September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
3 tags
September Song
by Geoffrey Hill
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts...
August 2011
4 posts
3 tags
To Have Without Holding
by Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of...
3 tags
The Primer
by Christina Davis
She said, I love you. He said, Nothing. (As if there were just one of each word and the one who used it, used it up). In the history of language the first obscenity was silence.
2 tags
Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age
by Margaret Atwood
I know I change have changed but whose is this vapid face pitted and vast, rotund suspended in empty paper as though in a telescope the granular moon I rise from my chair pulling against gravity I turn away and go out into the garden I revolve among the vegetables, my head ponderous reflecting the sun in shadows from the pocked ravines cut in my cheeks, my eye- sockets 2...
3 tags
Last Picnic
by Charles Simic
Before the fall rains come, Let’s have one more picnic, Now that the leaves are turning color And the grass is still green in places.
Bread, cheese and some black grapes Ought to be enough, And a bottle of red wine to toast the crows Puzzled to find us sitting here.
If it gets cold—and it will—I’ll hold you close. Night will come early. We’ll watch the sky, hoping for a full...
July 2011
7 posts
4 tags
Ditty of First Desire
by Federico García Lorca
In the green morning I wanted to be a heart. A heart.
And in the ripe evening I wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale.
(Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.)
In the vivid morning I wanted to be myself. A heart.
And at the evening’s end I wanted to be my voice. A nightingale.
Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.
...
3 tags
(once like a spark)
by e. e. cummings
(once like a spark) if strangers meet life begins— not poor not rich (only aware) kind neither nor cruel (only complete) i not not you not possible; only truthful —truthfully,once if strangers(who deep our most are selves)touch: forever (and so to dark)
3 tags
A Girl
by Ezra Pound
The tree has entered my hands, the sap has ascended my arms, the tree has grown in my breast - downward, the branches grow out of me, like arms. Tree you are, moss you are, you are violets with wind above them. A child - so high - you are, and all this is folly to the world.
1 tag
Visible World, Richard Siken
diamondnight:
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall. The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. You had not expected this, the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light pummeling you in a stream of fists. You raised your hand to your face as if to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light streamed straight to the bone, as if you were the small room...
2 tags
Love's Secret
by William Blake
Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears, Ah! she did depart!
Soon as she was gone from me, A traveler came by, Silently, invisibly He took her with a sigh.
2 tags
The Gardener (41)
by Rabindranath Tagore
I long to speak the deepest words I have to say to you; but I dare not, for fear you should laugh. That is why I laugh at myself and shatter my secret in jest. I make light of my pain, afraid you should do so.
I long to tell you the truest words I have to say to you; but I dare not, being afraid that you would not believe them. That is why I disguise them in untruth,...
7 tags
Forty Years by Mary Oliver
pausesandsilences:
for forty years the sheets of white paper have passed under my hands and I have tried to improve their peaceful emptiness putting down little curls little shafts of letters words little flames leaping not one page was less to me than fascinating discursive full of cadence its pale nerves hiding in the curves of the Qs behind the soldierly Hs in the webbed feet...
June 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Like Kerosene
by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Yes, it’s daily that we move into each other—but this morning I was separate even from myself— my hands were shovels, I had mosquito netting for hair, and the insect beating against the night was my heart. My name was hallow and the sky was made of shale when I walked into a part of morning I’ve never seen: the sky still heavy, still smoldering with the nightmares of...
2 tags
The circle game
by Margaret Atwood
i
The children on the lawn joined hand to hand go round and round each arm going into
the next arm, around full circle until it comes back into each of the single bodies again
They are singing, but not to each other: their feet move almost in time to the singing
We can see the concentration on their faces, their eyes fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them.
...
May 2011
6 posts
2 tags
After Love
by Maxine W. Kumin
Afterward, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries. These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in. Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership. The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down. Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the...
2 tags
Firework
by Stacie Cassarino
The day my body caught fire the woodland darkened. The horizon was a sea of maids, rushing to piece me back into a girl. Out of the girl came yellow flowers, came stem & sepal. You never happened, they said. The meadow was a narration of lessness. Inside the corral, horses fell from the impact of lightning. They broke down. I heard gunshots in my sleep. I was a...
1 tag
The Illiterate
by William Meredith
Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him, ...
Daphne
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Why do you follow me?— Any moment I can be Nothing but a laurel-tree. Any moment of the chase I can leave you in my place A pink bough for your embrace. Yet if over hill and hollow Still it is your will to follow, I am off;—to heel, Apollo!
1 tag
The Letter by Amy Lowell
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper Like draggled fly’s legs, What can you tell of the flaring moon Through the oak leaves? Of or my uncurtained window and the bare floor Spattered with moonlight? Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them Of blossoming hawthorns, And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness Beneath my hand.
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my...
1 tag
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp...
April 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Lost in Translation
by Gabriel Gomez
The kinship with those humans who speak directly to me is webbed to the ceiling. An economy of satellites, a cosmos, where revision we think comes without the benefit of our witness. A peculiar time when stars with modest faces sleep in enormity and mirror death like a child’s infirmity that despite socio-economics is still an illness, definitive as fading paint ...
1 tag
A Poplar
by William Faulkner
Why do you shiver there Between the white river and the road? You are not cold, With the sun light dreaming about you; And yet you lift your pliant supplicating arms as though To draw clouds from the sky to hide your slenderness.
You are a young girl Trembling in the throes of ecstatic modesty, A white objective girl Whose clothing has been forcibly take away from...
February 2011
6 posts
1 tag
Earbud
by Bill Holm
Earbud—a tiny marble sheathed in foam to wear like an interior earring so you can enjoy private noises wherever you go, protected from any sudden silence. Only check your batteries, then copy a thousand secret songs and stories on the tiny pod you carry in your pocket. You are safe now from other noises made by other people, other machines, by chance, noises you have not...
2 tags
Sonnet XIV by Pablo Neruda
Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more that this white head that I hold tightly as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among the yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as...
1 tag
Pulse by Stacy Kidd
This is not how hearts begin to beat, in twos sitting in trees. Soaked birds say we’re cold, and go inside. No one around us has a problem breathing. Whole branches collapse under the weight of ice and skin. Nations cave in the time it takes a heart to stop beating. And what of surrender? The beggar’s touch? The beating of a bird’s wings can sound like the start of...
1 tag
jimmypage:
F. Scott Fitzgerald reads Ode to a...
1 tag
Love is a Dog From Hell quotes by Charles Bukowski
She sends photos of herself sitting upon a rock by the ocean alone and damned. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?
January 2011
16 posts
1 tag
The Wormwood Star by Czeslaw Milosz
starsmending:
When Thomas brought news that the house I was born in no longer exists,
Neither the lane nor the park sloping to the river, nothing,
I had a dream of return. Multicoloured. Joyous. I was able to fly.
And the trees were even higher than in childhood, because they had been growing during all the years since they...
1 tag
Today It Seemed I Had Nothing to Say by Todd Boss
that hadn’t been said already— my head full of moldy hay and feelings of futility—
until you asked me what it was like, for a change, to have no barred owl brooding above the barn,
and then I went stealing again, softly, softly up the worn wood loft ladder, hoping to startle up a glimpse of something
that even now might heft itself lightly through the mouth of the mow, and...
1 tag
Omnivore by Allan Peterson
Perhaps I could even eat candles and survive the deep frozen ocean on my fats and waxes, meet rat fish on the abyssal plain, befriend the tubeworms and garden eels, arise at night to shine back at the moon that endlessly slaves for the calendar. For now I encompass the alkaloids, transformation hangs on my breath. One night I ate the entire bedroom to lace and she unfurled her leaves to...
1 tag
When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be by John...
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel,...
1 tag
Smoke by Moira Egan
“If you were smoke,” he said, “you’d be the smoke that rages from a forest fire, close and wild and dangerous.” Here ends the quote, but not the source of it, and me morose because I’ve always tried to be the smoke that billows gentle in the temple, joss or sandalwood, the incense that’s the yoke to help us get to god. For me, the clos- est feeling...
1 tag
Love’s Not the Way to Treat a Friend by Richard...
Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t want to see your eyes forgotten on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse of those who can remember nothing. Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I don’t want to see you end up that way with your body being poured like wounded marble into the architecture of those who make bridges out of crippled birds. Love’s not the way...
1 tag
In Her Sweetness Where She Folds My Wounds by...
In her sweetness where she folds my wounds there is a flower that bees cannot afford. It is too rich for them and would change their wings into operas and all their honey into the lonesome maps of a nonexistent California county. When she has finished folding all my wounds she puts them away in a dresser where the drawers smell like the ghost of a bicycle. Afterwards I rage at her: demanding that...
1 tag
Training by Sarah J. Sloat
I’m thinking of living forever. I think that way I might finally get my gig straight and solve the crosswords. I’m considering outlasting everyone although I know I’d have a hard time explaining not having read Ulysses past the first chapter. I don’t care if death smells like nutmeg. I don’t buy the plot-line on eternal rest. By staying alive someday I might manage to hail a taxi, and...
1 tag
Rumi
I want to see you. Know your voice. Recognize you when you first come ‘round the corner. Sense your scent when I come into a room you’ve just left. Know the lift of your heel, the glide of your foot. Become familiar with the way you purse your lips then let them part, just the slightest bit, when I lean in to your space and kiss you. I want to know the joy of how you whisper ...
1 tag
How Little We Deserve The Morning by Diane Wakoski
Some prefer coffee, thick as violets in spring, but my preference is a pot of Assam tea whose warm breath wafts around me more like lilies of the valley. How little we deserve the morning, yet need its charity of renewal, beggars, clasping our round bowls of liquid, holding morning’s moisture against the scratchy expanse of lengthening day. My own dry crumbling parts steep,...
1 tag
Staying by Laura O'Callaghan White
You keep me in a little pearl, barefoot, unlucky, tasting of apricots; I look and I think, There’s something about you that I adore, and isn’t freedom expensive when you pay with the shackles you love.
1 tag
Poet's Obligation by Pablo Neruda
To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman or street or mine or harsh prison cell: to him I come, and, without speaking or looking, I arrive and open the door of his prison, and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent, a great fragment of thunder sets in motion the rumble of the planet and the foam, the raucous...
1 tag
I left this morning by Peter Bland
I left this morning saying ‘I love you’ as if setting out for some unknown country instead of the corner shop. I wanted you to be sure, in case this time - out of, say, 10,000 departures I never made it back: although after 50 years together, 2 countries, 3 children, and several former journeys that would put this one to shame you’d think there’d be no need to...
1 tag
The Little Ghost by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I knew her for a little ghost That in my garden walked; The wall is high — higher than most — And the green gate was locked.
And yet I did not think of that Till after she was gone — I knew her by the broad white hat, All ruffled, she had on.
By the dear ruffles round her feet, By her small hands that hung In their lace mitts, austere and sweet, Her...
1 tag
I Don’t Get Tired of You by Rumi
I don’t get tired of you. Don’t grow weary of being compassionate toward me!
All this thirst equipment must surely be tired of me, the waterjar, the water carrier.
I have a thirsty fish in me that can never find enough of what it’s thirsty for!
Show me the way to the ocean! Break these half-measures, these small containers.
All this fantasy and grief.
Let my house be drowned in the...
December 2010
12 posts
1 tag
arkoftheache asked: Is it just me or does this blog have a criminally low amount of likes/reblogs/etc ?
1 tag
Ex Libris by Holly Iglesias
Unlike the sock who mistook static for love, love, passion is never lost. We may empty the house, stripping art from the walls, boxing cups and diction- aries, albums and coats, but the fervour of our days will remain, sparks rid- ing the air like dust before settling on the new owner’s book, the story changed each time she averts her eyes.
1 tag
Wish by Helen Ivory
Talk soft to me, talk gently as the night shuffles its papers in high offices and hilltops.
Talk low like cattle, breathe hay-scented words and I will show you the book kept inside my coat,
already learnt by heart by the nightjars that churr to each other before daylight setting the darkness home.
1 tag
Going by Michael Chitwood
This is what was bequeathed us: This earth the beloved left And, leaving, Left to us.
No other world But this one: Willows and the river And the factory With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here. No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions: Turn me into song; sing me awake.