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Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata
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| Kitchenette Building - Gwen Brooks |
[Dec 24 2009 / 1:35pm] |
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
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| li-young lee: a table in the wilderness |
[Dec 22 2009 / 10:25am] |
A Table in the Wilderness
Li-Young Lee
I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.
I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.
That's my picture of thinking.
If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it's a picture of speaking.
If I draw a second bird
in the woman's lap, it’s ministering.
A third flying below her feet.
Now it's singing.
Or erase the birds
make ivy branching
around the woman's ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.
You'll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.
As for me, many small hands
issuing from a waterfall
means silence
mothered me.
The hours hung like fruit in night's tree
means when I close my eyes
and look inside me,
a thousand open eyes
span the moment of my waking.
Meanwhile, the clock
adding a grain to a grain
and not getting bigger,
subtracting a day from a day
and never having less, means the honey
lies awake all night
inside the honeycomb
wondering who its parents are.
And even my death isn't my death
unless it's the unfathomed brow
of a nameless face.
Even my name isn't my name
except the bees assemble
a table to grant a stranger
light and moment in a wilderness
of Who? Where?
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| There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves | James Kavanaugh |
[Dec 21 2009 / 10:37am] |
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There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant's profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant's world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant's world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love.
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| Love: Beginnings | C.K. Williams |
[Dec 20 2009 / 10:44pm] |
They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much
frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity
and unity they make--
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter
at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of
being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in
flame into the sexual--
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that filling
of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again,
stamping in its stall.
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| who knows if the moon's | ee cummings |
[Dec 20 2009 / 10:09pm] |
who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should
get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people
than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where
always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves
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| Water | Mary Oliver |
[Dec 20 2009 / 12:27pm] |
What is the vitality and necessity
of clean water?
Ask the man who is ill, and who is lifiting
his lips to the cup.
Ask the forest.
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| Radiator | Connie Wanek |
[Dec 20 2009 / 5:23am] |
Mittens are drying on the radiator,
boots nearby, one on its side.
Like some monstrous segmented insect
the radiator elongates under the window.
Or it is a beast with many shoulders
domesticated in the Ice Age.
How many years it takes
to move from room to room!
Some cage their radiators
but this is unnecessary
as they have little desire to escape.
Like turtles they are quite self-contained.
If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness
we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.
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| Suppose | Chris Powici |
[Dec 20 2009 / 4:47am] |
Suppose all we know of love
is a tiny greenhouse
falling slowly to bits
between a crab apple tree
and the railway's nettled bank;
a frail rickety eden
where little spiders weave
little dewy webs
on a scrunched-up Silk Cut packet
mouldering in a corner
under the tomatoes.
And suppose all we know of the world
is how the greenhouse creaks and sighs
in the cool dawn rain
and crab apple leaves brush against
the stone-cracked glass
while love grows red and ripe and soft
and summers pass like trains.
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| No More Ghosts | Robert Graves |
[Dec 19 2009 / 2:34pm] |
The patriarchal bed with four posts
Which was a harbourage of ghosts
Is hauled out from the attic glooms
And cut to wholesome furniture for wholesome rooms;
Where they (the ghosts) confused, abused, thinned,
Forgetful how they sighed and sinned,
Cannot disturb our ordered ease
Except as summer dust tickles the nose to sneeze.
We are restored to simple days, are free
From cramps of dark necessity,
And one another recognize
By an immediate love that signals at our eyes.
No new ghosts can appear. Their poor cause
Was that time freezes, and time thaws;
But here only such loves can last
As do not ride upon the weathers of the past.
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| Animals | Frank O'Hara |
[Dec 19 2009 / 10:36am] |
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
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| The Peace That So Lovingly Decends | Noelle Kocot |
[Dec 19 2009 / 12:28am] |
"You" have transformed into "my loss."
The nettles in your vanished hair
Restore the absolute truth
Of warring animals without a haven.
I know, I'm as pathetic as a railroad
Without tracks. In June, I eat
The lonesome berries from the branches.
What can I say, except the forecast
Never changes. I sleep without you,
And the letters that you sent
Are now faded into failed lessons
Of an animal that's found a home. This.
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| Evening Man by Frederick Seidel |
[Dec 18 2009 / 10:08pm] |
The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
The same sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both men wish they could annul their marriage vows.
This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
Who does the things most people only dream about.
He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
You can't drink that much port and not have gout.
In point of fact, it is arthritis.
His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
To be a candidate for higher office,
You have to practice drastic openness.
You have to practice looking like thin air
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.
Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we're always headed.
Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.
Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless--
Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.
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| Ignorance | Philip Larkin |
[Dec 18 2009 / 1:30am] |
Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.
Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,
Even to wear such knowledge—for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions—
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.
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| Identity Crisis // F.D. Reeve |
[Dec 16 2009 / 11:03pm] |
He was urged to prepare for success: "You never can tell,
he was told over and over; "others have made it;
one dare not presume to predict. You never can tell.
Who’s Who in America lists the order of cats
in hunting, fishing, bird-watching, farming,
domestic service--the dictionary order of cats
who have made it. Those not in the book are beyond the pale.
Not to succeed in you chosen profession is unthinkable.
Either you make it or--you’re beyond the pale.
Do you understand?"
"No," he shakes his head.
"Are you ready to forage for freedom?"
"No," he adds,
"I mean, why is a cat always shaking his head?
Because he’s thinking: who am I? I am not
only one-ninth of myself. I always am
all of the selves I have been and will be but am not."
"The normal cat," I tell him, "soon adjusts
to others and to changing circumstances;
he makes his way the way he soon adjusts."
"I can’t," he says, "perhaps because I’m blue,
big-footed, lop-eared, socially awkward, impotent,
and I drink too much, whether because I’m blue
or because I like it, who knows. I want to escape
at five o’clock into an untouchable world
where the top is the bottom and everyone wants to escape
from the middle, everyone, every day. I mean,
I have visions of two green eyes rising
out of the ocean, blinking, knowing what I mean."
"Never mind the picture, repeat after me
the self’s creed. What he tells you you
tells me and I repeats. Now, after me:
I love myself, I wish I would live well.
Your gift of love breaks through my self-defeat.
All prizes are blue. No cat admits defeat.
The next time that he lives he will live well."
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| Stephanie Bolster - Untitled |
[Dec 15 2009 / 3:48pm] |
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there,
you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep,
the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose.
You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks
the beginning of real. I'm showing you this because
I'm sick of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands,
seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres.
I'm coming with you because I fear you'll trip
over the string that marks the beginning, you'll lie across the border
and with that view--fields of intricately seeded grain and chiselled mountains,
the cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm--you'll forget your feet,
numb in straw and indefinite cow dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther.
My fingers weave so close between yours because I've been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it has not made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,
on the other side of the property line, they're for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by sudden thirst, they're
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second.
----
(The first line is one of John Ashbery's "37 Haiku" in A Wave.)
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| Blues // Elizabeth Alexander |
[Dec 14 2009 / 5:30pm] |
I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, 'til
my face is creased and swollen,
'til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father's money.
To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worked hard to give you what you have.
There is no sin but sloth. Burn
to a wick and keep moving.
I avoided sleep for years,
up at night replaying
evening news stories about
nearby jailbreaks, fat people
who ate fried chicken and woke up
dead. In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V's of birds flying in formation,
or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.
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| A Lady |
[Dec 14 2009 / 8:01pm] |
You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.
My vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.
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| Alice Walker // Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts |
[Dec 14 2009 / 1:33pm] |
Never offer your heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heart meat
delicious
but not rare
who sucks the juices
drop by drop
and bloody-chinned
grins
like a God.
Never offer your heart
to a heart gravy lover.
Your stewed, overseasoned
heart consumed
he will sop up your grief
with bread
and send it shuttling
from side to side
in his mouth like bubble gum.
If you find yourself
in love
with a person
who eats hearts
these things
you must do:
Freeze your heart
immediately.
Let him-next time
he examines your chest—
find your heart cold
flinty and unappetizing.
Refrain from kissing lest he in revenge
dampen the spark
in your soul.
Now,
sail away to Africa
where old women
await you
on the shore-
long having practiced the art
of replacing hearts
with God and Song.
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