limits to saying

Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard

Sat, 25 May 2013 06:33:05 -0400

I’m here, one fat cherry
              blossom blooming like a clod,

one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread,
              so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer

at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say,
              That’s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling,

if I could I’d gin, I’d bargain, I’d take a little troll
              this moolit night, let you radish me awhile,

let you gag and confound me. How much I’ve struggled
              with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless

distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation
              continue to make me

your faithful indefile. I’m lonely. I’ve turned
              all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you,

My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife,
              so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities,

these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten
              with this heaven never meant for, never heard from.

You’ve said we’re each pockmarked like a golf course
              with what can’t be said of us, bred in us,

isn’t our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you
              I’ve stars, I’ve true blue depths, have learned to use

the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping
              devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze.

Everyone knows love is just a euphemism
              for you’ve failed me anyway. So screw me.

Bartering Yam, regardless of want I’m nothing
              without scope, hope, nothing

without your possibility. So let’s laugh
              like the thieves we are together, the sieves:

you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud,
              my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out,

revisible, spell-bound.
              Hello, joy. I’m thirsty. I’m Pasty Rectum.

In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself
              with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue.

I just wanted to write again and say
              how much I’ve failed you.

Paisley Rekdal

Grief

Sat, 11 May 2013 08:00:06 -0400

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

Music Is Only In The Piano When It’s Played

Sat, 11 May 2013 02:19:00 -0400

We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices
of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells,
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

Jack Gilbert

Multiple Sclerosis

Sat, 04 May 2013 22:00:32 -0400

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

Credo

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 05:59:18 -0400

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

Demeter's Prayer to Hades

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:48:53 -0400

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire and its edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.
Now for the first time
i see clearly the trail you planted,
what ground opened to waste,
though you dreamed a wealth
of flowers.
There are no curses, only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
And so I give up this fate, too.
Believe in yourself,
go ahead—see where it gets you.

Rita Dove

from Retreat

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 01:32:33 -0400

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: TreesTo be a giant and keep quiet about it,To stay in one’s own place;To stand for the...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:06:46 -0400

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

Our Lady of the Snows

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 03:10:13 -0400

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

Sound of a Body Falling off a Bridge

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 21:23:45 -0500

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

Autumn. A Mixed Music.

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:13:00 -0500

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

Christmas Carols

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:25:09 -0500

Children do not always mean
hope. To some they mean despair.
This woman with her hair cut off
so she could not hang herself
threw herself from a rooftop, thirty
times raped & pregnant by the enemy
who did this to her. This one had her pelvis
broken by hammers so the child
could be extracted. Then she was thrown away,
useless, a ripped sack. This one
punctured herself with kitchen skewers
and bled to death on a greasy
oilcloth table, rather than bear
again and past the limit. There
is a limit, though who knows
when it may come? Nineteenth-century
ditches are littered with small wax corpses
dropped there in terror. A plane
swoops too low over the fox farm
and the mother eats her young. This too
is Nature. Think twice then
before you worship turned furrows, or pay
lip service to some full belly
or other, or single out one girl to play
the magic mother, in blue
& white, up on that pedestal,
perfect & intact, distinct
from those who aren’t. Which means
everyone else. It’s a matter
of food & available blood. If mother-
hood is sacred, put
your money where your mouth is. Only
then can you expect the coming
down to the wrecked & shimmering earth
of that miracle you sing
about, the day
when every child is a holy birth.

Margaret Atwood

from My faith-based initiative

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 01:57:52 -0500

I don’t know how to be human, Lord, to be animal,
don’t know what poem to write my friend, how to shape
the light of the letters on the screen, if dying
soon, now, all of us now, this instant is the best thing
we could do for each other, the planet, the stars
coming so far to touch us, sending their atoms so far
to touch us, or fight, just kill whatever, whomever
is in reach, don’t know if I should eat or kiss Your face.

Sometimes when I touch my wife, I am overcome, I want
to bite her, want no edge, no border between us, I shake.

Is this how You want me to pray, Lord, what if everything
we do is love, every horrible thing we do is love,
and the tiny gestures of notes beside the phone,
and blowing on soup, what if there are no distinctions,
and we, who are nothing but the impulse to distinguish,
to cut one thing from another, are wrong,
if we should have stopped after one word, one sound,
the sigh of breath when making love, of one body
pushing into another, forcing air out, I don’t know
if the tongue of that sound is all I can say, Lord,
don’t know why my hands are still moving, are these keys
touching You, Lord, are my fingerprints on Your skin?

Bob Hicok

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:18:34 -0500

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

Marty McConnell

Honey Hush

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:28:00 -0500

I.
It will be as if: fur. As if trust
could be fur. Imagine,
bees coat the sugar body

that is yours…
see how your body hums?
Say you love them. Now. You must

say you love them. And I would, and
—I would, until it was true
almost, and then true:

I could love the bees,
and neither mind nor be surprised
by their weight, slow as drones

and as deliberate, upon me.

II.
Every fall, still, the deer swim the cold channel
between the island whose name I don’t know
and this island.

Their instinct is: they need more; and that, here,
they will find it. From the shore, children
make of their small hands small binoculars,

and guess at which ones will drown.
For some of the deer always drown.
They lose, I think, whatever for a deer

hope can be. And it weighs something,
that loss. How else understand it,
this swimmer, that one, there and then

not, except as when sometimes the body
meets a weight sudden, unlooked-for,
and large, the way persuasion is large—

or despair: no struggle attends that descent.

Carl Phillips

from Quarto

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 05:30:37 -0500

I’ll tell you about the mermaid
Sheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancing
Sings like the sea with a choked throat
Knives straight up her spine
Lancing every step
There is a price
There is a price
For every gift
And all advice

Adrienne Rich

Cyclops

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 03:01:10 -0500

You, going along the path,
mosquito-doped, with no moon, the flashlight
a single orange eye

unable to see what is beyond
the capsule of your dim
sight, what shape

contracts to a heart
with terror, bumps
among the leaves, what makes
a bristling noise like a fur throat

Is it true you do not wish to hurt them?

Is it true you have no fear?
Take off your shoes then,
let your eyes go bare,
swim in their darkness as in a river

do not disguise
yourself in armour.

They watch you from hiding:
you are a chemical
smell, a cold fire, you are
giant and indefinable

In their monstrous night
thick with possible claws
where danger is not knowing,

you are the hugest monster.

Margaret Atwood

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 04:28:06 -0500

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Jack Gilbert
RIP 13 November 2012

Artless

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 03:36:01 -0400

is my heart. A stranger
berry there never was,
tartless.
Gone sour in the sun,
in the sunroom or moonroof,
roofless.
No poetry. Plain. No
fresh, special recipe
to bless.
All I’ve ever made
with these hands
and life, less
substance, more rind.
Mostly rim and trim,
meatless
but making much smoke
in the old smokehouse,
no less.
Fatted from the day,
overripe and even
toxic at eve. Nonetheless,
in the end, if you must
know, if I must bend,
waistless,
to that excruciation.
No marvel, no harvest
left me speechless,
yet I find myself
somehow with heart,
aloneless.

With heart,
fighting fire with fire,
fightless.
That loud hub of us,
meat stub of us, beating us
senseless.
Spectacular in its way,
its way of not seeing,
congealing dayless
but in everydayness.
In that hopeful haunting
(a lesser
way of saying
in darkness) there is
silencelessness
for the pressing question.
Heart, what art you?
War, star, part? Or less:
playing a part, staying apart
from the one who loves,
loveless.

Brenda Shaughnessy

My ever after

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 03:48:31 -0400

The word paraiso is on my table, Portuguese
for paradise. I will:

put it in a red bowl with raspberries
and yogurt, eat it with cinnamon, eat it
from the vagina of my wife;

put it in the shotgun and shoot it
into the fog of the mountain, the breath
of the sky.

Now I look at my shoes, which never struck off
on their own, never found a place to stand;
at the illiterate bookcase; at my hands
that aren’t wings but dream as feathers do.

It would not be a place where bleeding stops,
where screams wear mittens, where skulls
apply blush, it would not be a place.

There would be one thing different from here—
the last maple leaf doesn’t fall, stays
the winter, waving;
all of the voices in the hospital
are flutes for one second, nine floors
of music; once, you get to turn the clock
back three minutes, once
you get a practice kiss, once
you’re allowed to walk
across the bottom of the sea and on

the other side, someone waits
with a towel, someone who likes
to talk about slot cars and how the fragrances
get into the little bottles and how

the different shadows from different kinds
of storms could be arranged
in a scrapbook if we’d think of them
as our children and take their pictures:

the camera that would do this
would see that it’s not all darkness,
that there’s light hidden in the terror.
And not lie about the terror.

Bob Hicok