SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
voyage, oh voyage!
the final fire that ravages the air
unveils the soil on which
we walk aimlessly
and tirelessly
the hypocrisy of the strong protects us
I was walking up some stairs in a building
Inside parts of the building were new
but no one lived there anymore
I passed a lucky fox head on the stairs—
On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain
which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,
in the dry, steep ravines, the live
mist of the heat is seething like dust
left over from an earlier world.
Give me a few more hours to pass
With the mellow flower ofthe elm-bough falling,
And then no more than the lonely grass
And the birds calling.
Give me a few more days to keep
I used to liken a poem to praying. Is that right?
Not the woo and gratitude praying served by queer witches.
Childhood praying. As a girl I genuflected to the tabernacle
My fist holds as many coins
as I can carry. All are stamped with the Queen's effigy;
Elizabeth, D.G. Regina, the resident of pockets,
a woman I've never met though I always know
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
for M. Maylor
Dear Anne Carson:
My friend read me the poem where your mom
said that the dead walk backwards.
You thought this myth arose from poor translation.
Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America
opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act
It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy
To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps
All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue
And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea
During two hours on the train
I rerun the film of my life
Two minutes per year on average
Half an hour for childhood
Another half-hour for prison
Love, books, wandering
take up the rest
I understand you.
I get what you’re trying to say.
What you’re trying to say is you want me to get it.
I get it. You want me
to understand. You want me to know
I lost my talk
The talk you took away.
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie school.
You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
take the moon
nd take a star
when you don’t
know who you are
paint the picture in your hand
nd roll on home
take my fear
nd take the hunger
take my body
The place, the question, the question.
The place, the interest, the question.
There is the place.
There is what you do in the place.
There is your belief.
K was supposed to come with the key, I was
to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,
the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
The trick to building houses was making sure
they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste
was growing more sophisticated and occasionally
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,
It left the fiord for the sea — a host
Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
It was down that road he brought me, still
in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,
but it did feel expected. The way you…
dont worry yr eyes
dont worry yr brain man th snow is
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
…
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
The train has stopped for no apparent reason
In the wilds;
A frozen lake is level and fretted over
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
