Poems

Francesca Woodman

i

At the heart there is a hollow sun

by  which  we  are constructed  and undone

A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

His Grace! impossible! what dead!

Of old age too, and in his bed!

And could that mighty warrior fall?

Light Shining out of Darkness

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

Pan Dulce

My niece calls me from my brother-in-law’s phone

While I’m getting ready to wash dishes. I pick up.

She says she needs to talk to her grandfather.

I tell her that her grandfather just went to sleep,

The Wife

Living, I had no might

To make you hear,

Now, in the inmost night,

Let Us Be Fireflies

Let Us Be Fireflies

                          All day we

     practice morse code signals

Index of Themes

Poems about night

and related poems. Paintings

            about night,

sleep, death, and

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Imaginary Dad

                                  Was so imaginary   he ceased to exist

The Tree

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade

’Tis just that some return be made;

Sure some return is due from me

Five Postcards from Jericho

Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of

…

Ex Libris

I come from the land of

Where You From?

My people dispossessed of their stories

and who have died again and again

in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,

the dead who walk, waiting and

A History of Houses Built Out of Spite

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

Money

Coin Exhibit, British Museum.

Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,

like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Homage to the Mineral of the Onion (I)

In the onion, there’s

something of fire. That fire known as

Fog. The onion is the way

My Poem Without Me in It

My poem without me in it—would it be like

my room when I had returned to it

after my mother was done with me.

Under my bed, only the outer

space balls, of dust, only

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Ramadan

You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,

and have to choose between the starving month’s

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

From Summer Grass

The willows are thinking again about thickness,

slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

and day by day this imaging transforms them

Dear Diaspora Child

it's okay if you only learned about your culture from Google

it's okay if you only read your language at the public library

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

the many descriptions of being brown

White people tell you to apologize for yourself

through gestures, through small talk, through the ways in

which they ask,                  “Where are you from?” and

my mother found herself

my mother found herself one late summer

afternoon lying in grass under the wild

yellow plum tree jewelled with sunlight

she was forgotten there in spring picking 

rhubarb for pie & the children home from

A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales

I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.

I have discovered something, an entirely new species

with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy

with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

susiya

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

The Fish

wade

through black jade.

   Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps

4 Marked by Claws and Cloudburst...

The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June. 

180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil 

   …

Catastrophe That Nearly Brought Down a Plane

After late-night Li Bo,

on a plane to Houston, out of sheer intumescence

I begin unravelling a sickness bag—

starting with the wired throat,

then the pleated sides, then bottom.

The Colonel

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried

a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went   

out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the

Current

The sludge-slow flow of the visible current

opens a path we can’t continue, tugs

at what no hand can pull along.

It’s how even water loses memory,

travels a direction it cannot find,

That feeling of my soul getting yanked

That feeling of my soul getting yanked

I wonder where my soul hides when I’m sick

My heart feels as if it’s getting beat up

Is it because the restless ocean is clumping up?

How She Read

Oh, how she read this. Girl

Verso 3.1

At first there's no lake in the city, at first there are only

elevators, at first there are only constricting office desks;

there are small apartments and hamburger joints and

Lima Limón :: Madurez

I wear a peineta & pin a mantilla to my hair

I want to be Conchita Piquer warning women

about becoming lemons. The goal: tener alguien

quien me quiera. I want to be my mother singing me

Love Armed

Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,

Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,

For whom Fresh pains he did Create,