limits to saying

Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea
the water disappears into itself,
hauling an ocean in.

Vortex, how you repeat
a single gesture,
come round to find only

yourself, a cup full of questions,
perhaps some curl of wisdom,
a bit of flung salt.

You hold an absence
at your center,
as if it were a life.

Richard Brostoff

Jack Gilbert

(via acircularjoy)

For ten years I would not say the name.
I said: episode. Said: setback, incident,
exacerbation—anything but be specific
in the way this is specific, not a theory
or description, but a diagnosis.
I said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue.
I said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm.
Remission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit.

But the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused.
There are two words. The last one means: scarring.
It means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired.
The first one means: repeating, or myriad,
consisting of many parts, increasing in number,
happening over and over, without end.

Cynthia Huntington

You say wind is only wind
and carries nothing nervous

in its teeth. I do not believe it.
I have seen leaves desist from moving

although the branches move,
and I believe a cyclone has secrets

the weather is ignorant of. I believe
in the violence of not knowing.

I’ve seen a river lose its course
and join itself again, watched it court

a stream and coax the stream
into its current, and I have seen rivers,

not unlike you, that failed to find
their way back. I believe the rapport

between water and sand, the advent
from mirror to face. I believe in rain

to cover what mourns, in hail that revives
and sleet that erodes, believe

whatever falls is a figure of rain,
and now I believe in torrents that take

everything down with them.
The sky calls it quits, or so I believe,

when air, or earth, or air has had
enough. I believe in disquiet,

the pressure it plies, believe a cloud
to govern the limits of night. I say I,

but little is left to say it, much less
mean it—and yet I do. Let there be

no mistake. I do not believe
things are reborn in fire.

I believe they’re consumed by fire,
and the fire has a life of its own.

Andrew Zawacki

Rita Dove

From inside the meadow, the fidget of

darkness that was, all along, birds
lifts abruptly, assembles: first a shield
thrown, too soon, too recklessly aloft,

then any door by a storm opened, in a
wind swinging, that someone—whom
nobody sees, whom nobody thinks,

therefore, to thank—passes, and—
not tenderly, just—responsibly, pulls
shut. The body first. Then the soul.

Carl Phillips

ndlelanhle:

Trees

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word —
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also — though there has never been
A critical tree — about the nature of things.

Howard Nemerov

(via hoidn)

In white,
the unpainted statue of the young girl
on the side altar
made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.

When my mother was in a hospital drying out,
or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,
I would slip in the side door,
light an aromatic candle,
and bargain for us both.
Or else I’d stare into the day-moon of that face
and, if I concentrated, fly.

Come down! come down!
she’d call, because I was so high.

Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age, I am standing at my older brother’s closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.

Robert Hass

I can tell you there is no word for this
in any language. I’ve asked

and everyone seems to confirm
its translatability.

Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-
simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-
exactly how one imagines it.

And somewhere between shuffle and fracture-
the silence of Scott Koch’s body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,
which is also the silence of stars.

~

They write their arc over faces
of stones staring up from riverbed,

and if you were a swarm of mayflies
hatching in the pre-dawn, coal-dark

aubade of a Susquehanna morning,
or if you were a freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out
with friends to gaze at stars,

you would know stars make a hell of a racket.
Like time, like death,

they scrawl their inscrutable marks
of light.

~

Say you are not a hatch of insects
or one of those kids wrecked and lovely,

their skins’ leaf-awkward sheen.
Though if you were, you’d be lost

in a fury of living and dying.

So you’ll have to trust the words
for the way his face twitched, went

stone-white, for how unbeautiful
his body comprehended night, words

for a breath untaken, the arrested
air in his lungs.

~

I give them to you piecemeal,
hand over hand, as if in aftermath

we build a city of bridges. I press each
against your mouth. They taste of salt.

They fall into place. They are beginning
to mean less and less. They only do

what they do. For anything else, you’ll need
something like a life, or memory-

car tires ticking over a bridge, wheel
of a flower cart knocking cobblestone,

seams, separations.

James Hoch

Belive me, I would sooner
speak true—
And not of the leaves as the once-green

Accomplices that, failing,
I shall most miss now,
October,

and how they sang to me
like water, singing
what was often enough

loss, eventually,
into choruses of Something
is lost, Something is still

gainable: You who call yourself
hunter, never lay
your bow down.

When was it all dreaming became
the one dream: myself
on the pier safe again, waving and

still waving, the body
at last separate—a vessel
steerable, but no longer

my hand steering—
and impossibly shackled
to it,

that god whose best trick
is to proffer madness as a balm
so sweet, who wouldn’t

pick it up,
who wouldn’t slather, in it,
his own body—hypnotic,

October…. And all the leaves
not failing—merely filling out entire
that space marked “Being Leaves.”

And all the lives they covered, laid
bare now, finding elsewhere
to hide, to continue

variously toward an end that
comes always, however much a small
other thing beneath

          Yes, inevitably, but
          not yet, there is still a distance

continues…. Whatever edges, at

this lean hour, into view,
it is not the god;
is not, by other messenger, the desired

release granted; it isn’t
the soul,
as too long imagined,

stepping into the visible world—

Listen: that doesn’t happen in this world.

Carl Phillips