Support us!
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
I threw away your letters.
Years ago, just like that.
The tight black swirls,
circles and strokes
filling fine sheets —
I would not see them again.
The last items I had left.
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
1
an urban image from the eighties
when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
We cannot know this statue, this satyr
with his head propped on a wineskin;
we cannot know if he dreams. In fact,
He totaled his blue truck —
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups
they remind us of all the possible ways & means
that worlds…
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home.
He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books
Coin Exhibit, British Museum.
Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,
like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
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
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
Now I set out across a minefield,
space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over
from a point where every pebble may explode
beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up
behind my body as I gasp for air,
sometimes I find myself
weeping
at the oddest moment
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I’ve scratched a…
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
It is 2005, just before landfall.
Here I am, a labyrinth, and I am a mess.
I am located at the corner of Waterway
Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face
little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling
against a dust-storm…
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
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,
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown