with his promise of the grapes. I was certain I'd dream of him last night. Instead I dreamed another in the growing chain of others with whom it ended not quite right. But the thirst was perfect, if its price pain and shattered crystal, spilling wine, all part and parcel of our imperfect lives. Then Art startles out of heartache, marble or page. You learned this long ago. Now I too see the wildest things require the strongest cages, the panther's double bars, or the seeds, bloodysweet and bitter, in the pomegranate's rind. Love held tight in a sonnet.

Moira Egan

Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture,Poetry & Poets,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

Memorial Service

Forgiving the living is hard enough, shrugging away all the wounds delivered with kisses and curses, the thousand and one petty slights that bled me to an albino shade, that shadow me even in dreams. But the dead are altogether another matter, not easily to be enlightened and quite beyond regretting anything (as far as we can tell) and most likely indifferent to our common currency of tears. And so it is that pissing on your grave doesn't please me as much as it ought to. Now that you have passed beyond all blaming and shaming, what can I do but rise and proclaim sincere admiration when my turn comes around to speak?

George Garrett

Living,Death,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire

Body and Soul

They grow up together but they aren't even fraternal twins, they quarrel a lot about where to go and what to do, the body complains about having to carry the soul everywhere as if it were some helpless cripple, and the soul snipes that it can go places the body never dreamed of, then they quarrel over which one of them does the dreaming, but the truth is, they can't live without each other and they both know it, anima, animosity, the diaphragm pumps like a bellows and the soul pulls out all the stops— sings at the top of its lungs, laughs at its little jokes, it would like to think it has the upper hand and can leave whenever it wants— but only as long as it knows the door will be unlocked when it sneaks back home before the sun comes up, and when the body says where have you been, the soul says, with a smirk, I was at the end of my tether

Sharon Bryan

Living,The Body,Nature

Subject to Change

A reflection on my students They are so beautiful, and so very young they seem almost to glitter with perfection, these creatures that I briefly move among. I never get to stay with them for long, but even so, I view them with affection: they are so beautiful, and so very young. Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung, they're expert in the art of introspection, these creatures that I briefly move among— And if their words don't quite trip off the tongue consistently, with just the right inflection, they remain beautiful. And very young. Still, I have to tell myself it's wrong to think of them as anything but fiction, these creatures that I briefly move among— Because, like me, they're traveling headlong in that familiar, vertical direction that coarsens beautiful, blackmails young— the two delusions we all move among.

Marilyn L. Taylor

Living,Coming of Age,Midlife,Activities,School & Learning,Philosophy

Song of the Sea to the Shore

Unraveling velvet, wave after wave, driven by wind, unwinding by storm, by gravity thrown— however, heaving to reach you, to find you, I've striven undulant, erosive, blown— or lying flat as glass for your falling clear down: I can't swallow you. So why have I felt I've reached you—as two reflected stars, surfaced, lie near—as if the sky's close element is one in me, where starfish cleave to stones—if you're so far? I've touched you, I know, but my rush subsides; our meetings only leave desire's fleeting trace. Every place I touch you changes shape. Shore, lie down— undo. I'll fill your thirsty bones with blue. I'll flood your every cave and we'll be one.

Robert Fanning

Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Relationships,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

In Rubble

Right after the bomb, even before the ceiling And walls and floor are rearranging You and themselves into a different world, You must hold still, must wait for them To settle down in unpredictable ways, To bring their wars, shuddering, To an end, and only then should you begin Numbly to feel what freedom may be left To your feet or knees, to your elbows Or clenched fingers. Where you used to walk Or lean or lie down or fix your attention At a whim or stomp your foot Or slump in a chair, you'll find a new Architecturally unsound floor-plan To contend with, if you can move At all. Now you may remember others Who were somewhere near you before This breakdown of circumstances. Caught by surprise Like you, they may be waiting separately At their own levels, inside their own portions Of your incoherent flat. They may be thinking Of you, as you are of them, and wondering Whether some common passageway, no matter How crooked or narrow, might still exist Between you, through which you might share the absence Of food and water and the cold comfort Of daylight. They may be expecting you To arrive at any moment, to crawl through dust And fire to their rescue as they find their bodies Growing more stiff, assuming even more Unusual attitudes at every turn Of a second hand, at every sound Of a bell or an alarm, at every pounding Of a door or a heart, so if you can't reach them Now and they can't reach you, remember, please Remember, whatever you say, Whatever you hear or keep to yourself, whatever You scream or whisper, will need to make Some kind of sense, perhaps for days and days.

David Wagoner

Thinking about the Enemy

In the beginning we could hear their swords cutting jewels From the protected orchard while our children heard fine teeth Dragging along empty granary floors. Between us and them Stands the great wound, swallowing all tears, all voices. Transfixed or transformed by this pain? We never know because Who can slip through the gate without throwing a shadow Toward both the past and present? Fire, flood, famine— All we've wished upon them a thousand times, still they inch Back and taunt us with their persistence. We track them down To a quick end. More come. And the old memories grow new. The future seems already written with a pen of iron. The book Unreadable, immense. The enemy has become our masterpiece.

J. P. White

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Update on the Last Judgment

There will be no deafening noise. No hornblow of thunder. The small plants of the earth will not tremble on the hillside as grace is prepared. The sky will neither drown us in its plenty, nor the ground crack and consume feet in its hunger. No, bodies will not, in their last rags of flesh, creep from under the earth, and with breath once torn from them, choke and expel the old mud of the world. Adam and Eve, incredulous, will not embrace again in their poverty, not knowing whether to shield themselves, or to emerge shameless from the past's shadow, astonished to again greet Terra Firma. The book of the world, encrusted with deep-sea pearls and the blood of the lamb, will not open up its pages in which all deeds have been inscribed. And the totality of history will not roll back together, all events fusing, once and for all, into the great blazing sphere of time. None will sit on the right hand. There will be no right hand. And the figure of sorrow and grace, with his staff upright, its purple pennant caught in that final wind, will not be there to greet us, with the mercy of justice in his eyes. No, never judgment. Just the abyss into which all acts are thrown down, and the terrible white silence in which judgment either endures or burns.

Ellen Hinsey

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Religion,Christianity,Faith & Doubt

Writing in the Afterlife

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear, shot with pristine light, not this sulphurous haze, the air ionized as before a thunderstorm. Many have pictured a river here, but no one mentioned all the boats, their benches crowded with naked passengers, each bent over a writing tablet. I knew I would not always be a child with a model train and a model tunnel, and I knew I would not live forever, jumping all day through the hoop of myself. I had heard about the journey to the other side and the clink of the final coin in the leather purse of the man holding the oar, but how could anyone have guessed that as soon as we arrived we would be asked to describe this place and to include as much detail as possible— not just the water, he insists, rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water, not simply the shackles, but the rusty, iron, ankle-shredding shackles— and that our next assignment would be to jot down, off the tops of our heads, our thoughts and feelings about being dead, not really an assignment, the man rotating the oar keeps telling us— think of it more as an exercise, he groans, think of writing as a process, a never-ending, infernal process, and now the boats have become jammed together, bow against stern, stern locked to bow, and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

Billy Collins

Living,Death,Activities,School & Learning,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets

I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. Emily Dickinson It wasn't bliss. What was bliss but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours in patter, moving through whole days touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite housekeeping in a charmed world. And yet there was always more of the same, all that happiness, the aimless Being There. So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor, lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror. He was off cataloging the universe, probably, pretending he could organize what was clearly someone else's chaos. That's when she found the tree, the dark, crabbed branches bearing up such speechless bounty, she knew without being told this was forbidden. It wasn't a question of ownership— who could lay claim to such maddening perfection? And there was no voice in her head, no whispered intelligence lurking in the leaves—just an ache that grew until she knew she'd already lost everything except desire, the red heft of it warming her outstretched palm.

Rita Dove

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

A Momentary Longing to Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead

Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat Saying to me as we walked across the Yard Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said You are not wearing overcoat. He said, You should do as I say not do as I do. Just how American it was and how late Forties it was Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me In his New York apartment sitting on chair Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering. Look at this photograph said of his mother and father. Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out. Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture. Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said. Why don't you ask him? Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not. Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph. Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs. Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true. Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.

Kenneth Koch

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets

To the Blank Spaces

For longer than by now I can believe I assumed that you had nothing to do with each other I thought you had arrived whenever that had been more solitary than single snowflakes with no acquaintance or understanding running among you guiding your footsteps somewhere ahead of me in your own time oh white lakes on the maps that I copied and gaps on the paper for the names that were to appear in them sometimes a doorway or window sometimes an eye sometimes waking without knowing the place in the whole night I might have guessed from the order in which you turned up before me and from the way I kept looking at you as though I recognized something in you that you were all words out of one language tracks of the same creature

W. S. Merwin

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books

White-Eyes

In winter all the singing is in the tops of the trees where the wind-bird with its white eyes shoves and pushes among the branches. Like any of us he wants to go to sleep, but he's restless— he has an idea, and slowly it unfolds from under his beating wings as long as he stays awake. But his big, round music, after all, is too breathy to last. So, it's over. In the pine-crown he makes his nest, he's done all he can. I don't know the name of this bird, I only imagine his glittering beak tucked in a white wing while the clouds— which he has summoned from the north— which he has taught to be mild, and silent— thicken, and begin to fall into the world below like stars, or the feathers of some unimaginable bird that loves us, that is asleep now, and silent— that has turned itself into snow.

Mary Oliver

Nature,Animals,Winter

Paschal

Easter was the old North Goddess of the dawn. She rises daily in the East And yearly in spring for the great Paschal candle of the sun. Her name lingers like a spot Of gravy in the figured vestment Of the language of the Britains. Her totem the randy bunny. Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays Are stained by syllables of thunder And Woden's frenzy. O my fellow-patriots loyal to this Our modern world of high heels, Vaccination, brain surgery— May they pass over us, the old Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers, Embodiments. Egg-hunt, Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter Compass of martyrdom, Ground-up apples and walnuts In sweet wine to embody mortar Of affliction, babies for bricks. Legible traces of the species That devises the angel of death Sailing over our doorpost Smeared with sacrifice.

Robert Pinsky

Religion,Other Religions,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Easter

Body

Map of terror and pleasure, ardent junk, passionate congress filled with the arguments of chemicals, Echo chamber for the fanatical cries of stubborn generations, all the quaint invisibles death has grown a beard on, labyrinth of desire, playing field of impulse, factory where decay's silent armies clock in, philosopher-clown blowing a horn at each epiphany. Washed by the rough nurse of morning, wheeled into the ward of the afternoon, feeds, grateful, on the rich broth of dusk. Reads the erratic cards of dreams, turns on the rack of insomnia, steals the two-bit grace of sleep. Loses its name in foreign embraces, forges a passport to the country of tenderness, gestures like a child at the thing that it wants, opaque from its own breath on the glass.

Alissa Valles

The Body,Nature

Crossing the Days

My son's been learning time: big hand and little, powers of sixty and of twenty-four, the slow semaphore of days. He's brought home paper plates from kindergarten, arrows pointing at his favorite hours. So far the face of every clock has smiled. And before we read to sleep each night he crosses off another square on the calendar above his bed, counting down to Christmas or to nothing in particular, sometimes just a line he draws uphill or down, check marks like the ones his teacher leaves on sheets he's filled with capitals and lower cases, other times a pair of thick lines like the crossed bones on a pirate's flag, an X as if to mark the treasure buried in some ordinary week, no day yet a cross to bear.

James Scruton

Living,Parenthood,Time & Brevity,Activities,School & Learning,Philosophy

The Lake

Day and night, the lake dreams of sky. A privacy as old as the mountains And her up there, stuck among peaks. The whole eye Fastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars, So little trespass. An airplane once Crossed her brow; she searched but could not find A face. Having lived with such strict beauty She comes to know how the sun is nothing But itself and the path it throws; the moon A riddled stone. If only a hand Would tremble along her cheek, would disturb. Even the elk Pass by, drawn to the spill of creeks below— How she cannot help abundance, even as it leaves Her, as it sings all the way down the mountain.

Sophie Cabot Black

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

0

Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort of stopgap doorstop for those quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing, remains embryonic sum, non-cogito.

Hailey Leithauser

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

My Brother the Artist, at Seven

As a boy he played alone in the fields behind our block, six frame houses holding six immigrant families, the parents speaking only gibberish to their neighbors. Without the kids they couldn't say "Good morning" and be understood. Little wonder he learned early to speak to himself, to tell no one what truly mattered. How much can matter to a kid of seven? Everything. The whole world can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses of August and pretends he's grown up, someone complete in himself without the need for anyone, a warrior from the ancient places our fathers fled years before, those magic places: Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea, Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon, the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston. In the damp grass he recites the names over and over in a hushed voice while the sun climbs into the locust tree to waken the houses. The husbands leave for work, the women return to bed, the kids bend to porridge and milk. He advances slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god, while beneath him the earth holds its breath.

Philip Levine

Living,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Nature,Summer,Philosophy

Dio Ed Io

There is a heaviness between us, Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours. What ash has it come to purify? What disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds? God of my fathers, but not of mine, You are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one. There is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt. What figure of earth and clay would it have me become? Sunday again, January thaw back big time. The knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls Sit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy Smoking their dun-filtered cigarettes. Nothing is bothering them—and their nicotine dreams— This afternoon. Everything's weightless, As insubstantial as smoke. Nothing is disappearing in their world. Arrival is all. There is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window Above a cobblestone Paris street. A man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance. One of them's you, the other is me. Cut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net Right under the swan-diving body. Cut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net. Hmm . . . And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man. One loses one's center in the air, trying to stay afloat, Doesn't one? Snowfalling metaphors. Unbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed. And unshedable. Such heaviness. The world has come and lies between us. Such distance. Ungraspable. Ash and its disappearance— Unbearable absence of being, Tonto, then taken back.

Charles Wright

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Photography & Film

Dismantling the House

Rent a flatbed with a winch. With the right leverage anything can be hoisted, driven off. Or the man with a Bobcat comes in, then the hauler with his enormous truck. A leveler or a lawyer does the rest; experts always are willing to help. The structure was old, rotten in spots. Hadn't it already begun to implode? Believe you've just sped the process up. Photographs, toys, the things that break your heart—let's trust they would have been removed, perhaps are safe with the children who soon will have children of their own. It's over. It's time for loss to build its tower in the yard where you are merely a spectator now. Admit you'd like to find something discarded or damaged, even gone, and lift it back into the world.

Stephen Dunn

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Separation & Divorce,Time & Brevity

Kindness

For Carol Rigolot When deeds splay before us precious as gold & unused chances stripped from the whine-bone, we know the moment kindheartedness walks in. Each praise be echoes us back as the years uncount themselves, eating salt. Though blood first shaped us on the climbing wheel, the human mind lit by the savanna’s ice star & thistle rose, your knowing gaze enters a room & opens the day, saying we were made for fun. Even the bedazzled brute knows when sunlight falls through leaves across honed knives on the table. If we can see it push shadows aside, growing closer, are we less broken? A barometer, temperature gauge, a ruler in minus fractions & pedigrees, a thingmajig, a probe with an all-seeing eye, what do we need to measure kindness, every unheld breath, every unkind leapyear? Sometimes a sober voice is enough to calm the waters & drive away the false witnesses, saying, Look, here are the broken treaties Beauty brought to us earthbound sentinels.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Song

I make the drive, walk the corporate walk, To do what I must and give what I got. I turn the chrome knob and I fill my slot. I talk and I joke, a regular guy I input and output and rarely ask why. It's pasta and wine at home in my flat. It's voice mail and e-mail, then feed the stray cat. Sometimes I go out and chat up the girls. Some want to tango, some manage a smile. Some come home and have safe sex for a while. My sweet IRA, my 401-k, Let me buy tickets to games, to a play— I go with the gang and don't get involved. I fly to St. Croix and stare at the sea. I travel first class. No day-tripper me. My stocks are diverse to ride out the storm. I buy what is solid, hew to the norm. My portfolio teaches how I should vote. I'm cautious in style, suspicious of trend. When weather turns foul I always come in. This is my choice, my new BoBo life. A two-career marriage, the tension, the strife— It didn't last long. We parted as pals. She got the condo. I got the car. She's a savvy, cool chick. She'll go really far. My folks live upstate, where I misspent my youth. They're tight with their money and long in the tooth. When I visit it's hard with so little to say. They miss me, they claim. They worry. They pray. But they seem relieved when I drive away.

Mark Defoe

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

What I Know about Epistemology

As the light goes, go. Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from convention's good graces: learn, or someone will have you filing files or writing writs, demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge door to door; someone might even drop your lovely life into a factory and have you derusting rings on the coolant-spouting turntable of a vertical lathe. It's best for everyone that what you know is generally thought of as general knowledge. You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars, in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms where it whispers like a ribbon untying; you can even find it in schools. But be careful: it's dangerous, inescapable and exact down to every atom of everything there is, to every name each thing goes by and every law each thing obeys. And the best part is, you always know more than you know.

John Surowiecki

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Philosophy,Graduation

Worms

Aren't you glad at least that the earthworms Under the grass are ignorant, as they eat the earth, Of the good they confer on us, that their silence Isn't a silent reproof for our bad manners, Our never casting earthward a crumb of thanks For their keeping the soil from packing so tight That no root, however determined, could pierce it? Imagine if they suspected how much we owe them, How the weight of our debt would crush us Even if they enjoyed keeping the grass alive, The garden flowers and vegetables, the clover, And wanted nothing that we could give them, Not even the merest nod of acknowledgment. A debt to angels would be easy in comparison, Bright, weightless creatures of cloud, who serve An even brighter and lighter master. Lucky for us they don't know what they're doing, These puny anonymous creatures of dark and damp Who eat simply to live, with no more sense of mission Than nature feels in providing for our survival. Better save our gratitude for a friend Who gives us more than we can give in return And never hints she's waiting for reciprocity. "If I had nickel, I'd give it to you," The lover says, who, having nothing available In the solid, indicative world, scrapes up A coin or two in the world of the subjunctive. "A nickel with a hole drilled in the top So you can fasten it to your bracelet, a charm To protect you against your enemies." For his sake, she'd wear it, not for her own, So he might believe she's safe as she saunters Home across the field at night, the moon above her, Below her the loam, compressed by the soles of her loafers, And the tunneling earthworms, tireless, silent, As they persist, oblivious, in their service.

Carl Dennis

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Animals,Gratitude & Apologies

A Dog's Life

A stay of execution: one last day, your day, old Everydog, then, as they say, or as we say (a new trick to avoid finalities implicit in destroyed), you have to be put down, or put to sleep— the very dog who, once, would fight to keep from putting down, despite our shouts, a shoe until he gnawed it to the sole, and who would sit up, through our sleepless nights, to bark away some menace looming in the dark. Can you pick up the sense of all this talk? Or do you still just listen for a walk, or else, the ultimate reward, a car?— My God, tomorrow's ride . . . Well, here we are, right now. You stare at me and wag your tail. I stare back, dog-like, big and dumb. Words fail. No more commands, ignore my monologue, go wander off. Good dog. You're a good dog. And you could never master, anyway, the execution, as it were, of Stay

Daniel Groves

Living,Death,Relationships,Pets

Trust

Trust that there is a tiger, muscular Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been seen and never will be seen by any human eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword- fish will never near a ship, that far from cameras or cars elephant herds live long elephant lives. Believe that bees by the billions find unidentified flowers on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe in caves of contentment, bears sleep. Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun. I must trust all this to be true, though the few birds at my feeder watch the window with small flutters of fear, so like my own.

Susan Kinsolving

Nature,Animals

The Crow

Was it because at last I cleaned the window that he threw himself against the glass? I thought, poor crow— he doesn't know the evergreens and blue sky are behind him. I turned back to my page but whumpp— the bird attacked the glass again. His long claws scuffled at the pane and I yelled "Crow! Go away!" Again his body slapped the glass, again and then again, and then at last he caught my eye— oh, prophet, terrified.

Kunst Judith McCune

Nature,Animals

Cozy Apologia

For Fred I could pick anything and think of you— This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page. I could choose any hero, any cause or age And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart, Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart As standing in silver stirrups will allow— There you'll be, with furrowed brow And chain mail glinting, to set me free: One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy. This post-postmodern age is all business: compact disks And faxes, a do-it-now-and-take-no-risks Event. Today a hurricane is nudging up the coast, Oddly male: Big Bad Floyd, who brings a host Of daydreams: awkward reminiscences Of teenage crushes on worthless boys Whose only talent was to kiss you senseless. They all had sissy names—Marcel, Percy, Dewey; Were thin as licorice and as chewy, Sweet with a dark and hollow center. Floyd's Cussing up a storm. You're bunkered in your Aerie, I'm perched in mine (Twin desks, computers, hardwood floors): We're content, but fall short of the Divine. Still, it's embarrassing, this happiness— Who's satisfied simply with what's good for us, When has the ordinary ever been news? And yet, because nothing else will do To keep me from melancholy (call it blues), I fill this stolen time with you.

Rita Dove

Living,Coming of Age,Love,Infatuation & Crushes,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Popular Culture

An Equation for My Children

It may be esoteric and perverse That I consult Pythagoras to hear A music tuning in the universe. My interest in his math of star and sphere Has triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve. They don't add up. But if I rack and toil More in ether than a mortal coil, It is to comprehend how you revolve, By formulas of orbit, ellipse, and ring. Dear son and daughter, if I seem to range It is to chart the numbers spiraling Between my life and yours until the strange And seamless beauty of equations click Solutions for the heart's arithmetic.

Wilmer Mills

Arts & Sciences,Sciences

Mapping the Genome

Geneticist as driver, down the gene codes in, let's say, a topless coupe and you keep expecting bends, real tyre-testers on tight mountain passes, but instead it's dead straight, highway as runway, helix unravelled as vista, as vanishing point. Keep your foot down. This is a finite desert. You move too fast to read it, the order of the rocks, the cacti, roadside weeds, a blur to you. Every hour or so, you pass a shack which passes for a motel here: tidy faded rooms with TVs on for company, the owner pacing out his empty parking lot. And after each motel you hit a sandstorm thick as fog, but agony. Somewhere out there are remnants of our evolution, genes for how to fly south, sense a storm, hunt at night, how to harden your flesh into hide or scales. These are the miles of dead code. Every desert has them. You are on a mission to discover why the human heart still slows when divers break the surface, why mermaids still swim in our dreams.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Sciences,Farewells & Good Luck

A Book on a Shelf

A history of some sort, one that made us, a war and what the war had meant, or since meaning eludes war, what it did to the look of the trees and the sides of the buildings, most of which survived, only to be torn down later to widen the street or put up a new office complex. There it was on the shelf. I was there only a moment, but still, I wanted to know what happened to the man in the photograph wearing a flat cap standing outside the important building cheering. He was there. He was part of that moment, one of the first into the streets when the turn of events came, the declaration or pronouncement, words that would change the look of everything he smiled on, words that may have cost him his life. Here it is in a book I found on a shelf. The person who lives here bought it at a library stock reduction sale. No one had read it. It looked interesting thirty years ago. It was practically new, the back uncracked. But the person did what those before her had, put it up on a shelf and never found a way back to it. The history sits there, unread, unbelievable, somebody else's. Even I have only looked at the pictures, at the man smiling between the cold pages. Maybe ending the world as he knew it was ok. Maybe it was the only way. Maybe the world has to come to an end in the first place to be the world. And the man? He has to smile, though he knows so little of what's coming, even looking right at it. As we do, who still haven't read the book.

Roger Mitchell

Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

Just Another Paradigm Shift

Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible. Coming out of the woods, whispering Happily Ever After. Even in that light— stars with the skeletons of animals and old friends— visible to the eye behind the one always left open on the east side of the house, downhill. Where the coffee trees and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie, buried themselves in leaves and left to the sputtering wind of memory. & if that's not enough (he says to himself in the voice of a black-and-white actor whose name is a moth that keeps avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue) to bring you home, well, there it is again, already exhausted by your efforts to make it comfortable enough to stay. Impatient, already headed back down into the woods, whispering Once Upon A Time . . .

Paul Grant

Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light! The cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam, the opened, blue mussels, moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred— and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. It's like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words. First you figure out what each one means by itself, the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight. Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Mary Oliver

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?

Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.

Linda Pastan

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

My God

Protestants pray for grace, Scientists look to space. Jews find truth in the Torah, New Agers, in each other's aura. Catholics are blessed by a Pope, Yaquis enlightened by dope. Maoris use ritual chants, Navahos get up and dance. Muslims bow daily to Allah, Norsemen aspire to Valhalla. Feminists swear by a She, Quakers swear not, silently. Confucians kowtow to ancestors, Hare Krishnas, to airport investors. Hindus revere Lord Brahma, Richard Gere, the Dalai Lama. Baptists believe in the Ark, Physicists, in the quark. Moonies obey Reverend Sun, Mormons say Brigham's the one. Daoists extol yang and yin, Sufis transcend in a spin. Shintos seek peace where it's grassy, Rastas, in Haile Selassie. When we meet in the Afterlife, We can laugh at sectarian strife. But meanwhile back to the wars, 'Cause my God's better than yours.

Susan Rolston

Religion,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Philosophy,Sciences,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Love Recidivus

Whatever it may be, we may suppose it is not love, for love must leave its trace like contraband seized and displayed in rows; is not sufficient reason to erase the careful lives we have so far lived through— there is no call for us to undermine the walls we've built; no need to think anew of all the chains and choices that define us still. And yet for all our fine intent a single touch ignites the night and tries resolve past all resisting. What we meant before we mean again; fidelities have yet been known to shift and come undone and all good reasons fail us, one by one.

Lisa Barnett

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships

To the Light of September

When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew

W. S. Merwin

Nature,Fall,Landscapes & Pastorals,Summer

Nightwatchman's Song

After Heinrich I. F. Biber I What’s unseen may not exist— Or so those secret powers insist That prowl past nightfall, Enabled by the brain’s blacklist To fester out of sight, So we streak from bad to worse, Through an expanding universe And see no evil. On my rounds like a night nurse Or sentry on qui vive, I make, through murkier hours, my way Where the sun patrolled all day Toward stone-blind midnight To poke this flickering flashlamp’s ray At what’s hushed up and hidden. Lacking all leave or protocol, Things, one by one, hear my footfall, Blank out their faces, Dodge between trees, find cracks in walls Or lock down offices. Still, though scuttling forces flee Just as far stars recede from me To outmost boundaries, I stalk through ruins and debris, Graveyard and underground. Led by their helmetlantern’s light Miners inch through anthracite; I’m the unblinking mole That sniffs out what gets lost or might Slip down the world’s black hole. II (ending his rounds, the watchman, somewhat tipsy, returns) What’s obscene?—just our obsessed, Incessant itch and interest In things found frightful: In bestial tortures, rape, incest; In ripe forbidden fruit Dangling, lush, just out of reach; Dim cellars nailed up under each Towering success, The loser’s envy that will teach A fierce vindictiveness, The victors’ high court that insures Pardon for winners and procures Little that’s needed But all we lust for. What endures?— Exponential greed And trash containers overflowing With shredded memos, records showing What, who, when, why ’Til there’s no sure way of knowing What’s clear to every eye: The heart’s delight in hatred, runny As the gold drip from combs of honey; The rectal intercourse Of power politics and money That slimes both goal and source. What’s obscured?—what’s abscessed. After inspection, I’d suggest It’s time we got our head Rewired. I plan to just get pissed, Shitfaced and brain-dead.

W. D. Snodgrass

Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

BETTER DAYS

Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer when I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas' whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water. All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each night's one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with? And where's he gone? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

A. F. Moritz

Living,Coming of Age,Growing Old,Nature,Summer,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

LITTLE BLESSING FOR MY FLOATER

After George Herbert This tiny ruin in my eye, small flaw in the fabric, little speck of blood in the egg, deep chip in the windshield, north star, polestar, floater that doesn't float, spot where my hand is not, even when I'm looking at my hand, little piton that nails every rock I see, no matter if the picture turns to sand, or sand to sea, I embrace you, piece of absence that reminds me what I will be, all dark some day unless God rescues me, oh speck that might teach me yet to see.

Jeanne Murray Walker

Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

A CAVE OF ANGELFISH HUDDLE AGAINST THE MOON

Put an ear to the light at fall of dark and you will hear nothing. This pale luminescence that drifts in upon them makes a blue bole of their caves, a scare of their scything tails. They tell in the bubbling dark of images that come in upon them when light spreads like an oil slick and sea fans that once were their refuge turn away. Now there is no dark dark enough for their silver tails, scatter of color (like coins massively piling in the lap of a miser) that was, in the day, their pride.How hugely here we belong. This is their song in the silting drift of the reef. They have never seen the moon nor the black scut of night, stars spread like plankton in their beastly infinities.

Ron De Maris

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Stars, Planets, Heavens

The Sun

There is one mind in all of us, one soul, who parches the soil in some nations but in others hides perpetually behind a veil; he spills light everywhere, here he spilled some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended. He is in charge of darkness also, also in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination. People fucking do so by flicking him off and on, off and on, with their eyelids as they ascertain their love's sincerity. He makes the stars disappear, but he makes small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars, in the ommatea of skyscrapers or in the eyes of sighing lovers bored with one another. Onto the surface of the world he stamps all plants and animals. They are not gods but it is he who made us worshippers of every bramble toad, black chive we find. In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes a clock-like tick-tick when he flies, but he is not a god. The only god is the sun, our mind, master of all crickets and clocks.

Dan Chiasson

Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Religion,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

To Judgment: An Assay

You change a life as eating an artichoke changes the taste of whatever is eaten after. Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat— not objectively present at all— and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow: to know if the distance between two things can be leapt. The piano, that good servant, has none of you in her at all, she lends herself to what asks; this has been my ambition as well. Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot whose water comes from far-off mountain springs. Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow, coldly delicious. For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind, not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes. Judgment decrees what remains— the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says, and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children. The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments— judged beetles especially loved by God, “because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender: I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever carries the quail. Yet however much I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you: you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth. When I have erased you from me entirely, disrobed of your measuring adjectives, stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns, when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter— not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter— then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not. As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk, find it sweet.

Jane Hirshfield

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

N

has crawled out of the ocean to carry us from sleep, like sleep, the gray of outer Sunset portending the gray of inner Sunset. And so on. On the N, one should invent intricate fictions for the lives of the passengers: time is a game. Soon we will be underground. But first, the long lush green of Duboce Park, the happiness of dogs! Good-bye now to their owners eyeing one another. Good-bye to the park's locked men's room, where once a man was found dead, his penis shoved into his own mouth. The world continues, the engine of the world the letter N.

Randall Mann

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Confession

Down in the blue-green water at nightfall some selving shapes float fluorescing, trance-dancing, trembling to the rhythm of theodoxical marching- music that they hear over the mere noise of the breaking tide. Above, stars in certain places; along the shore roads, cars carrying people on uncertain errands, sordid and sacred and all the kinds in between. Halogen-lit, a woman gets down from her all-wheel-drive velocipede, enters through an obeying door a cyclopean store to buy unintelligent fresh fish and other objects whether formerly alive or formerly dead, she comes out again, a poor man calls to her, selling his no-news- paper; the disastrous head- lines smile and nod, they announce the plans of steel patriots and undertakers, ad-men and fallen vice-generals, doping their stolen crusades. But the woman has learned, as I have learned, as all of us must keep learning if we are to be good subjects, how to make of a newspaper the mask of a locust, calmly put it on, and begin once more to eat everything up.

Reginald Gibbons

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Heroes & Patriotism

Disgraceland

Before my first communion, I clung to doubt as Satan spider-like stalked the orb of dark surrounding Eden for a wormhole into paradise. God had formed me from gel in my mother’s womb, injected by my dad’s smart shoot. They swapped sighs until I came, smaller than a bite of burger. Quietly, I grew till my lungs were done then the Lord sailed a soul like a lit arrow to inhabit me. Maybe that piercing made me howl at birth, or the masked creatures whose scalpel cut a lightning bolt to free me. I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed and hauled around. Time-lapse photos show my fingers grow past crayon outlines, my feet come to fill spike heels. Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood to one side with a glass of water. I swatted the sap away. When my thirst got great enough to ask, a clear stream welled up inside, some jade wave buoyed me forward, and I found myself upright in the instant, with a garden inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs. The vines push out plump grapes. You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.

Mary Karr

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,Christianity

Cabezón

I see you shuffle up Washington Street whenever I am driving much too fast: you, chub & bug-eyed, jaw like a loaf hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack from the slit of your pumpkin mouth, humped over like the eel-man or geek, the dummy paid to sweep out gutters, drown the cats. Where are you going now? Though someday you'll turn your gaze upon my shadow in this tinted glass I know for now you only look ahead at sidewalks cracked & paved with trash but what are you slouching toward—knee-locked, hippity, a hitch in your zombie walk, Bighead?

Amy Beeder

Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Lions Are Interesting

Each morning in the little white cabin by the river they woke to a raccoon clawing under the floorboards or banging in the wood stove. They did not discuss this. Instead they said it was a perfect day to pick blueberries on the hill, or that a hike to the old glassworks sounded good. They were beginning to speak not in meat but in the brown paper the butcher wraps around it. Brown paper around dirty magazines. Like dirty magazines, they only traced the contour of substance: silk over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over bone. What's under bone? Marrow? Their forks so small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell dolls from animals because the latter are made of meat. Many eat it, also. Lions are interesting. Lions don't eat the flesh of their kills right away, but first lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched nearly white. White as the little cabin by the river they stayed in that summer. White as the raccoon covered in ashes, his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.

Joel Brouwer

The Body,Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals

Map

Daddy goes. Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating and trestle-jumping bare into rust-brackish water and cane-poling for bream and shallow-gigging too with a nail-pointy broomstick and creek-shrimping and cooler-dragging and coon-chasing and dove-dogging and duck-bagging and squirrel-tailing and tail-hankering and hard-cranking and -shifting and backfiring like a gun in his tittie-tan El Camino and parking it at The House of Ham and Dawn's Busy Hands and Betty's pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing double-wide and spine-leaning Vicki against her WIDE-GLIDE Pontiac and pumping for pay at Ray Wade's Esso and snuff-dipping and plug-sucking and tar-weeping pore-wise and LuckyStrike-smoking and Kool only sometimes and penny-pitching and dog-racing and bet-losing cocksuckmotherfuck and pool-shooting and bottle-shooting over behind Tas-T-O's Donuts and shootin' the shit and chewin' the fat and just jawin' who asked you and blank-blinking quick back at me and whose young are you no-how and hounddog-digging buried half-pints from the woods.

Atsuro Riley

Living,Parenthood,Love,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,Class,Popular Culture

Bedtime Story

The generator hums like a distant ding an sich. It's early evening, and time, like the dog it is, is hungry for food, And will be fed, don't doubt it, will be fed, my small one. The forest begins to gather its silences in. The meadow regroups and hunkers down for its cleft feet. Something is wringing the rag of sunlight inexorably out and hanging. Something is making the reeds bend and cover their heads. Something is licking the shadows up, And stringing the blank spaces along, filling them in. Something is inching its way into our hearts, scratching its blue nails against the wall there. Should we let it in? Should we greet it as it deserves, Hands on our ears, mouths open? Or should we bring it a chair to sit on, and offer it meat? Should we turn on the radio, should we clap our hands and dance The Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance? I think we should, love, I think we should.

Charles Wright

Living,Midlife,Relationships,Home Life

Then Too There Is This

joy in the day's being done, however clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists, the packages nestling together, no one home waiting for dinner, for you, no one impatient for your touch or kind words to salve what nightly rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling that one is really as alone as one had feared. One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy to see over the strip mall darkening right on schedule a neon-proof pink sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth, cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up and lit as if by a match struck somewhere in the throat much deeper down.

J. Allyn Rosser

Relationships,Home Life

Country Love Song

I try to think of the cup of a hand, of legs in a tangle, and not the thistle though even it, purpled, spiking away, wants to be admired, wants to say, whistle a little for me. O every little thing wants to be loved, wants to be marked by the cry that brings desire to it, even blue-eyed fly to the bloated hiss of death. To love is to be remiss: the horse alone in the wide flat field nods its head as if the bridle and bit were missed or mocked; the cow slung with the unmilked weight of her tremendous teats shoots a look back over her shoulder at O lonesome me. I want to say to her need as if crooning could be enough, sweet, sweet mama . . . truth be told, the thousand lisping bees to the milkweeds' honey terrifies me. When the stink of slurry season is over and the greened fields are slathered, fecund, overtall foxgloves tip with the weight of their fruit. Then I dream a little dream of you and me, curled like two grubs on the top of a leaf wind-driven and scudding along the lake's surface. All night we glide to its blue harbor and back again. The fattened slack of us singing O darlin' darlin' darlin'.

Melanie Almeder

The Body,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships,Nature

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs

Sleep, she will not linger: She turns her moon-cold shoulder. With no ring on her finger, You cannot hope to hold her. She turns her moon-cold shoulder And tosses off the cover. You cannot hope to hold her: She has another lover. She tosses off the cover And lays the darkness bare. She has another lover. Her heart is otherwhere. She lays the darkness bare. You slowly realize Her heart is otherwhere. There's distance in her eyes. You slowly realize That she will never linger, With distance in her eyes And no ring on her finger.

A. E. Stallings

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships

Obbligato

Late August was a pressure drop, rain, a sob in the body, a handful of air with a dream in it, summer was desperate to paradise itself with blackberry drupelets and swarms, everything polychromed, glazed, sprinkler caps gushing, the stars like sweat on a boxer's skin. A voice from the day says Tax cuts for the rich or scratch what itches or it's a sax from Bitches Brew, and I'm a fool for these horns and hues, this maudlin light. It's a currency of feeling in unremembered March. There's a war on and snow in the city where we've made our desire stop and start. In the dying school of Bruce I'm the student who still believes in the bad taste of the beautiful and the sadness of songs made in the ratio of bruise for bruise.

Bruce Smith

Nature,Summer,Arts & Sciences,Music

Tutelary

What a fuckup you are. What dumbshit you do. Your father's voice still whispers in you, despite the joys that sweeten each day. Your Genius it isn't until, dying away, it worms back through the sparkling dream where you drown him in an inch-deep stream: your knee in his back, your strength on his skull, it begins singing praise for your skill.

Michael Ryan

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Here

Ghost I house In this old flat— Your outpost— My aftermath

Samuel Menashe

Indiscriminate Kisses

Foreplay of obscene graffiti carved into trees—foot-long boners gouge the bark. Beaks and snouts on a restroom mirror. Slick lips. Succulent lips. I go out among them sometimes. So sweet how they pucker up out of pity. A practiced pathos in a saloon of woodsmen whose axes wait in trucks out back. Lips full of yawn or yes. Lips thick with God-spit and God-suck. Chapped lips, bloody lips. Pierced or tattooed, they pout into view—here to give, willy-nilly, what's been too long held in the body. Something passes across tongues. It sayeth not a name; it taketh everyone's turn. Mute lips of a swift unbuttoner. Mouths fording frothy streams, vaporous bogs. I stumble forth in their midst. Maybe I am out of bread or in a bad place with a book. The streets have an attendant caress. Moon lapping rumor. Fat lip approaches hare lip. There go pasty lips. All are readied as if for a race or to be plucked like rare moths by bright wings from the air. Betty's lips and Bobby's and Bucky's just before the collision and the siren's red wail. Laddy, keep a light on. I may have to come ashore some distance from where I set in.

Nance Van Winckel

Staying Power

In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929 Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts outside to the yard and question the sky, longing to have the fight settled, thinking I can't go on like this, and finally I say all right, it is improbable, all right, there is no God. And then as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose to put the smoldering thing out. Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls, tells me they've found melanoma, complains that the hospital is cold, I say God. God, I say as my heart turns inside out. Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck, wipe its face, set it down on the lawn, and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire again, which—though they say it doesn't exist—can send you straight to the burn unit. Oh, we have only so many words to think with. Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone, but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be. You don't want to talk, so you pull out the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up and a voice you love whispers hello.

Jeanne Murray Walker

Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

Kind of Blue

Not Delft or delphinium, not Wedgewood among the knickknacks, not wide-eyed chicory evangelizing in the devil strip— But way on down in the moonless octave below midnight, honey, way down where you can't tell cerulean from teal. Not Mason jars of moonshine, not waverings of silk, not the long-legged hunger of a heron or the peacock's iridescent id— But Delilahs of darkness, darling, and the muscle of the mind giving in. Not sullen snow slumped against the garden, not the first instinct of flame, not small, stoic ponds, or the cold derangement of a jealous sea— But bluer than the lips of Lazarus, baby, before Sweet Jesus himself could figure out what else in the world to do but weep.

Lynn Powell

Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

Between Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night

Just then, encountering my ruddy face in the grand piano's cold black craquelure, it conjured the jack-o'-lantern moon dipping up over the roofs of the Tenderloin. Only when I have done with the myths— the inner spill that triggers us to flame, breasts so sensitive a moment's touch will call down fever; the dark sea-lane between limbic squall and the heart's harbour— will I picture you, just beyond innocence, lying stripped by a thrown-wide window, letting the cool breeze covet your ardour.

Roddy Lumsden

The Body,Love,Desire,Relationships,Nature

The Dipper

It was winter, near freezing, I'd walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird. It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song. It isn't mine to give. I can't coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.

Kathleen Jamie

Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Winter

The Dead

Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom; though they speak with more than just the season's tongue— the colours that they blaze from the dark loam all have something of the jealous tang of the dead about them. What do we know of their part in this, those secret brothers of the harrow, invigorators of the soil—oiling the dirt so liberally with their essence, their black marrow? But here's the question. Are the flower and fruit held out to us in love, or merely thrust up at us, their masters, like a fist? Or are they the lords, asleep amongst the roots, granting to us in their great largesse this hybrid thing—part brute force, part mute kiss?

Don Paterson

Living,Death,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Social Commentaries,Class

Magnificat

When he had suckled there, he began to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms, but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet milk she could not keep from filling her, from pouring into his ravenous mouth, and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was huge, towering above her, the landscape, his shadow stealing the color from the fields, even the flowers going gray. And they came like ants, one behind the next, to worship him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was his hunger they admired most of all. So they brought him slaughtered beasts: goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own kin whose hunger was a kind of shame to them, a shrinkage; even as his was beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent. The day came when they had nothing left to offer him, having denuded themselves of all in order to enlarge him, in whose shadow they dreamed of light: and that is when the thought began to move, small at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally, it broke out into words, so loud they thought it must be prophecy: they would kill him, and all they had lost in his name would return, renewed and fresh with the dew of morning. Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons. And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain, which never ends, who is the father of that? And who are we who speak, as if the world were our diorama—its little figures moved by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers, spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity that no one any longer wants to see, excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace, who sows darkness like a desert storm, who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,who touches the hills, and they smoke.

Eleanor Wilner

Religion,Christianity,Faith & Doubt,Social Commentaries

Lady Macbeth's Confession

Never mind thick night! Darkness move quick! Madness engulf me like Jacob's coat; colors tighten like sickness 'round me throat. Wha it is do already can't tek back but it still got me a wash me hand til they sour and callus, de visions plaguing de dark a me mind like locust. Me conscience no business dem days when me could grin up and skin teet 1 inna company of great men who smile up smile up wid me an looking fava 2 inna secret eyes an backdoor smiles. I know say woman like me plain wicked an conniving: stinkin' wid ambition, smilin' close against you skin, seeking confession wid de devil. Now so, me lay up inna bed wid death a-write me love letter. Got me a crave colors to soothe me spirit; red never could please me, purple grind like a grater on me cheek, orange sting like a ledda on me hot skin, and white—mek me breast feel weight down wid milk, got me head swirling like inna hurricane. I chew down me bitter nails til I taste de poison1 be insincere; 2 special treatment

Neisha Tweed

Suburban Pastoral

Twilight folds over houses on our street; its hazy gold is gilding our front lawns, delineating asphalt and concrete driveways with shadows. Evening is coming on, quietly, like a second drink, the beers men hold while rising from their plastic chairs to stand above their sprinklers, and approve. Soon the fireflies will rise in lucent droves— for now, however, everything seems content to settle into archetypal grooves: the toddler's portraits chalked out on cement, mothers in windows, finishing the dishes. Chuck Connelly's cigarette has burned to ashes; he talks politics to Roger in the drive. "It's all someone can do just to survive," he says, and nods—both nod—and pops another beer from the cooler. "No rain. Would you believe—" says Chuck, checking the paper for the weather. At least a man can keep his yard in shape. Somewhere beyond this plotted cityscape their sons drive back and forth in borrowed cars: how small their city seems now, and how far away they feel from last year, when they rode their bikes to other neighborhoods, to score a smoke or cop a feel in some girl's bed. They tune the radio to this summer's song and cruise into the yet-to-exhale lung of August night. Nothing to do but this. These are the times they'd never dream they'll miss— the hour spent chasing a party long burned out, graphic imagined intercourse with Denise. This is all they can even think about, and thankfully, since what good would it do to choke on madeleines of temps perdu when so much time is set aside for that? Not that their fathers weaken with regret as nighttime settles in—no, their wives are on the phone, the cooler has Labatt to spare; at nine the Giants play the Braves. There may be something to romanticize about their own first cars, the truths and lies they told their friends about some summer fling, but what good is it now, when anything recalled is two parts true and one part false? When no one can remember just who sang that song that everybody loved? What else? It doesn't come to mind. The sprinkler spits in metronome; they're out of cigarettes. Roger folds up his chair, calls it a day. The stars come out in cosmic disarray, and windows flash with television blues. The husbands come to bed, nothing to say but 'night . Two hours late—with some excuse— their sons come home, too full of songs and girls to notice dew perfect its muted pearls or countless crickets singing for a mate.

Dave Lucas

Living,Coming of Age,Midlife,Relationships,Home Life,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Gender & Sexuality

Tricyclist and a Turtle

Minnesota snapping turtles clutched by little cities are wet busts of moonstone wreathed in scum, the gray self sugared, half a lot of granite phlegm stopped upon a chaise longue, that incoming pod of him dunked, thorny hooves aswim. Lichen licked him, then he quivered in the stem, and didactic stoicism stitched him tight with a neat twine. Even when tapped on the back by a barefoot tricyclist with a bulging wheaten midriff, he does not respond except that a flagellant paddling worm nested in the necropolis of his nape twists in disgust under the skin, keeping all the grim social hate safe in him.

Molly McQuade

Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries

The Perfect Life

I have a perfect life. It isn't much, But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive And happy in a vague way: no disappointments On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt; Looking forward in anticipation, looking back In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day. I heed the promptings of my inner voice, And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance For my own powers and innate superiority—the fake Security of someone in the grip of a delusion, In denial, climbing ever taller towers Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom With a secret smile, while all the while Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful And strong becomes an object of indifference Reaching out to no one, as later middle age Turns old, and the strength is gone. Right now the moments yield to me sweet Feelings of contentment, but the human Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name To be forgotten soon, as the things I know Turn into unfamiliar faces In a strange room, leaving merely A blank space, like a hole left in the wake Of a perfect life, which closes over.

John Koethe

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Midlife

Little God Origami

The number of corners in the soul can't compare with the universe's dimensions folded neatly into swans. In the soul's space, one word on a thousand pieces of paper the size of cookie fortunes falls from the heavens. At last, the oracular answer, you cry, pawing at the scraps that twirl like seed-pod helicopters. Alas, the window to your soul needs a good scrubbing, so the letters doodle into indecipherables just like every answer that has rained down through history, and you realize, in your little smog of thought that death will simply be the cessation of asking, a thousand cranes unfolding themselves and returning to the trees.

Stefi Weisburd

Living,Death,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

Toth Farry

In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby canines and incisors are mostly chaff, by now, split kernels and acicular down, no whole utensils left: half an adz; half a shovel, in its broken handle a marrow well of the will to dig and bite. And the enamel hems are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go from salt, to bone, to pee on snow, to sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs and chipped-off skate-blade. One cuspid is like the tail of an ivory chough on my grandmother's what-not in a gravure on my mother's bureau in my father's house in my head, I think it's our daughter's, but the dime Hermes mingled the deciduals of our girl and boy, safe- keeping them together with the note that says Dear Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me A Bag of Moany

Sharon Olds

Living,Infancy,Parenthood,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Home Life,Philosophy

Undone Song at Neap Tide

When the sun and moon were in quadrature, when the garden had become a wilderness and the clock refused to strike When the old year died and the sand walked into the sea with the neap tide When you had been too long away and your old snowblue footprints clotted and hesitated in the clay When the worry of this undone song unsung so long so loud my head I went inside and under to let the flood run free

Kathryn Starbuck

Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Stars, Planets, Heavens

You That I Loved

You that I loved all my life long, you are not the one. You that I followed, my line or path or way, that I followed singing, and you earth and air of the world the way went through, and you who stood around it so it could be the way, you forests and cities, you deer and opossums struck by the lonely hunter and left decaying, you paralyzed obese ones who sat on a falling porch in a deep green holler and observed me, your bald dog barking, as I stumbled past in a hurry along my line, you are not the one. But you are the one, you that I loved all my life long, you I still love so in my dying mind I grasp me loving you when we are gone. You are the one, you path or way or line that winds beside the house where she and I live on, still longing though long gone for the health of all forests and cities, and one day to visit them, one day be rich and free enough to go and see the restricted wonders of the earth. And you are the one, old ladies fated from birth to ugliness, obesity and dearth, who sat beside my path one day as I flashed by. And you are the one, all tumble-down shacks in disregarded hills and animals the car on the road kills and leaves stinking in the sun.

A. F. Moritz

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Alone, Drinking with the Tickfaw River

Featherweight lawn chair, cooler for a footrest, and me a squatter on the landlord's dock where baitstealers teased a thousand times a day until rowdy boats and summer scared them deep. Day and night I snoozed on the porch beneath a filthy orbit of fanblades to the opera of my neighbors fighting and reconciling in the glow of stolen wattage. I saw them swimming once. Maybe naked, judging from their skittish talk, but the water smeared their bodies' pale particulars. It was just me and the Tickfaw River. Me with the taste of a tin can in my mouth, feeling no pain, lighting a cigarette backwards, the Tickfaw tricking me closer and closer with echoes and music out of nowhere. Is it funny that I was too lit to notice twenty-five orange yards of extension cord stretching from my outlet, over the driveway shells, to feed the hungry plug of their deep freezer? Mother would have pitched a fit if she discovered the stash of whiskey in the woodpile, and my father wasn't laughing if he looked down from his company of stars.

Alison Pelegrin

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Bernal Hill

Something has to give. We stand above it all. Below, the buildings' tall but tiny narrative. The water's always near, you say. And so are you, for now. It has to do. There's little left to fear. A wind so cold, one might forget that winter's gone. The city lights are on for us, to us, tonight.

Randall Mann

Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

You People

People, don't ask me again where my shoes are. The valley I walked through was frozen to me as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc talisman—I'm fine, people. Don't stare at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card— card among cards, card of my number and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of the system, in the beast's belly and up to here, people, with your pity. People, what is wrong with you? I don't care what the sign on your door says. I will go to another door. I will knock and rattle and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere, will put a pancake in my hand. You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies of the blooming stump, I bend over you, taste you, keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning of what you may one day dream an end to. The new century peeled me bone-bare like a first song inside a warbler—that bird, people, who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Keep this in mind. Do you think the fox won't find your nest? That the egg of you will endure the famine? You, you people born of moons with no mother-planets, you who are back-lit, who have no fathers in heaven, hear now the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned. From your alley. From your car up on blocks. From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple and move out into the studded green lightning. Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dogs of hell not to bust free? Or that because your youth's been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you? If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn— do not confuse me with dawn. Now people, about the shoes: the shoes have no doubt entered the sea and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis. I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least I have something to say. I lay myself down in a pencil of night—no chiseled tip yet, but the marks already forming in the lead.

Nance Van Winckel

Religion,Faith & Doubt,Social Commentaries

Hour

Sleepless in the cold dark, I look through the closed dim door be- fore me, which be- comes an abyss into which my memories have fallen past laughter or horror, passion or hard work—my memories of our past laughter, horror, passion, hard work. An ache of be- ing. An ache of being, over love. An ache of being over love. Like projections on the screen of the heavy window curtains, flashing lights of a slow-scraping after- midnight snowplow for a moment pulse in this room.

Reginald Gibbons

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships

Luciferin

"They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard." I love that moment. And I love the moment when I climb into your warm you-smelling bed-dent after you've risen. And sunflowers, once a whole field and I almost crashed, the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation, I love you. Dividing words between syl- lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter- section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD of some guy with 15 different guitars in his shack with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy! Mexican animal crackers! But only to be identified by what you love is a malformation just as embryonic chickens grow very strange in zero gravity. I hate those experiments on animals, varnished bats, blinded rabbits, cows with windows in their flanks but obviously I'm fascinated. Perhaps it was my early exposure to Frankenstein. I love Frankenstein! Arrgh, he replies to everything, fire particularly sets him off, something the villagers quickly pick up. Fucking villagers. All their shouting's making conversation impossible and now there's grit in my lettuce which I hate but kinda like in clams as one bespeaks poor hygiene and the other the sea. I hate what we're doing to the sea, dragging huge chains across the bottom, bleaching reefs. Either you're a rubber/ gasoline salesman or like me, you'd like to duct tape the vice president's mouth to the exhaust pipe of an SUV and I hate feeling like that. I would rather concentrate on the rapidity of your ideograms, how only a biochemical or two keeps me from becoming the world's biggest lightning bug.

Dean Young

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries

The House Gift

Egg-white house, old ache in the rafters, small as a button but yearning for zero: a sparrow parts the chimney and veers for my face. I wanted my nevers again, my immaculate touch-down to the durable granite of love too heavy to move: this gift, implacable bird's-eye sorrow reared from the original fairy tale's page— I don't like it. I offered no signature, my nature altered, and I'm over my hurricane. Rocking room to room, this bird threatens my gravity, threaded through like a pearl from the evening's stem. Didn't I break all eighty-eight bones of my compass, my wingspan spun from my awkwardness? This bird returns to the shell with monstrous wings, wings clumsy as shovels in a fist of dirt. It's covered with ashes, sloughing off cloud—caught in my hair, brown tumor bulged upside down on the floor to meet the applause: this blessing's too unwieldy. But open one door, one terriblegoodbye, hello—the sparrow flings like a shout for the trees.

Joanie Mackowski

Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Animals