March 2012
24 posts
a settlement | mary oliver
look, it’s spring. and last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. the wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. the thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.
and i am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages...
stone | charles simic
go inside a stone that would be my way. let somebody else become a dove or gnash with a tiger’s tooth. i am happy to be a stone. from the outside the stone is a riddle: no one knows how to answer it. yet within, it must be cool and quiet even though a cow steps on it full weight, even though a child throws it in a river; the stone sinks, slow, unperturbed to the river bottom where the fishes...
the madness vase | andrea gibson
the nutritionist said i should eat root vegetables. said if i could get down thirteen turnips a day i would be grounded, rooted. said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. the psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. i handed her the twenty. she said, “stop worrying, darling. you will find a good man soon.” the...
the cinnamon peeler | michael ondaatje
if i were a cinnamon peeler i would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow. your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. the blind would stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe under the rain gutters, monsoon. here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbour to...
haiku | sonia sanchez
grammatolatry:
there are things sadder than you and i. some people do not even touch.
puttanesca | michael heffernan
before i gave up wondering why everything was a lot of nothing worth losing or getting back, i took out a jar of olives, a bottle of capers, a container of leftover tomato sauce with onions, put a generous portion of each in olive oil just hot enough but not too hot, along with some minced garlic and a whole can of anchovies, until the mixture smelled like a streetwalker’s sweat, then...
men and their boring arguments | wendy cope
eating-poetry:
One man on his own can be quite good fun But don’t go drinking with two - They’ll probably have an argument And take no notice of you.
What makes men so tedious Is the need to show off and compete. They’ll bore you to death for hours and hours Before they’ll admit defeat.
It often happens at dinner-parties Where brother disputes with brother And we can’t even talk among...
nobody but you | charles bukowski
nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself and it will be easy enough to fail so very easily but don’t, don’t, don’t. just watch them. listen to them. do you want to be...
keys | nancy henry
when things got hard i used to drive and keep on driving once to north carolina once to arizona i’m through with all that now, i hope. the last time was years ago.
but oh, how i would drive and keep on driving! the universe around me all well in my control; anything i wanted on the radio, the air blasting hot or cold; sobbing as loudly as i cared to sob, screaming...
the two times i loved you most in a car | dorothea...
it was your idea to park and watch the elephants swaying among the trees like royalty at that make-believe safari near laguna. i didn’t know anything that big could be so quiet. and once, you stopped on a dark desert road, to show me the stars climbing over each other riotously like insects; like an orchestra thrashing its way through time itself. i never saw light that way again.
the book of pilgrimage, II, 22 | rainer maria...
you are the future, the red sky before sunrise over the fields of time. you are the cock’s crow when night is done, you are the dew and the bells of matins, maiden, stranger, mother, death. you create yourself in ever-changing shapes that rise from the stuff of our days — unsung, unmourned, undescribed, like a forest we never knew. you are the deep innerness of all things, the last...
when you are old | william butler yeats
when you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
how many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face;
and bending down beside the glowing...
upon request | anton korteweg
that i love you, i want to finally have that written down, now that you ask. because i love you and not just sometimes, given the four thousand days and nights. that it seems as if you hardly have grown older, that you sometimes gaze into the distance as if love struck, that your hands are still beautiful, further than this i’d rather not go. that i sometimes look for your cheek and not your...
462-0614 | charles bukowski
I get many phonecalls now. they are all alike. “are you charles bukowski, the writer?” “yes,” I tell them. and they tell me that they understand my writing, and some of them are writers or want to be writers and they have dull and horrible jobs and they can’t face the room the apartment the walls that night — they want somebody to talk to, and they can’t...
taboo | nina suba
in this game, there are words I cannot say. like if I mean bill clinton, I can’t say president or united states. or if snowball, I can’t say winter or fight or any other word at the top of my mind - unless you say it first. I must hold the tip of my tongue and find a way around words, tell you about pain, for instance, by recounting the sadness of the stars on moonless nights when...
part of eve's discussion | marie howe
it was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment when rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to...
when death comes | mary oliver
when death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox
when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
i want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
and therefore i look upon...
counterparts | octavio paz
in my body you search the mountain for the sun buried in its forest. in your body i search for the boat adrift in the middle of the night.
vespers | moria egan
grammatolatry:
one of the gifts of the evening hours is darkness, a velt screen between your self and the brutal art of dying. your knees, your shoulders, ribs, are hard etched in the parchment of your skin. you watch your own heart beat, you’ve grown so thin.
another gift is numb, narcotic sleep. entire days drip slowly into veins, the tubes exchanging morphine for release from pain...
account | czesław miłosz
the history of my stupidity would fill many volumes. some would be devoted to acting against consciousness, like the flight of a moth which, had it known, would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame. others would deal with ways to silence anxiety, the little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored. i would deal separately with satisfaction and pride, the time when i was...
shake the dust | anis mojgani
this? this is for you. this is for you.
make sure that by the time fisherman returns, you are gone.
because just like the days, i burn both ends. and every time i write? every time i open my eyes? i am cutting out a parts of myself just to give them to you.
so shake the dust and take me with you when you do, for none of this has never been for me.
all that pushes and pulls and pushes and...
how do you know | joe mills
how do you know if it’s love? she asks, and i think if you have to ask, it’s not, but i know this won’t help. i want to say you’re too young to worry about it, as if she has questions about medicare or social security, but this won’t help either. “you’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth, “when you still want to be with them the next morning” would involve too many follow-up questions. the...
everything is waiting for you | david whyte
your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. to feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. you must note the way the soap dish enables you, or...
epithalamium | carolina ebeid
grammatolatry:
if a tree falls in a forest & if we make our dining room chairs out of its freight & if we were meant to haul it, haul that behemoth tree the way one hauls faith, debt, imagination, a car from a slushed-over ditch & if the tree is older than we are, older than our entire life separately or added together & if we put the tree back into the ground in our...
