Spoiler: Dust Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor — not like food, sweet or sharp. More like a fine powder, like dust. And I wasn’t elated or frightened, but simply rapt, aware. That’s how it is sometimes — God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you’re just too tired to open it. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54716/dust-56d235633c79b
Spoiler: Dirge Without Music I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,— They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52773/dirge-without-music
Spoiler: For the anniversary of my death Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43118/for-the-anniversary-of-my-death
Spoiler: My life closed twice before its close My life closed twice before its close— It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. https://poets.org/poem/my-life-closed-twice-its-close-96
Spoiler: Conscientious Objector I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. But I will not hold the bridle while he clinches the girth. And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up. Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran. With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp. I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll. I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends nor of my enemies either. Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man's door. Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death? Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome. https://allpoetry.com/Conscientious-Objector
Higgledy-piggledy unparliamentary green parrots quarrel outside in the trees Squawking out epithets uncomplimentary Squads of unmannerly Oversized peas. https://dharmagun.tumblr.com/post/164767898579
Spoiler: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. You, drowning between my arms — stay. You, pushing your body into the river only to be left with yourself — stay. I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling. Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. It’s not too late. Our heads haloed with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks. Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio. Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs. This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body beside a body must make a field full of ticking. That your name is only the sound of clocks being set back another hour & morning finds our clothes on your mother’s front porch, shed like week-old lilies. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57586/on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous
Spoiler: Candle Facts #2 by Jarod Anderson A lil candle is a tiny, flickering animal standing on top of all the food it will eat in its lifetime. A candle is a leash. They let us tame an ancient, devouring force of nature, older than life, and stick it in a little jar on the shelf. A candle is a pet god. https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/v4rsqs/poem_field_guide_to_the_haunted_forest_by_jarod_k/
They were giving out bracelets at work for pride month, and I was looking through them when I recognized that one of the sayings was the last two lines of this poem. So now I have a stretchy pink bracelet that says I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Spoiler: Invictus Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51642/invictus
Spoiler: Dysphoria It’s true that I’m im- patient under affliction. So? Most of what the dead can do is difficult to carry. As for gender I can’t explain it any more than a poem: there was an instinct, I followed it. A song. A bell. I saw deer tracks in the snow. Little split hearts beckoned me across the lawn. My body bucked me, fond of me. Here is how you bear this flourish. Bud, I’m buckling to blossoms now. https://poets.org/poem/dysphoria
Spoiler: Tired I am so tired of waiting, Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two – And see what worms are eating At the rind. https://westrowcooper.com/2020/06/17/tired-by-langston-hughes/
Spoiler: The Uses of Sorrow Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. I think Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets right now.
Spoiler: Rain A teacher asked Paul what he would remember from third grade, and he sat a long time before writing "this year somebody tutched me on the sholder" and turned his paper in. Later she showed it to me as an example of her wasted life. The words he wrote were large as houses in a landscape. He wanted to go inside them and live, he could fill in the windows of "o" and "d" and be safe while outside birds building nests in drainpipes knew nothing of the coming rain
Spoiler: What He Thought We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what's a cheap date, they asked us; what's flat drink). Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib—and there was one administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked "What's poetry?" Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world." Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry— (we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)— poetry is what he thought, but did not say.
Spoiler: The Stolen Child Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berrys And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand. https://poets.org/poem/stolen-child
I've been reading this magazine through libby. If you have a library card you should check to see if your library has a subscription to The American Poetry Review. https://aprweb.org/poems/aubade-a-mapping-jishin-no-ben
