limits to saying

from Colophon

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


In Kansas

The moon coming back,
your breath returning,
love replenishing itself.

        Allison Funk

I Datura

It’s warm enough
to sit out on the porch

till late:
             the windows
all along this street

burning out
                   one by one
till only the moon

and the saw-toothed pumpkins
set out in the yards

are visible
                 as if the town
had finally succumbed

to magic
               — and what if the moon
and the ocean

are one long
conversation?

surely the same applies
to prairie
               something tidal in the grass

coming to light
                         first here
then out amongst

the angel’s trumpets,
ice-white in the dark,

a wavelength
given form along a fence

and asked to stand
for spirits not yet known

but sensed
                  the way the wind
belongs to us

if only for a moment
                                  as it fills
a sleepless head with music
                                             or a taste

for distance
when we rise to go inside

and something else arrives
to claim the dark.

II Moon

These are the autumn nights
we learn from books

a Chinese moon
suspended in the sky

our bodies warm
and graceful in the dark

as if we had stepped sideways
into something

animal: the new scent on our hands
conjured from grass and water

and flecked with blood;
the gradual shift

from one form to the next
so visible in every glint and slide

it makes me wonder
why a soul would want

the same again,
why anyone would go

to life eternal
given all this sweet

proliferation:
salt to dreaming salt,

the long exchange
of memory and warmth

that guides the Arctic tern
from pole to pole

as surely as it guides us
to the bank.

There is nothing we know
for sure
              and nothing much

we care to know
beyond this moment’s span,

the one thing we might have said
if we had to speak

is how the body
leaves itself behind

in rivers and storms,
caresses and empty rooms,

and each of us knows the other
as water knows

the bodies it transforms
and then surrenders:

fingers, the curve of the throat,
the windless

undertow of watergreen
and void

that waits to be re-entered
like a vow.

It makes me wonder
why we ever think

of anything
beyond this ebb and flow

III Salt

or why Xenocrates,
that sullen Greek,

would picture us
as shadows on the moon

between the life we have
and that to come.

I wonder if he thought
our other souls

were real, half-human,
standing in the light,

dusted
with silver

and barely a flicker of wings
at their crippled shoulders,

I wonder
if they seemed to him

benevolent, or ghostly,
true, or false,

gathered together
for warmth and conversation,

twins to the living souls
they would replace,

remembering
the fragrance of a rose,

the weight of snow,
or how an apple falls

forever
on the cusp of afternoon.

Surely he would have
known enough to guess

that souls live in the dark,
like fleas, or mice,

and these, our other selves,
are neither vague nor pale,

but utterly substantial
when they swarm

in hundreds,
on the far side of the moon,

cunning, feral,
waiting to be born,

no more or less like us
than rocks, or sand,

but marked with a slipknot of blood
for the world to come:

its salt and rain, its feasts,
its widowhood.

John Burnside


In Autumn

The extinct animals are still looking for home
Their eyes full of cotton

Now they will
Never arrive

The stars are like that

Moving on without memory
Without having been near turning elsewhere climbing
Nothing the wall

The hours their shadows

The lights are going on in the leaves nothing to do with evening

Those are cities
Where I had hoped to live.

Mark Irwin


October (section I)

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body
rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden
harrowed and planted—

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,
didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice
for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth
safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,
weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

Louise Glück


Fetch

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


Masters of the Cante Jondo

1.

                            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


Mother’s Day

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


Heraclitus on Rivers

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


from By Kautokeino

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


A Mathematics of Breathing

I.

Think of any of several arched
colonnades to a cathedral,

how the arches
like fountains, say,

or certain limits in calculus,
when put to the graph paper’s crosstrees,

never quite meet any promised heaven,
instead at their vaulted heights

falling down to the abruptly ending
base of the next column,

smaller, the one smaller
past that, at last

dying, what is
called perspective.

This is the way buildings do it.

II.

You have seen them, surely, busy paring
the world down to what it is mostly,

proverb: so many birds in a bush.
Suddenly they take off, and at first

it seems your particular hedge itself
has sighed deeply,

that the birds are what come,
though of course it is just the birds

leaving one space for others.
After they’ve gone, put your ear to the bush,

listen. There are three sides: the leaves’
releasing of something, your ear where it

finds it, and the air in between, to say
equals. There is maybe a fourth side,

not breathing.

III.

In One Thousand and One Nights,
there are only a thousand,

Scheherazade herself is the last one,
for the moment held back,

for a moment all the odds hang even.
The stories she tells she tells mostly

to win another night of watching the prince
drift into a deep sleeping beside her,

the chance to touch one more time
his limbs, going,

gone soft already with dreaming.
When she tells her own story,

Breathe in,
breathe out

is how it starts.

Carl Phillips


Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat
-- Robert Frost
"Cento" Copyright © Andrew Brinker 2011.