More than the beetles turned russet,
sunset, dragging their shield, more than
the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon,
it’s the bees I love this time of year.
Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips
of too many flowers for one summer but
still must go on hunting, one secret
closing, another ensuing, picking
lock after lock, rapping the glass,
getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap,
almost winter, almost dark, reading far past
the last paragraph into the back blank page,
acknowledgments, and history of type.
Dean Young
Go, bring back the worthless stick.
“Of memory,” I almost added.
But she wouldn’t understand, naturally.
There is the word and the thing
adhering. So far so good.
Metaphor, drawer of drafting tools—
spill it on the study floor, animal says,
that we might at least see
how an expensive ruler tastes.
Yesterday I pissed and barked and ate
because that’s what waking means.
Thus has God solved time
for me—here, here. What you call
memory is a long and sweet,
delicious crack of wood in my teeth
I bring back and bring back and bring back.
Jeffrey Skinner
They were beside me,
they sat in black taffeta, in veils, leather chaps,
felt hats, lace. “Closer,” they call, “closer.”
“And my body I give to you,” “my body
I would betray for you.” The sun akimbo
to the plated horizon sinks, a goblet moon
above sea slowly rises
If we could talk: “Moon,” I’d say,
“your light’s too elegant, too old, useless.
In it, I could brush my donkey, polish apples,
sew nets. You are strong and ay, I have
already begun to fray.”
I’m past the mid-haven,
have heard your stories, have seen the bark
twist into a face, the bole of wood speak,
have seen the leaves run along the river’s edge,
fairy hedges.
I was beside me as architecture,
solid as a house, a hovel made of sticks,
a shack whose chimney is a cloud at dusk,
a broken shack stove in by a single vista,
a room where countenance continues to fall,
a retinue of hair.
2. (visitation)
There were words in the garage
broken against anvils, in pieces.
There was a forge, flames from a coal oven.
In the dream there were broken windows,
mold on walls, green light from brush, from trees.
It was summer, late in the day, and the banging.
The hammer and anvil rocked a rhythm,
rocked and rang throughout the forest.
You had come from a far place,
a desert, I knew this from your eyes.
You mapped a diagram with grease
to explain the history of that place.
3. (solo guitar)
It was a structure-
cactus flowers, lipstick
the dry scent of sand,
sage and everywhere
cottonwood fluff.
The day was the day we kissed,
the sky, bent for always
and a disc of fire warmed us.
There was narrative, a future,
screen doors and pickups,
a dirt-shimmied vista.
Things as they are-
upon a time
and goes like this.
4. (song)
“I know where you are because I knows
where the sun is”
in all its disguises
says the open mouth - agape
By the time of this speech
the original has vanished
without promising emancipation
The sound is a body
This sound is my body
5. (duet)
“And my body”
What ground is this?
“I would give to you”
Whose sky?
“And my body”
At whose table are we called to order?
“I would betray for you”
And what about order?
“Say it is nameless”
That we are nameless
“dust?”
and the shape of our walk become pages
become pavement underfoot
and overhead nothing, so clear that it
might finally break us, and that is good
The great-coats walk by, let them.
6. (the dance)
To walk, was walking, in the capital
a hand composing in air, in rain
was raining, on sheets, notes dissolved
into pools, tides unsettling a coin
at the bottom of the cistern.
And so to you
a song, a palm open to the elements:
paper, rock.
Is there a score for the treatise
you compose in rain
for the voice as it comes
out of blankness
liberty?
Tell of the way
light enters your rooms, quiet
alone with your book
in your book, friend
it is raining,
a broken line
picked clean
by sparrows at dusk
invisible against dusk.
7. (post script)
Many days since this letter, I want to report
I have seen the seeds outside my factory open,
have seen the door to my apartment broken,
heard footsteps by the window,
tasted the small charge of power, which is bitter.
“At sunrise I saw a fire, I have it to live.”
“And I can never believe how much
I want you. I can never believe it.”
It is late. The cicadas make a racket in my ear.
What will they sing, say of our words. Shaping dust,
a room out of air, an empty room, a room
whose breeze is only song, a body when no one sees it.
Peter Gizzi
I passed through the small hills
of my mother’s hips one cold morning
and never looked back, until now, cutting
her hard toenails the yellow of blanched corn,
sitting her with her on the bed’s edge,
combing out the tuft of hair at the crown
of her head where it ratted up as she slept,
her thumbs locked into her fists, a gesture
as old as she is, her bald knees fallen together
beneath a blue nightgown. The stroke
took whole pages of words, random years
torn from the calendar, the names of roses
leaning out over her driveway, Cadenza,
Great Western, American Beauty. She can’t
think, can’t drink her morning tea, do her
crossword puzzle in ink. She’s afraid
of everything, the sound of the front door
opening, light falling through the blinds–
she pulls her legs up so the bright bars
won’t touch her feet. I help her
with the buttons on her sweater. She looks
hard at me and says the word sleeve.
Exactly, I tell her and her face relaxes
for the first time in weeks. I lay down
next to her on the flowered sheets and tell her
a story about the day she was born, head
first into a hard world, The Great Depression,
shanties, Hoovervilles, railroads and unions.
I tell her about Amelia Earhart and she asks
Air? and points to the ceiling, says Heart?
and points to her chest. Yes, I say. I sing
Cole Porter songs, Brother, Can You Spare
a Dime. When I recite lines from Gone
with the Wind she sits up and says Potatoes!
and I say, Right again. I read her Sandburg,
some Frost, and she closes her eyes. I say yes,
yes, and tuck her in. It’s summer. She’s tired.
No one knows where she’s been.
Dorianne Laux
Nobody steps into the same river twice.
The same river is never the same
Because that is the nature of water.
Similarly your changing metabolism
Means that you are no longer you.
The cells die, and the precise
Configuration of the heavenly bodies
When she told you she loved you
Will not come again in this lifetime.
You will tell me that you have executed
A monument more lasting than bronze;
But even bronze is perishable.
Your best poem, you know the one I mean,
The very language in which the poem
Was written, and the idea of language,
All these things will pass away in time.
Derek Mahon
Nothing explains the pull and lurch of the sky,
how, sooner or later, each of us goes to answer;
no logic stills the heartbeat in the earth:
it never stops, it knits within the bone,
a world around the world we understand
waiting to be recovered and given names:
this gravity, this lifeblood in the thaw,
this salt of love, this mercury in absence.
John Burnside
