Children have an instinct for sweetness
When young nectarines sprouted
From the young nectarine tree
My goblin sister and I ate them greedily
All of them
The fallen and the barely freed from budding
They knifed our bellies
What’s wrong with them
My mother cried
Meaning us, her children
She was so helpless
We were such shits
Rolling round
Like nectarine pits
Suffering from surfeit
Suffering for sweet
SPOILER ALERT: Don’t even think about reading this if spoilers bother you.
This may plod. I am sorting out my thoughts as I write.
I’m prompted to write by the posts I see online that purport to explain the final scene in Drive My Car.
The final scene shows the driver, Misaki Watari, shopping in a Korean supermarket, in Korea, addressing the check-out assistant in Korean language. She gets into a red car, the red car we recognise she’s been driving throughout the film, and she greets a golden dog, the golden dog I believe we met earlier in the narrative in the home of the Korean couple Yoon-a and Yoon-soo.
What is this Japanese woman from Hokkaido doing speaking Korean in Korea in possession of her client Mr Kafuko’s car and her colleagues’ dog?
The internet explainers: Misaki has been freed from her miserable past by her cathartic experiences with Mr Kafuko and his theatre troupe. She has moved to Korea and commenced a new life. (Mr Kafuko, similarly freed from his miserable past, has given her his car, emblematic of said past. Yoon-a and Yoon-soo have given her the dog to be her companion and have, presumably, supported Misaki in transplanting to Korea.)
It’s not a total no-no explanation. The theatre troupe has been workshopping a production of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, which, at one level, is about dealing with life coming to dead-ends. Though Chekhov didn’t offer his characters’ the option of acts beyond the final curtain: say, The Three Sisters move to Moscow.
Myself – and I am odd – view Drive My Car differently.
On the face of it, this is a film about a man grieving his wife’s death who can’t reconcile his wife’s proclaimed deep love for him with her sexual infidelity. So: a film about distinguishing authenticity from acting.
On another layer, this is a film about the genius of Chekhov: how to present the authentic small lives of relatively ordinary people as worthy of our focus.
Theatre as most of us know it in the West derives from classical Greek drama. Its purpose is carthasis – the purging of deep emotions. Its protagonists are the great and powerful. They fall due to their fatal flaws. Witnessing their fall stirs deep emotions in audiences. The purpose of drama – the purging of deep emotions.
Every character in Drive My Car is, or has been, an actor, except Misaki, the driver. Yes, Mr Kafuko’s wife Oto was a scriptwriter. But before that she had been an actor. Yes, Yoon-a was a dancer. But now she is an actor. Yes, Yoon-soo is a dramaturg. But he studied Noh (or was it Kabuki?) at a Japanese theatre school. There’s the theatre festival’s director. But I say all theatre administrators started out as would-be actors.
The driver, Misaki, has her on-stage correlative in Uncle Vanya in the character Sonya: a plain girl easy to overlook, to disregard. Sonya is the emotional centre of Chekhov’s play. She owns the final scene. The character of Sonya is played in Mr Kafuko’s production by Yoon-a, who is deaf, and communicates in Korean deaf sign language.
Mr Kafuko’s production of Uncle Vanya is multilingual, featuring actors from across Asia acting their parts in their native languages. In the earlier stages of the readings, the Japanese actors admit they find the foreign language passages boring, like listening to a mantra. All the actors find Mr Kafuko’s insistence on a lengthy lead-up just reading the text, without vocal emotion, without embodiment, frustrating. He tells them to “listen to the text”.
A multilingual production of a Russian classic suggests the text is universal, and that ‘hearing’ the text transcends words. Eventually the text is felt, at the level of deep emotions. Eventually, almost everyone can understand that feeling of life coming to an end during one’s life-time, or of life running out of life within its allocated limits.
This is the experience of Uncle Vanya. “If I live to 60 and I’m 47 now, how will I fill in the years?”
Sonya’s answer: We will endure. Then we’ll die, quietly.
There are several characters in Drive My Car who have ‘run out of life’. A young man’s life can have ‘ended’ prematurely as much as his older counterpart’s. We are all Vanya, eventually.
So personally I don’t think Misaki moved to Korea and began a new life.
Personally, I think the film director is revealing “Misaki” to be yet another actor, an actor in a fictional narrative purporting to be true life, that is true to life, but not real. “Sonya” in Uncle Vanya is presented as a simple, ordinary girl, yet is a theatrical construct brought to life by an actor and, as such, as much the performer as the histrionic beauty Yelena (a mask for another actor).
“Sonya” / “Misaki” is the antithesis of the great and the powerful, yet is an agent of catharsis. Because Chekhov taught us drama is not wholly the domain of the great and the powerful, the noisy and famous, but also the stories, in any language, of those who endure quietly. And drama translates to cinema.
Intelligent cinema, anyway.
Afternote: Drive My Car is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami from his collection Men Without Women (2014). Murakami explores the relations of fiction and actuality and acts of creating. The Korean film Burning (2018) is also based on a Murakami short story. One of the more interesting commentaries I read on Burning suggested the characters Ben and Hae-mi never exist in life but are imagined creations of the would-be writer Jong-soo. I recommend viewing Burning in tandem with Drive My Car. (The final sequences of Burning, where Jong-soo attempts to assert agency, are not part of Murakami’s narrative.)
rive
In 1984 I wrote a poem I called ‘Tidal’ and submitted it to several publications simultaneously, as was my practice. (The odds against a poem being accepted were low and editorial decison-making was slow.) All four journals published it. How embarrassing.
‘Tidal’ was a love poem to my dad. My dad across that period spent hours fossicking on the rockpools at the local beach, looking for shards of willow-plate and fragments of other ceramics lost in C19th shipwrecks.
His pose bending over the rockpools reminded me of a framed print in his parents’ house, the house where he’d grown up, a famous Edwardian image of a woman beachcombing. (Dad named a later home ‘Beachcomber’.)
In ‘Tidal’, I combined that image with the image of my father seeking, seeking… and merged that with the image of his parents on their wedding day, his mother, Edie Gibson, looking young and lush. A Gibson girl.
Two years later, in 1986, I wrote ‘Father and Child’, a deliberate echo of ‘Tidal’, this time the love between father and daughter rather than son and mother. Both have an erotic charge in the last line, intentionally evoked by reference to touch.
‘Father and Child’ was written as an technical exercise, a conscious attempt at a ‘happy’, “life affirming” poem. But I wasn’t happy with it. My father seldom talked about his mother or his parents’ relationship, which I knew was violent. So I wrote the poem ‘Wedding Photo’, about a battered bride, at much the same time. There’s an earlier poem, ‘Mad Edie’, also about, duh, Edie.
(I knew my grandfather’s feelings for Edie were tender, too. As he lay dying, he told 15 y.o. me that I looked just like 14 y.o. Edie as he first met her.)
At the same time as ‘Wedding Photo’ and ‘Father and Child’ I wrote a poem I called ‘Possums’ about someone I’d trusted who turned into a goblin. It was a poem about emotional violence and fear.
That suite of poems put paid to my poem writing for a few decades. A bit before I wrote my first poems in 25 years, my sister took a portrait photo of me as a kind of water spirit / earth goddess. The Gibson Girl of ‘Tidal’ turned full circle.
I’ve written before about a day at poet Dorothy Hewett’s place where I overshared about my maternal grandparents (not Edie and Angus) and Dorothy turned to her husband and said: “How gothic.”
My sister spontaneously confided similar thoughts last week: “Both our grandfathers were so gothic. One lived in Miss Haversham’s house, the other was King Lear.”
So what’s this about? Honestly, I’m over people assuming they know what or whom I wrote about. Those people don’t know the names of the people who mattered most to me. It’s just a bit ‘You’re So Vain’. I bet you think this song is about you.
But you know what? Even if the song *were* about you, I own my experiences and memories. And anyone who feels otherwise can climb a rat’s arse.
After writing a sequence of horrifying nightmare poems, I decided to attempt a life-affirming, positive poem.
I wrote it in two parts, out of an intended three: I was aiming for a triptych. But after Pt2 I felt my heart wasn’t in it. I abandoned that poem and didn’t write another poem for about 30 years. When I re-read this one I thought it was awful, Hallmark greeting card stuff. I chucked Pt2 altogether. This is Pt1.
I.
A woman pulled a rib from out
of my side
and my heart stepped out.
she looked
just like me: a small
grey-eyed, soft-fleshed, female
me.
My daughter
he said.
I am not ashamed
to recognise love.
I see no shame
in relatedness. Her eyes are
mine, and she
is my heart.
He walks
her up the road.
He holds her hand.
she rides on his back and
she laughs.
My daughter
he says, and her arms
curl around his neck as
years ago he
sucked the breast of a woman
he loves
limbs contorted, tearing thick air: white fleshy
boomerangs broken
arms, snapped ribs: eyes fear-forced open, bruised and
swollen closed, the smashed
nose and plates, bent knives, kicked in
door
permanent
images, fixed like that clock – one hand
wrenched off, stoved in and reckless, lying
on its side on the living
room floor – no progress, not ever, silenced and
strange; or the door-frame, splintered
as readily as bone – the violated
flywire, the hammer-bashed
lock: glass stabbed curtains and blood
in the bathroom – the bride in the photo
(no sound) lies senseless, scrunched up
and torn
face downwards
Unbalanced, tall buildings loom
above us: screening out the sky, too close
together – like cramped teeth they jut
in shades of bone decay. I look quickly
at her
she looks down, and frowns
Uneven, the roadface staggers before
us. Cobblestones: smooth swellings
cemented together, colourless, so cold –
like trampling
thousands of hardened dead
breasts. Now she turns on me
her death’s head, survivor’s stare
black
streets drop away, breath
catches, while rain
– not quite falling –
hangs in dark clumps of
night and possums sit
in the middle of a fence
nightfall
wide-eyed, they observe – not caring
neither way
we mean nothing, this is nothing
not to them, not us
come away
from here, take care
in this dark, bright-eyed
with cars – we are blinded
by cars –
in public, all observed
two possums stare
balanced on a fence
you and I, eye to eye
you and I, watching on
small blundering familiars
neither comprehend nor care
my hand reaches out
to your shoulder, instinctive – I touch
your neck:
warm and unresponsive – you’re scared
we two, clinging lightly
lean on each other
look up, look and see large
luminous eyes
in a damp-cheeked night
walking onwards, then at once
pulled up
pulled back – as if by an image reflected
in a window, a face one-known
your own
aged features – sharp-edged, so
white – a bloodless light hand
reaches out
touch finger touch phantom a skeleton bridge
half-flesh, half-hope: the ghost
behind your eyes steps out, stands beside you
but it can’t be
you at all
not this time.
In half dark (half-light into
night), it’s someone you remember:
someone else.
Your stare mirrors his; the ghost you’ve become
sees itself living, behind
his eyes reflected; in the present, it relives
a scene from the past.
It stares through a window and sees you both
there – profiles overlapping, fingers touch
flesh… the man (who is him) looks up
stops
stares out the window, straight at the phantom, half-sees
through shadow: he says
I once knew her
The girl with him smiles (she is you, and she smiles)
Go on, go and tell her
‘good to see her again. Go out there
and talk but
He looks away and whispers
She won’t talk to me now
now on this street
you stop, you stare
you can see yourself touching (white lip touches
shoulder), phantom lips
plead promise me
don’t ever walk past me, don’t let me
walk past
No matter what happens, whoever
we become, I will always
stop:
Stop here for me now
Love letters from the council estate boys
1.
Lady in orange we like you
No real reason
Just your treble clef curves
Those playground heels
The way your hair foofs
Like a TV commercial come
To life
The bow’n’arrow smile
The narrowed eyes
That bag slung over your shoulder shouts
money
2.
You are my perfect woman.
Come out with me.
Here is my phone number.
I have a job.
Death Sports
There are no excuses for us.
We are still the savage species
thrilling to
dog fights
bear baiting
cock fighting.
Death sports.
The fall of the fortunate
our enemies hacked to death.
Not even our enemies
The cats in the sack
ignite
We must know
the law is an ass.
We
only believe
in the mob.
I find myself unable to work with WordPress Block editing. Apologies to the poets whose poems are not set out as they should be here.
The in-flight magazine crossword partially done,
a corner begun here, scratched out answers there,
one set of answers in pencil, another in the green.
The woman with the green ball point knew
the all-time hit king is Rose and the Siem Reap
treasure is Angkor Wat. The woman, perhaps en route
to hold her dying mother’s hand in Seattle, forgot
about death for ten minutes while remembering her
husband’s Cincinnati Reds hat while gardening after
the diagnosis. Her handwriting was so clean. Maybe
she was a surgeon. Maybe a painter. No. What painter
wouldn’t know 17 down, Diego’s love, five letters?
In a rush, her dying mother’s voice came back
to her, or maybe she was Chinese and her mother’s
imagined voice said, wo ai ni. At 30,000 feet,
you focus on 33 across, Asian American classic,
The Woman ________, when a stranger in the window
seat sees the clue, watches me write in W, and she says
Warrior, and for a moment you forget it is your favorite
memoir, and she reminds you of lilies or roses, Van Gogh
or stems with thorns, art galleries in romantic cities
where she is headed but you should not go. The flight
attendant grazes my shoulder. The crossword squares,
the letters, the chairs and aisles seem so tight in flight,
but there is nothing here but room, really.
Maybe the next passenger will know
what I do not: 64 down, five letters, Purpose.
And why do we remember what we do? We know
the buzz of Dickinson’s fly and the number of years
in Marquez’s solitude, but some things we will never
know, as it should be: why the body sometimes rumbles
like a plane hurtling over southern Oregon, how exactly
we fall in love, or if Frida and Maxine Hong
Kingston would have loved the same kind of tea.
Originally published in Daily Gramma, October 2016.
What we need has always been inside of us.
For some—a few poets or farmers, perhaps—
it’s always near the surface. Others, it’s buried.
It was in our original design, though—pre-machine,
pre-border, pre-pandemic. I imagine it like the light
one might feel through the body before dying,
a warm calm, a slow breath, a sweet rush.
There is, by every measure, reason for fear,
concern, a concert in the balcony of anxiety
made of what has also always been inside of us:
a kind of knowing that everything could break.
But it hasn’t quite yet and probably won’t.
What I mean to say is, I had a daydream
and got lost inside of it. There were dozens
of birds for some reason, who sounded like
they were singing in different accents:
shelter in place, shelter in place.
You’re made of stars and grace.
Stars and grace. Stars—and grace.
Originally published in MiGoZine, March 2020.
The moon will shine for God
knows how long.
As if it still matters. As if someone
is trying to recall a dream.
Believe the brain is a cage of light
& rage. When it shuts off,
something else switches on.
There’s no better reason than now
to lock the doors, the windows.
Turn off the sprinklers
& porch light. Save the books
for fire. In darkness,
we learn to read
what moves along the horizon,
across the periphery of a gun scope—
the flicker of shadows,
the rustling of trash in the body
of cities long emptied.
Not a soul lives
in this house &
this house & this
house. Go on, stiffen
the heart, quicken
the blood. To live
in a world of flesh
& teeth, you must
learn to kill
what you love,
& love what can die.
Copyright © 2016 by Burlee Vang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 20, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
∞
The screens plant bulbs
of tension inward, but hit no nerves.
River of speechless current.
My gaze faces the screen, laps up
blue-eyed policemen in bloom
and a fat fog fanning out by the inch
across cities in eastern China.
Refresh for a politician yawning
wolfish monosyllables.
In the bed of pixels, I can make out
truth and fiction taking turns,
one imitating the other.
My window faces stone and glass.
My screen faces my face.
The clean square cells of this city
contain so many faces.
Each brightened by a fear
which makes them commonplace.
Copyright © 2017 by Jenny Xie.
your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
stars and the Humorous
moon
dear girl
How i was crazy how i cried when i heard
over time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
your voice
In the end,
I was like others.
A person.
Sometimes embarrassed,
sometimes afraid.
When “Fire!” was shouted,
some ran toward it,
some away—
I neck-deep among them.
—2017
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace
“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.
That summer, she had a student who was obsessed with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard, she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade is essential to bread . He copied this down, but he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern. When he first arrived, he did not know enough English to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color. Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal. After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.
From Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague, Persea Books. Copyright © 2010 by Alexandra Teague.
Alexandra Teague
Late American Aubade
Man in a chicken suit, you’re the only one today
not selling beauty: 5th Avenue star-struck with Christmas,
three-story diamonds and flocks of ballerinas pirouetting
clockworking gears as if the Industrial Revolution
were a life-sized music box of desires and we’ve just kept
on winding. If. And Wish Upon. And shopping bag. And you
with your wind-ruffled feathers and flyers, pleading
for our primitive hungers. That inelegant grease spot
and crunch to remind us. The mannequins don’t
even have bones. I’ll never have a purse nice enough
to hold a wallet worth the money to buy the purse
at Barney’s. And what does it matter? There are drumsticks.
I’m a vegetarian. You are no masked creature worth hugging
for a picture. No Minnie. No marble nymph of Beauty
in pigeon net outside the library: old yet ever new eternal voice
and inward word. As if we hear it clear in the gizzard:
Beauty is God and love made real. You will be this beautiful
if. You are the rock in the crowd-raked garden of traffic,
just past the corner of jaguar-made-of-dazzle and flapper
reading Shakespeare bound in bardic sparkles. Your yellow,
a scant flag to claim us: ordinary strange as holy chickens
in a gilded cage in Spain. Their ancestors, heralds
of a miracle. A huge mechanical owl recites Madonna
in a window Baz Luhrmann designed since February.
It takes all year for a miracle with this many moving parts.
All of us in a rush to wait for the catastrophe of personality
to seem beautiful again. As if this is the best we can hope for:
seeming to ourselves—like panhandlers dressed as Buddhist
monks the real monks are protesting. Asked for her secret, the model for Beauty said, The dimples on my back
have been more valuable to me than war bonds. Asked for proof,
one orange-robed woman said, I can’t tell you where, but I do
have a temple. Beaked promise of later lunch, catastrophe
of unbeautiful feather, how can we eat the real you
that you are not? Which came first? The shell to hatch
desire, or desire? Which skin holds my glittering temple?
Copyright © 2016 by Alexandra Teague. “Late American Aubade” originally appeared in Cimarron Review.
translated by Tracy K. Smith & Changtai Bi
1. Mirror Trick
Of course you know her.
She is one and many,
A multitude flashing on, then off,
Watching out from the tidy blank
of her face. She is silent, speaking
With just her mind. She is flesh, a form,
but also flat, a mute screen.
What she offers you, by no means
Should you accept. She belongs to no-one,
sitting like a ghost beyond her own reach.
And yet, she’s there—I mean me—
Behind glass, as if the world has been cleaved,
Though something whole remains,
Roving, free, a voice with poise and pitch.
She’s there—me—snug in the glass,
The little mirror on the bedside
Doing its one trick
A hundred times a day.
You didn’t come to live with me.
2. Turkish Bath
The room is choked with nudes.
Once, a man tried to muscle in by mistake
Crying, “Turkish bath!” He had no idea
My door is always locked in this heat,
No idea that I am the sole guest and client,
The chief consort, that I cast my gaze
Of pity and absolute pride across
The length of my limbs—lithe, pristine—
The bells of my breasts singing,
The high bright note of my ass,
My shoulders a warm chord,
The chorus of muscle that rings
Ecstatic. I am my own model.
I create, am created, my bed
Is heaped with photo albums,
Socks and slips scatted on a table.
A spray of winter jasmine wilts
In its glass vase, dim yellow, like
Despondent gold. Blossoms carpet
The floor, which is a patchwork
Of pillows. Pick a corner, sleep in peace.
You didn’t come to live with me.
3. Curtain Habit
The curtain seals out the day.
Better that way to let my mind
See what it sees (every evil under the sun),
Or to kneel before the heart, quiet king,
Feeling brave and consummately free.
Better that way to let all that I want
And all I believe swarm me like bees,
Or ghosts, or a cloud of smoke someone
Blows, beckoning. I come. I cry out
In release. I give birth
To a battery of clever babies—triplets,
Quintuplets, so many all at once.
The curtain seals in my joy.
The curtain holds the razor out of reach,
Puts the pills on a shelf out of sight.
The curtain snuffs shut and I bask in the bounty
Of being alive. The music begins.
Love pools in every corner.
You didn’t come to live with me.
4. Self-Portrait
The camera snaps. Spits me out starkly ugly.
So I set out to paint the self within myself.
It takes twelve tubes, blended to a living tint,
Before I believe me. I name the mixture Color P.
The hair—curious, unlikely—is my favorite,
The same fluff of bangs tickling my niece’s face.
And my eyebrows are wide as hills. They swallow everything.
They are a feat. They do not impress me as likely to age.
They are brimming with wisdom. Neither slavish nor stern.
Not magnificent, but not the kind made to crumple in shame.
Not prudish. Unwilling to arch and beckon like a whore’s.
They skitter away from certainties like alive or dead.
My self-portrait hangs on the narrow wall,
And I kneel down to it every day.
You didn’t come to live with me.
5. Impromptu Party
The little table is draped with a festive cloth, and
Light blurs out from a single lamp, making us fuzzy.
A sip of red wine, and I rise to my feet. We are
Dancing, my guests and I, like kids in a ballroom.
We don’t smile or even speak.
We’ve had a lot to drink.
To a single woman, time is like a scrap of meat:
Nothing you can afford to give away. I want
To hold it in my lap, Time, that sneak, that thief already
Scheming to break free. Please—I beg
Upon the magnificent extravagance of my beloved stilettos,
I want the world back. I’ve been alive—could it be?—
Near a century. My face has closed up shop.
My feet are a desolate country.
For a single woman, youth is a feast that lasts
Only until it is gone.
You didn’t come to live with me.
6. Invitation
When it arrived, I was interrupted by relief,
Sitting in my rattan chair, feeling the wind ease in
Through the hole in my life.
I only said yes because of his dissertation. Friends,
Nothing more. We talked—he talked—about modernism,
Black humor. But always at a distance from reality.
Why didn’t he ask me anything?
Tender and petulant, he struck me as cute.
But at heart, only a very well-behaved boy.
He offers his arm. Elegant, decent, gallant.
But how can I prove myself a woman
If he is a child? What can come of that union?
Can any of us save ourselves? Save another?
You didn’t come to live with me.
7. Sunday Alone
I don’t picnic on Sundays.
Parks are a sad song; I steer clear.
But I dug out all my sheet music,
I lolled about in the Turkish Bath
Singing from breakfast to tea.
With my hair, I sang Do
And my eyes, Re
And my ear sounded Mi
And my nose went after Fa
My face tilted back and out rose So
My mouth breathed La
My whole body birthed Ti
Like my cousin said, famously—
Music is the soul sighing.
Music pushes back against pain.
Solitude is great (but I don’t want
Greatness). My eyes slump
Against the walls. My hair
Hurls itself at the ceiling like a colony
Of bats.
You didn’t come to live with me.
8. Dialectic
I read materialist philosophy—
Material ispeerless.
But I’m creationless.
I don’t even procreate.
What use does the world have for me
Here beside my reams of cock-eyed drafts
That nick away at the mountain of
Art and philosophy?
Firstly, Existentialism.
Secondly, Dadaism.
Thirdly, Positivism.
Lastly, Surrealism.
Mostly, I think people live
For the sake of living.
Is living a feat?
What will last?
My chief function is obsolescence.
Still, I send out my stubborn breath
In every direction. I am determined
To commit myself to a marriage
Of connivance.
You didn’t come to live with me.
9. Downpour
Rain hacks at the earth like an insatiable man.
Disquiet, like passion, subsides instantly.
Six distinct desires mate, are later married.
At the moment, I want everything and nothing.
The rainstorm barricaded all the roads. Sandbags.
Isn’t there something gladdening about a dead-end?
I canceled my plans, my trysts, my escapes.
For a moment—I almost blinked and missed it—the storm
Stopped the clock that chases me. The clock of the heart, maybe.
It was an ecstasy so profound…
“Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!”
I’d rather admit despair. And die.
You didn’t come to live with me.
10. Dream of Symbolism
I occupy the walls that surround me.
When did I become so rectilinear?
I had a rectilinear dream:
The rectilinear sky in Leo:
The head, for a while, shone brightest.
Next the tail. After a while
It became a wild horse
Galloping into the distances of the universe,
Lasso dragging behind, tethered to nothing.
There are no roads in the black night that contains us.
Every step is a step into absence.
I don’t remember the last time I saw
A free soul. If she still exists, fire-eyed gypsy,
She’ll die young.
You didn’t come to live with me.
11. Birthday Candles
They are like heaps of stars.
My flat roof is like a private galaxy
That stretches on stubbornly forever.
The universe created us by chance,
Our birth, simple happenstance.
Should life be guarded or gambled?
Lodged in a vault or flung to the wind?
God announces: Happy Birthday.
Everyone raises a glass and giggles audibly.
Death gets clearer in the distance. Closer by a year.
Because all are afraid, none is afraid.
It’s pity how fast youth sputters and burns,
Its flame like the season’s last peony.
A bright misery.
You didn’t come to live with me.
12. Cigarette
I lift it to my lips, supremely slim,
Igniting my desire to be a woman.
I appreciate the grace of the gesture,
Cosmopolitan, a shorthand for beauty,
The winding haze off the tip like the chaos of sex.
Loneliness can be sweet. I re-read the paper.
The ban on smoking underway
Has gotten a bonfire of support. A heated topic,
Though I find it inflammatory. Authority
Flings a struck match in our direction, then
Gasps when we flare into flame. Law:
A contest between low-lives and sophisticates,
Though only time knows who is who.
Tonight I want to commit a victimless crime.
You didn’t come to live with me.
13. Thinking
I spend all my spare time doing it.
I give it a name: walking indoors.
I imagine a life in which I possess
All that I lack. I fix what has failed.
What never was, I build and seize.
It’s impossible to think of everything,
Yet more and more I do. Thinking
What I am afraid to say keeps fear
And fear’s twin, rage, at bay. Law
Squints out from its burrow, jams
Its quiver with arrows. It shoots
Like it thinks: never straight. My thoughts
Escape. One day, they’ll emigrate
To a kingdom far-off and heady.
My visa’s in-process, though like anyone,
I worry it’s overpopulated already.
You didn’t come to live with me.
14. Hope
This city of riches has fallen empty.
Small rooms like mine are easy to breech.
Watchmen pace, peer in, gazes hungry.
I come and go, always alone, heavy with worry.
My flesh forsakes itself. Strangers’ eyes
Drill into me till I bleed. I beg God:
Make me a ghost. Something invisible
Blocks every road. I wait night after night
With a hope beyond hope. If you come,
Will nation rise against nation? If you come,
Will the Yellow River drown its banks?
If you come, will the sky blacken and rage?
Will your coming decimate the harvest?
There is nothing I can do in the face of all I hate.
What I hate most is the person I’ve become.
You didn’t come to live with me.
Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Please Call Me by My True Names
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, nthe door of compassion.
Öykü Tekten
Mountain Language
the day after the mulberry tree fell on its belly, the army bombed a truck
full of black umbrellas sent from russia against the tyranny of rain. they
said, the black umbrellas are no longer allowed in the mountains. hats
are. guns are. gods are. the trees are offensive to the sky. then
they called our language mountain, then they pronounced it dead.
we are in a dream, you said. undo the pain before you speak
against the gods with mouths full of rain. a tongue cut in half
becomes sharper, you said. date your wound.
Copyright © 2020 by Öykü Tekten. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 21, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
Poem III from “Twenty-One Love Poems,” from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
| December 26, 2020 Emilie Zoey Baker |
| I On New Year’s Eve a small river of brown snakes crossed our path What does this mean? my friends wondered I said it means we have to stay wide awake this year, pay attention. Animals are omens. II We got a kitten during lockdown and I taught him to walk on a lead we named him Panko, a tiny crumb amid a PAN-demic of CO-vid I would push a harness over his crayon sun face, then let him lick meat cream from my fingers. Now he’s tethered, clipped to a lead whenever outdoors, to save the honeyeaters, rosellas, whipbirds, cockatoos and king parrots. We nicknamed him Clippy. He comes in and out, making a cat’s cradle with the cord we have to climb over it as if he’s woven intricate laser beams in a heist movie, booby-trapped the doorway Home Aloned us. The tomato plant near the doorway is wounded from his leash, a slow cut each day like me on Twitter like every night I say it will be a new day but I wake up and think I better check if the world has ended log on to the junk feed and absorb everything I have to pay attention. III I wake up covered in dream post-it notes the urgency of action in an actionless day the news stapled into my stomach its metal claws piercing the sides I kept wishing I’d suddenly change but there have been way more aspirins than moons. My belly got big so I named it King George because mediaeval royalty wasn’t taught to body-shame. The toilet paper part of lockdown feels so long ago now the Tiger King part of lockdown the faked dolphins in Venice part of lockdown the Universal Declaration of Bunnings Rights part of lockdown the done-all-of-Brighton part of lockdown the cranberry juice and Fleetwood Mac part of lockdown the aerial shots of hospital carparks part of lockdown the marches, violence and justice part of lockdown I’m world-sick. But the snakes insisted. The prime minister waving his Sharkies scarf while we couldn’t hug our friends the prime minister offering leadership by holding a hammer (not a hose) the unwanted handshakes turning into gormless grinning elbow bumps. The air in China suddenly full of clean-crystal hope, now again heavy with particles as black as Rudy Giuliani’s skull tears. Unprecedented times. I watch it unspool. The Moses-sized divides leave me thirsty for unpresidented times. Memes blaze catastrophes duplicate. It all thumps through me like bass. IV In the beginning I saw myself like a fossil in a rock placed back into a mountain the imprinted ridges still there, clicking back like a battery I stayed quiet as the stone around me. Now I must prise myself out again. I tried to cry an ocean so the tides might bring back what was there before, wash me up to my own feet because only an ocean can dissolve a mountain. I’m not sure who I have become or what I will do. This year is vibrating with such monolithic symbolism there’s little room for poetry. Maybe making friends with a kitten is enough. V The Rockefeller Christmas owl was hunkered on a branch when they chopped her tree down and hauled it to the Rockefeller Centre. There’s a photo of the owl placed in a box looking at us with eyes like angry amber biscuits. They filled her tree with their city, added coloured lights and winding tinsel streets and called her a “stowaway”. “She wanted to see the Big Apple!” Christmas reminds us we’re monsters, shows up our Pac-Man consumerism. Blowing up ancient caves, tearing down sacred trees for three minutes of highway. Waving smirk and coal around in parliament. Decimating forests. Some cultures believe owls to be messengers for shamans to communicate with the spirit world The Rockefeller Christmas owl “got her own” children’s book. VI At yoga the teacher let it slip there’s a serpent coiled at the bottom of our spines then quickly took it back you’re not supposed to know that yet she said but that’s not the sort of thing I can unknow I googled the hell out of it. The sickeningly symbolic river of macrocosmic snakes made their way into my spine. Now I can stay awake and finally close my eyes. |
| Emilie Zoey Baker is an award-winning poet and spoken-word performer who has toured internationally including being a guest at Ubud Writers Festival, The Milosz Festival Poland and was the winner of the Berlin International Literature Festival’s poetry slam. She was a Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, poet-in-residence for Museums Victoria and coordinator for the National Australian Poetry Slam. She teaches poetry to both kids and adults and was core faculty for the spoken word program at Canada’s Banff Centre. |
It is rare that I
have to stop eating anything
because I have run out of it.
We, in the West, eat until we want
to eat something else,
or want to stop eating altogether.
The chef of a great kitchen
uses only small plates.
He puts a small plate in front of me,
knowing I will hunger on for it
even as the next plate is being
placed in front of me.
But each plate obliterates the last
until I no longer mourn the destroyed plate,
but only mewl for the next,
my voice flat with comfort and faith.
And the chef is God,
whose faithful want only the destruction
of His prior miracles to make way
for new ones.
From The Final Voicemails Milkweed Editions © 2018 by Max Ritvo.
The night air is filled
with the scent of apples,
and the moon is nearly full.
In the next room, Jim
is reading; a small cat sleeps
in the crook of his arm.
The night singers are loud,
proclaiming themselves
every evening until they run
out of nights and die in
the cold, or burrow down into
the mud to dream away the winter.
My office is awash in books
and photographs, and the sepia/pink
sunset stains all its light touches.
I’ve never been a good traveler,
but there are days, like this one,
when I’d pay anything to be in
another country, or standing on
the cold, grey moon, staring back
at the disaster we call our world.
We crave change, but
turn away from it.
We drown in contradictions.
Tonight, I’ll sleep
blanketed in moonlight.
In my dreams, I’ll have
nothing to say about anything
important. I’ll simply live my life,
and let the night singers live theirs,
until all of us are gone.
I won’t say a word, and let
silence speak in my stead.
Copyright © 2020 by William Reichard. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 19, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Eileen Myles
Howl
a refrigerator
makes a lot
of sound
so does a bird
people are
always talking
full of love
& pain
we started
a fund
and the dogs
are needing
some money &
I don’t know how
to do
it & I’ll
learn from
one of them
Tom’s blue
shirt & glasses
are perfect.
My teeshirt
is good
my pen works
I breathe.
Copyright © 2020 by Eileen Myles. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
I worry that my friends
will misunderstand my silence
as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind,
I worry I can no longer pretend
enough to get through another
year of pretending I know
that I understand time, though
I can see my own hands; sometimes,
I worry over how to dress in a world
where a white woman wearing
a scarf over her head is assumed
to be cold, whereas with my head
cloaked, I am an immediate symbol
of a war folks have been fighting
eons-deep before I was born, a meteor.
Copyright © 2018 by Tarfia Faizullah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 10, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
in Ramallah
the ancients play chess in the starry sky
the endgame flickers
a bird locked in a clock
jumps out to tell the time
in Ramallah
the sun climbs over the wall like an old man
and goes through the market
throwing mirror light on
a rusted copper plate
in Ramallah
gods drink water from earthen jars
a bow asks a string for directions
a boy sets out to inherit the ocean
from the edge of the sky
in Ramallah
seeds sown along the high noon
death blossoms outside my window
resisting, the tree takes on a hurricane’s
violent original shape
“Ramallah” by Bei Dao, from World Beat: International Poetry Now, copyright 2006 by Zhao Zhenkai, Translation © Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
My grandmother kisses
as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,
where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes
through the kitchen window,
as if somewhere, a body is falling apart
and flames are making their way back
through the intricacies of a young boy’s thigh,
as if to walk out the door, your torso
would dance from exit wounds.
When my grandmother kisses, there would be
no flashy smooching, no western music
of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe
you inside her, nose pressed to cheek
so that your scent is relearned
and your sweat pearls into drops of gold
inside her lungs, as if while she holds you
death also, is clutching your wrist.
My grandmother kisses as if history
never ended, as if somewhere
a body is still
falling apart.
Copyright © 2014 by Ocean Vuong. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
Roland Barthes
1
One version of the story is I wish you back—
that I used each evening evening out
what all day spent wrinkling.
I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine
you could see my ovaries through it.
This is how I thought I would seduce you.
This is how frantic I hollowed out.
2
Another way of telling it
is to hire some kind of gnarled
and symbolic troll to make
a tape recording.
Of plastic beads coming unglued
from a child’s jewelry box.
This might be an important sound,
like serotonin or mighty mitochondria,
so your body hears about
how you stole the ring made
from a glittery opiate
and the locket that held candy.
3
It’s only fair that I present yet another side,
as insidious as it is,
because two sides hold up nothing but each other.
A tentacled skepticism,
a suspended contempt,
such fancies and toxins form a third wall.
A mean way to end
and I never dreamed we meant it.
4
Another way of putting it is like
slathering jam on a scrape.
Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick?
Which is the worst! So much technology
and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it.
I mean there’s no relief unless.
So I’m coming, all this excitement,
to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play.
It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally
focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain.
5
In some cultures the story told is slightly different—
in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates
as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed
that the most personally attractive fish have eyes
only on one side and repel each other like magnets.
The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage.
Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has
those five pink moving suckerpads
that allow endless permutations so no solid memory,
no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid.
6
The story exists even when there are no witnesses,
kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete,
and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy
factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast
or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident.
This little tale tries so hard to be humorous,
wants so badly to win affection and to lodge.
Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.
7
Three million Richards can’t be wrong.
So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which,
in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously.
They think one may start a tale off whingy
and wretched in a regular voice.
But when one strikes out whimsically,
as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you,
as if this story is happening to nobody
it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody.
The Richards believe you cannot
privately jettison into the sky, just for fun.
You must stack stories from the foundation up.
From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it.
Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule,
not a hang glide. This is real life.
So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built.
Because no one unbuilds meticulously
and meticulosity is what allows hearing.
Three million Richards make one point.
I hear it in order to make others. Mistake.
8
As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is,
when it would be truer to say nothing.
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.
But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.
To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.
This just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.
Brenda Shaughnessy, “One Love Story, Eight Takes” from Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2008 by Brenda Shaughnessy. http://www.coppercanyonpress.org
We felt nostalgic for libraries, even though we were sitting in a library. We looked around the library lined with books and thought of other libraries we had sat in lined with books and then of all the libraries we would never sit in lined with books, some of which contained scenes set in libraries. * We felt nostalgic for post offices, even though we were standing in a post office. We studied the rows of stamps under glass and thought about how their tiny castles, poets, cars, and flowers would soon be sent off to all cardinal points. We rarely got paper letters anymore, so our visits to the post office were formal, pro forma. * We felt nostalgic for city parks, even though we were walking through a city park, in a city full of city parks in a country full of cities full of city parks, with their green benches, bedraggled bushes, and shabby pansies, cut into the city. (Were the city parks bits of nature showing through cutouts in the concrete, or was the concrete showing through cutouts in nature?) * We sat in a café drinking too much coffee and checking our feeds, wondering why we were more anxious about the future than anxiously awaiting it. Was the future showing through cutouts in the present, or were bits of the present showing through cutouts in a future we already found ourselves in, arrived in our café chairs like fizzled jetpacks? The café was in a former apothecary lined with dark wood shelves and glowing white porcelain jars labeled in gilded Latin, which for many years had sat empty. Had a person with an illness coming to fetch her weekly dose of meds from one of the jars once said to the city surrounding the shop, which was no longer this city, Stay, thou art so fair? Weren’t these the words that had sealed the bargainer’s doom? Sitting in our presumptive futures, must we let everything run through our hands—which were engineered to grab—into the past? In the library, in the post office, in the city park, in the café, in the apothecary… o give us the medicine, even if it is a pharmakon—which, as the pharmacist knows, either poisons or heals—just like nostalgia. Just like the ruins of nostalgia.
Copyright © 2020 by Donna Stonecipher. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
By which a strip of land became a hole in time
—Durs Grünbein
Grandfather I cannot find,
flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,
what country do you belong to:
where is your body buried,
where did your soul go
when the road led nowhere?
Grandfather I’ll never know,
the moment father last saw you
rips open a wormhole
that has no end: the hours
became years, the years
forever: and on the other side
lies a memory of a memory
or a dream of a dream of a dream
of another life, where what happened
never happened, what cannot come true
comes true: and neither erases
the other, or the other others,
world after world, to infinity—
If only I could cross the border
and find you there,
find you anywhere,
as if you could tell me who he is, or was,
or might have become:
no bloodshot eyes, or broken
bottles, or praying with cracked lips
because the past is past and was is not is—
Grandfather, stranger,
give me back my father—
or not back, not back, give me the father
I might have had:
there, in the country that no longer exists,
on the other side of the war—
Copyright © 2019 by Suji Kwock Kim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1973 by Adrienne Rich.
Beside this dike, I shake off the world's dust, enjoying walks alone near my brushwood house. A small stream gurgles down a rocky gorge. Mountains rise beyond the trees, kingfisher blue, almost beyond description, but reminding me of the fisherman's simple life. From a grassy bank, I listen as springtime fills my heart. Finches call and answer in the oaks. Deer cry out, then return to munching weeds. I remember men who knew a hundred sorrows, and the gratitude they felt for gifts. Joy and sorrow pass, each by each, failure at one moment, happy success the next. But not for me. I have chosen freedom from the world's cares. I chose simplicity.
From Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, translated and edited by Sam Hamill. Translation copyright © 2000 by Sam Hamill. Reprinted by permission of translator and publisher. All rights reserved.
If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.
If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.
If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.
Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.
The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.
It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.
Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.
—2014
from Ledger (Knopf, 2020); first appeared in Brick.
Gathering sounds from each provincial
Nook and hilly village, the scholars
Discerned differences between
Long and short vowels, which phonemes,
Mumbled or dipthonged, would become
Brethren, linguistically speaking.
Speaking of taxonomy,
I’ve been busy categorizing what’s
Joseon, what’s American about each
Choice of diction or hill I might die on.
Killing my accent was only ever half the
Task, is what I mean. Q: When grief
Pushes its wet moons from me, is the sound
Historically accurate? or just a bit of feedback?
Copyright © 2020 by Franny Choi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 20, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
I have been living closer to the ocean than I thought-- in a rocky cove thick with seaweed. It pulls me down when I go wading. Sometimes, to get back to land takes everything that I have in me. Sometimes, to get back to land is the worst thing a person can do. Meanwhile, we are dreaming: The body is innocent. She has never hurt me. What we love flutters in us.
From House of Poured Out Waters © 2000 by Jane Mead.
(This poem’s about looking for the sage and not finding her)
Some say she moved in with her ex-girlfriend in Taiwan
Some say she went to Florida to wrestle alligators
Some say she went to Peach Blossom Spring
To drink tea with Tao Qian
Miho says she’s living in Calexico with three cats
And a gerbil named Max
Some say she’s just a shadow of the Great Society
A parody
Of what might-have-been
Rhea saw her stark raving mad
Between 23rd and the Avenue of the Americas
Wrapped in a flag!
I swear I saw her floating in a motel pool
Topless, on a plastic manatee, palms up
What in hell was she thinking?
What is poetry? What are stars?
Whence comes the end of suffering?
Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Chin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 13, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
II.
All night long we lie
Stupidly watching the smoke puff over the sky,
Stupidly watching the interminable stars
Come out again, peaceful and cold and high,
Swim into the smoke again, or melt in a flare of red…
All night long, all night long,
Hearing the terrible battle of guns,
We smoke our pipes, we think we shall soon be dead,
We sleep for a second, and wake again,
We dream we are filling pans and baking bread,
Or hoeing the witch-grass out of the wheat,
We dream we are turning lathes,
Or open our shops, in the early morning,
And look for a moment along the quiet street…
And we do not laugh, though it is strange
In a harrowing second of time
To traverse so many worlds, so many ages,
And come to this chaos again,
This vast symphonic dance of death,
This incoherent dust.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“1915: The Trenches” was published in Nocturne of a Remembered Spring and Other Poems (The Four Seas Company, 1917).
To such a request, the world is obliging.
In just the past week, a rotund porcupine,
who seemed equally startled by me.
The man who swallowed a tiny microphone
to record the sounds of his body,
not considering beforehand how he might remove it.
A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread.
How easily the large spiders were caught with a clear plastic cup
surprised even them.
I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended.
Or why each time a new fossil, Earth-like planet, or war.
Or that no one kept being there when the doorknob had clearly.
What should not have been so surprising:
my error after error, recognized when appearing on the faces of others.
What did not surprise enough:
my daily expectation that anything would continue,
and then that so much did continue, when so much did not.
Small rivulets still flowing downhill when it wasn’t raining.
A sister’s birthday.
Also, the stubborn, courteous persistence.
That even today please means please,
good morning is still understood as good morning,
and that when I wake up,
the window’s distant mountain remains a mountain,
the borrowed city around me is still a city, and standing.
Its alleys and markets, offices of dentists,
drug store, liquor store, Chevron.
Its library that charges—a happy surprise—no fine for overdue books:
Borges, Baldwin, Szymborska, Morrison, Cavafy.
—2018
from Ledger (Knopf, 2020); first appeared in The New Yorker.
On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.
The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.
Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,
while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.
The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking
of rivers, of boulders and air.
Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.
Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.
They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.
—2017
from Ledger (Knopf, 2020); first appeared in The Washington Post.
Extraordinary efforts are being made To hide things from us, my friend. Some stay up into the wee hours To search their souls. Others undress each other in darkened rooms. The creaky old elevator Took us down to the icy cellar first To show us a mop and a bucket Before it deigned to ascend again With a sigh of exasperation. Under the vast, early-dawn sky The city lay silent before us. Everything on hold: Rooftops and water towers, Clouds and wisps of white smoke. We must be patient, we told ourselves, See if the pigeons will coo now For the one who comes to her window To feed them angel cake, All but invisible, but for her slender arm. Copyright © 2005 by Charles Simic. From My Noiseless Entourage, of Harcourt Inc.
The whirring internal machine, its gears
grinding not to a halt but to a pace that emits
a low hum, a steady and almost imperceptible
hum: the Greeks would not have seen it this way.
Simply put, it was a result of black bile,
the small fruit of the gall bladder perched
under the liver somehow over-ripened
and then becoming fetid. So the ancients
would have us believe. But the overly-emotional
and contrarian Romans saw it as a kind of mourning
for one’s self. I trust the ancients but I have never
given any of this credence because I cannot understand
how one does this, mourn one’s self.
Down by the shoreline—the Pacific
wrestling with far more important
philosophical issues—I recall the English notion
of it being a wistfulness, something John Donne
wore successfully as a fashion statement.
But how does one wear wistfulness well
unless one is a true believer?
The humors within me are unbalanced,
and I doubt they were ever really in balance
to begin with, ever in that rare but beautiful
thing the scientists call equilibrium.
My gall bladder squeezes and wrenches,
or so I imagine. I am wistful and morose
and I am certain black bile is streaming
through my body as I walk beside this seashore.
The small birds scrambling away from the advancing
surf; the sun climbing overhead shortening shadows;
the sound of the waves hushing the cries of gulls:
I have no idea where any of this ends up.
To be balanced, to be without either
peaks or troughs: do tell me what that is like…
This contemplating, this mulling over, often leads
to a moment a few weeks from now,
the one in which everything suddenly shines
with clarity, where my fingers race to put down
the words, my fingers so quick on the keyboard
it will seem like a god-damned miracle.
Copyright © 2020 by C. Dale Young. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 13, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Every day you sink into her To make room for me. When I die, I sink into you, When Xing dies, she sinks Into me, her child dies & Sinks into Xing & the Earth, Who is always ravenous, Swallows us. I don’t know where you’re buried. I don’t know your sons’ names, Only their numbers & fates: #2 was murdered, #3 went to jail, #4 hung himself, #5, who did the cooking & cleaning, is alive. #1, my father, died of pancreatic cancer. Of bacon & lunch meat & Napoleons. Your husband died young, of Double Happiness, unfiltered. You died of Time, Of motherhood, Of being the boss, Of working in a sock factory, Of an everyday ailment For which there is no cure. I am alone, like a number. #1 writes me a letter: My dearest Jenny, Do you know Rigoberta Menchú, this name? There were also silences about Chinese girls, Oriental women. In field of literature, you must be strong enough to bear all these. An ivory tower writer can never be successful. You are almost living like a hermit. Are you coming home soon? He doesn’t mention you. Perfect defect. Hidden flaw in the cloth, Yellow bead in the family regalia. Bidden to be understory, Silences, pored & poured over. You are almost living. You say hello to me quietly. What is success? Meat? Pastries? Cigarettes? The cessation of Communion with self? I want to be eaten By an ivory tower, Devoured by the power Of my own solitude. We’re alone together. I read the letter every day before death. Where are you buried, Nainai? I’m coming home soon.
Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Tseng. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 25, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
[For Petra]
Scientists say the average human
life gets three months longer every year.
By this math, death will be optional. Like a tie
or dessert or suffering. My mother asks
whether I’d want to live forever.
“I’d get bored,” I tell her. “But,” she says,
“there’s so much to do,” meaning
she believes there’s much she hasn’t done.
Thirty years ago she was the age I am now
but, unlike me, too industrious to think about
birds disappeared by rain. If only we had more
time or enough money to be kept on ice
until such a time science could bring us back.
Of late my mother has begun to think life
short-lived. I’m too young to convince her
otherwise. The one and only occasion
I was in the same room as the Mona Lisa,
it was encased in glass behind what I imagine
were velvet ropes. There’s far less between
ourselves and oblivion—skin that often defeats
its very purpose. Or maybe its purpose
isn’t protection at all, but rather to provide
a place, similar to a doctor’s waiting room,
in which to sit until our names are called.
Hold your questions until the end.
Mother, measure my wide-open arms—
we still have this much time to kill.
Copyright © 2017 by Nicole Sealey. Originally published in The Village Voice.
At night, in winter, in St Kilda
the bayside highway forms a halo. Cars
like comets blazing at and into me.
Walking into lights, the cold, the hard clean bayside night,
their energy recharges me.
Melbourne at night, a winter night, has no sunsets, no stars.
Instead, a rose-tinted, glass-panelled airport and
the traffic current.
There are no stars in the bay. The water reflects
the grey mist ripples, smothered night, that functions as a sky.
In winter, Melbourne nights are tones of grey on black and red and
amber aura light.
An empty Brighton crossroad, tusk-like railway lines.
Each street-light traps a sparkling mist,
electric dew.
Melbourne
is a cage. Held down by tram-wire steel-nets overhead,
this city is straitjacketed,
sedated in the luminous haze of clouded sky and mist and bay.
Bright lights gleaming, flashing meteor
prison bar tramlines, wire sky leveller, cutting down…
By day the Melbourne summer sky
is violet tinged, not azure.
I remember
night-time skies as light,
when dull red dust clouds billowed down
escaped the gully, loomed above the dry town
I once called my home.
Five years, I said, and so with sentence up
I am glad to be on schedule.
Facing into lights, the world, the hard clean unchained wind…
I never called Melbourne home.
Written age 17 on the day I formally dropped out of university.
Cento Between the Ending and the End
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Sometimes you don’t die
when you’re supposed to
& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body
a white door opens
into a place queerly brimming
gold light so velvet-gold
it is like the world
hasn’t happened
when I call out
all my friends are there
everyone we love
is still alive gathered
at the lakeside
like constellations
my honeyed kin
honeyed light
beneath the sky
a garden blue stalks
white buds the moon’s
marble glow the fire
distant & flickering
the body whole bright-
winged brimming
with the hours
of the day beautiful
nameless planet. Oh
friends, my friends—
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free.
Copyright © 2018 by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Originally published in in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
∞
son/daughter
by Kai Conradi
In a dream my dad fell
from the top of a steep white mountain
down into a blue crevasse
like the space between two waves
where the light shines through just enough
to tell you
you will miss this life dearly.
The falling took years.
I could hear him moving through air and then finally nothing.
In another dream my dad was an angel
his see-through body dangling in the air
floating above me face shimmery like tinfoil
and I cried and cried when he told me
I can’t come back to earth now not ever.
When my dad told me
You will always be my daughter
maybe it was like that.
Will I be allowed to come back to earth
and be your son?
Source: Poetry (January 2019)
∞
Emily Dickinson
I’m Nobody. Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell. they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog _
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
∞
The Embrace
by Mark Doty
You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
From Sweet Machine, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty.
∞
Autobiography of Eve
by Ansel Elkins
Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
My own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake–
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
Copyright © 2015 by Ansel Elkins.
∞
The Colonel
by Carolyn Forché
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
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
May 1978
All lines from “The Colonel” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, Copyright (c) 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Originally appeared in Women’s International Resource Exchange. (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1981)
∞
Grace
by Sarah Gambito
You won’t
kill me
because I
will not
oblige you
by dying.
I hold all
my hands
under
the cherry
trees.
Clusters of
shyest
pinks
joining
hands.
Laced
like this,
diadem
like this,
we live the
past/
present/
future/
all at once
and even now.
Wouldn’t we tear
seas,
cities,
money
to get to
each other?
The public
garden—
the books
of its leaves,
the leaves
of its books—
denotes privilege,
entitlement
gorgeous belief
that we’ll meet
again and
again
holding
this
feelingtone
of
flowers
Source: Poetry (July/August 2019)
∞
Poof
by Amy Gerstler
Here on my lap, in a small plastic bag,
my share of your ashes. Let me not squander
them. Your family blindsided me with this gift.
We want to honor your bond they said at the end
of your service, which took place, as you’d
arranged, in a restaurant at the harbor,
an old two-story boathouse made of dark
wood. Some of us sat on the balcony, on black
leather bar stools, staring at rows of docked boats.
Both your husbands showed up and got along.
And of course your impossibly handsome son.
After lunch, a slideshow and testimonials,
your family left to toss their share of you
onto the ocean, along with some flowers.
You were the girlfriend I practiced kissing
with in sixth grade during zero-sleep
sleepovers. You were the pretty one.
In middle school I lived on diet Coke and
your sexual reconnaissance reports. In this
telling of our story your father never hits
you or calls you a whore. Always gentle
with me, he taught me to ride a bike after
everyone said I was too klutzy to learn.
In this version we’re not afraid of our bodies.
In this fiction, birth control is easy to obtain,
and never fails. You still dive under a stall
divider in a restroom at the beach to free me
after I get too drunk to unlock the door. You still
reveal the esoteric mysteries of tampons. You
still learn Farsi and French from boyfriends
as your life ignites. In high school I still guide you
safely out of the stadium when you start yelling
that the football looks amazing as it shatters
into a million shimmering pieces, as you
loudly admit that you just dropped acid.
We lived to be sixty. Then poof, you vanished.
I can’t snort you, or dump you out over my head,
coating myself in your dust like some hapless cartoon
character who’s just blown herself up, yet remains
unscathed, as is the way in cartoons. In this version,
I remain in place for a while. Did you have a good
journey? I’m still lagging behind, barking up all
the wrong trees, whipping out my scimitar far
in advance of what the occasion demands. As I
drive home from your memorial, you fizz in
my head like a distant radio station. What
can I do to bridge this chasm between us?
In this fiction, I roll down the window, drive
uncharacteristically fast. I tear your baggie
open with my teeth and release you at 85
miles an hour, music cranked up full blast.
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Gerstler. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
∞
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Copyright © 2005 Jack Gilbert. From Refusing Heaven, 2005, Alfred A. Knopf.
∞
Wait
by Galway Kinnell
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Mariner Books, 1980), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
∞
I Ask My Mother to Sing
by Li-Young Lee
She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.
I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.
But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.
Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.
From Rose. Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., http://www.boaeditions.org.
∞
From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org.
∞
The Hour and What Is Dead
by Li-Young Lee
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.
At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.
Someone tell him he should sleep now.
My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.
At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.
Someone tell him he should sleep now.
God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.
At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.
Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.
∞
Nucleation
by Sally Wen Mao
The harvesting of pearls, the very process, is a continuous systematic violation of flesh: insert the mantle tissue of a foreign creature into the oyster shell and wait for its insides to react. This is called nucleation. Panicked, the oyster produces nacre. Trapped in the nacre, the invasive agent—the parasite or mantle tissue—is subsumed by the pearl.
To domesticate, then, is to force-feed. Mikimoto, in his dreams, wanted a string of pearls to glow around the neck of every woman in the world. Like the bioluminescent waters of his youth, a deep-sea dive, the pearls became warm upon touch, upon being worn.
Women wear the trauma of other creatures around their necks, in an attempt to put a pall on their own. Adorn the self to be adored. What if we fail? What if we are failures at love? A man once called me “adorable” on a date at a museum. It was hailing outside, and we were wandering through the Death and Transcendence wing. I looked into a woman’s tomb, its mother-of-pearl inlays. A limp body looked back, into the gap around my neck. I had no amulet, I had no protection.
Source: Poetry (April 2020)
∞
Occidentalism
by Sally Wen Mao
A man celebrates erstwhile conquests,
his book locked in a silo, still in print.
I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface
its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain
fields whisper. Marble lions are silent
yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth.
In this life I have worshipped so many lies.
Then I workshop them, make them better.
An East India Company, an opium trade,
a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation,
a man parting the veil covering a woman’s
face, his nails prying her lips open. I love
the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy
it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han
dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995.
If only recovering the silenced history
is as simple as smashing its container: book,
bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross
borders the way our bodies never could.
Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde
dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts
still shudder through us like small breaths.
The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates
in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,
a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,
pick it up, read about all the ways her body
is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect
her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—
rewrite this.
Sally Wen Mao, “Occidentalism” from Oculus. Copyright © 2019 by Sally Wen Mao. Graywolf Press, http://www.graywolfpress.org.
∞
Resurrection
by Sally Wen Mao
In the autumn I moved to New York,
I recognized her face all over the subway
stations—pearls around her throat, she poses
for her immigration papers. In 1924, the only
Americans required to carry identity cards
were ethnically Chinese—the first photo IDs,
red targets on the head of every man, woman,
child, infant, movie star. Like pallbearers,
they lined up to get their pictures taken: full-face
view, direct camera gaze, no smiles, ears showing,
in silver gelatin. A rogue’s gallery of Chinese
exclusion. The subway poster doesn’t name
her—though it does mention her ethnicity,
and the name of the New-York Historical
Society exhibition: Exclusion/Inclusion.
Soon, when I felt alone in this city, her face
would peer at me from behind seats, turnstiles,
heads, and headphones, and I swear she wore
a smile only I could see. Sometimes my face
aligned with hers, and we would rush past
the bewildered lives before us—hers, gone
the year my mother was born, and mine,
a belt of ghosts trailing after my scent.
In the same aboveground train, in the same
city where slain umbrellas travel across
the Hudson River, we live and live.
I’ve left my landline so ghosts can’t dial me
at midnight with the hunger of hunters
anymore. I’m so hungry I gnaw at light.
It tunnels from the shadows, an exhausting
hope. I know this hunger tormented her too.
It haunted her through her years in L.A., Paris,
and New York, the parties she went to, people
she met—Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston,
Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein. It haunts
her expression still, on the 6 train, Grand
Central station, an echo chamber behind
her eyes. But dear universe: if I can recognize
her face under this tunnel of endless shadows
against the luminance of all that is extinct
and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.
∞
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
∞
Notebook, 1981
by Eileen Myles
I was so willing to pull a page out of my notebook, a day, several bright days and live them as if I was only alive, thirsty, timeless, young enough, to do this one more time, to dare to have nothing so much to lose and to feel that potential dying of the self in the light as the only thing I thought that was spiritual, possible and because I had no other way to call that mind, I called it poetry, but it was flesh and time and bread and friends frightened and free enough to want to have another day that way, tear another page.
Excerpted from Evolution. Copyright © 2018 by Eileen Myles. Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.
∞
“Have Made Earth as the Mirror of Heaven”
by Alice Notley
my name is Alice Elizabeth, so am I
Allie Sheedy of the movie Short Circuits thus angry
or Elizabeth McGovern self-controlled?
This question is posited
on a television screen where I can’t quite identify
the actress shown—which is she?
I am Allie and I will continue to rant.
____________________
My voice rises in real life often—
because I am ‘passionate’ … that’s
a convenient word.
____________________
I’m still in the forest, darkening
wishing I were ‘nicer.’
Hardwood says, You should stand up soon
I’ll help you
I say, I have cramps
I say, I’m using my period, to get pissed off and to Know.
____________________
I dreamed, last night, about an immense Dead Seal
below the surface of the water in a harbor
pull the curtain down.
For months you would not break the spell
for eternities you have not done so, citing economic
exigencies; the whole thing is a mess.
I might rather be dead
than doing what it takes to keep the seal under water
whale-sized
E is for seal. For spell. For suppression.
____________________
To take part in you is to die
is why one dies
Have I said this before?
____________________
I am Alp the Dizzy.
____________________
The dead seal isn’t a person, it’s poetry the seal
the hallmark
of selfhood, dead grotesquely large and richly hardening.
“Hardwood it was someone like you
you drowned the seal”
“No I’m making both you and it ‘hard.’ ”
____________________
And I’m still in the forest.
____________________
And I’m still in the forest
Money’s more the real live poetry
abstract symbolic imaginary
trade your life for it and trade it for your life
so you’ll have something ‘to do’
Sink the whale
and sleep all day in the real world, up and functioning
more fully imagined and dreamed, in society’s
than in your own, imagination?
I’m standing
I’m standing up Hard
I keep being Hardwood myself, dark and hard.
____________________
Initiating a new ‘broken symmetry’ (spinning to the
Left, like a newborn neutrino)
so that we can have a new consciousness …
am I doing that? Yes I think so.
____________________
The forest contains a French restaurant
every meter or so …
difficult to fast in this dream vision.
We’re a very unpopular group today
We’ve shot off another great bomb
and we’ve shot down a terrorist,
an Arab, young, before
we even found out what he “knew.”
____________________
Tell me something beautiful, bitter
because we are somehow bitter, forever,
a taste included in origin, in love, in you.
So I don’t have to be cloyed.
… soul’s waters are reticent
sly swamps.
It had nothing in it,
that swamp; because I didn’t know how to look for
the parts of its obvious whole—death is
minute, flavorful parts—which are said to spin
as I’m said to walk, moving while else
mostly unconscious of that.
____________________
In the new consciousness
Alice Notley, “Have Made Earth as the Mirror of Heaven” from Disobedience. Copyright © 2001 by Alice Notley. Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
∞
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
‘Wild Geese’, from Dream Work (1986) by Mary Oliver.
∞
Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.
∞
Red Brocade
by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.
Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.
I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.
Copyright © by Naomi Shihab Nye.
∞
i swear to god i will solve the rack man case just give me two weeks
by Harry Reid
give me something to wail on
i want instant justice like fly-spray
this train carriage is a court-room
& i’m the judge, handing down
25 to life for the man wearing btk glasses
& getting off at south kensington
at home my kitchen’s a crime scene
i’m the sheriff of the group chat like
cooking dinner i’m mad at 70’s america
do the fucking dishes guys
& take the bins out it’s wednesday
cooking dinner i’m mad at 70s america
like what the fuck were you doing
letting rodney alcala on the dating game
right in the middle of his murder spree
& how come cheryl was the only one
who thought he was a total creep?
i wash up like forensically
leave a fork in the sink like a calling card
fall asleep listening
for footsteps outside my window
watching a documentary
on the hillside strangers
think about paving the driveway with gravel
so i can hear when anyone approaches
wake up & put tiny numbered markers
all throughout the house
march my housemate around the living room
showing him where he missed with the vacuum
he hates it but he lets me
keep these little rituals
like taping off my bedroom
when i need some time alone
or microscopically examining
all the hair in the shower
so i know no-one has broken in
& used all my shampoo
it’s only because i can’t walk
through the park anymore
without my phone in one hand
& my keys in the other
so i’ll keep gary ridgway’s 48 life sentences
in my pocket for good luck
light a candle for every one
of dudley kyzer’s 10,000 years
go home & thank god
i don’t live in california
from six gay bushrangers
∞
What Kind of Times Are These
by Adrienne Rich
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times are These” from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich.
Source: Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995)
∞
Last on Earth
by Mary Ruefle
It is said that many have been cured of madness by drinking
of the spring in the orchard of this convent, but I
doubt it, for it is a very pleasant place and a surfeit
of pleasantries often leads directly to madness.
I do not have much experience of madness (once
a sister ran naked down the hall) but I have tasted
the water and it is clear and fresh, there is nothing
unpleasant about it. The Abbess said of a certain man
he is a drink of water—meaning he was a bore—
but I want to meet that man, he would be as welcome
in my life as Jesus in the orchard here, though the fat
old Abbess might shoo him away. I would be so glad
to have him drink, to serve him with a round of little glasses
on a painted tray, like the ‘cocktail parties’
in the secular world, and I the hostess, turning her cheek
to be kissed in the fray. I would wear white clothes and
my headdress, and he might carry a scythe and cut
the morning glories, or simply sit and sun his nose.
But they have taken my Lord away, lodged Him in the earth
somewhere, call Him leaves, vines, breeze, bird.
It cannot be true. Looking for Him in these things
condemns us to a lifetime of imbecile activity.
He has a face, arms, legs, a navel. He is a man,
for He is everything I am not. How can it be
otherwise? Before I leave the spring, I lean
over it and weep. I spit upon the flowers. I stumble
up the hill. We are somewhere below the Tserna Gota—
meaning the Black Mountain—and when I reach the top
I count the villages—there are two—where we
are the last on earth to think of Him as having a head.
Here, too, is the source of the spring, and crows
with lethargic dispositions circle and circle the spot.
Mary Ruefle, “Last on Earth” from Post Meridian. Copyright © 2000 by Mary Ruefle.
Source: Post Meridian (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)
∞
The Wife of Mission Rock
by Mary Ruefle
Nothing curves at sea,
and the men there die abruptly,
in imitation of the fact, except
when the ship rises higher than necessary
and then they must drop suddenly
but for a long time,
so that their deaths appear natural
in the end, and the women sweeping the coutyards
pause, thinking the dust
to be the cause of a specific dryness
in the mouth. They leave half of a
pastry to harden on a plate.
They leave all of the lemons and figs
in bowls. They leave fuschia
splattered on the stone steps leading
down to the bay. They carry their brooms
with them, keep sweeping the air,
cleaning it back to the sea.
They sweep the sand from the shore,
feet standing in neat little rows of foam.
Each at the edge of something when
the foghorns remind them:
they will not clearly remember it,
they will not altogether forget it.
They will wait for something to emerge,
like a man at sea carving his children
from soap. One woman will start the rumor
that the sea is deeper than necessary:
Tell her, when has anyone ever come back
for one day’s effort on earth?
Mary Ruefle, “The Wife of Mission Rock” from Life Without Speaking, published by University of Alabama Press. Copyright © 1982 by Mary Ruefle.
∞
The Letter
by Mary Ruefle
Beloved, men in thick green coats came crunching
through the snow, the insignia on their shoulders
of uncertain origin, a country I could not be sure of,
a salute so terrifying I heard myself lying to avoid
arrest, and was arrested along with Jocko, whose tear
had snapped off, a tiny icicle he put in his mouth.
We were taken to the ice prison, a palace encrusted
with hoarfrost, its dome lit from within, Jocko admired
the wiring, he kicked the walls to test the strength
of his new boots. A television stood in a block of ice,
its blue image still moving like a liquid center.
You asked for my innermost thoughts. I wonder will I
ever see a grape again? When I think of the vineyard
where we met in October—when you dropped a cluster
custom insisted you be kissed by a stranger—how after
the harvest we plunged into a stream so icy our palms
turned pink. It seemed our future was sealed. Everyone
said so. It is quiet here. Not closing our ranks
weakens us hugely. The snowflakes fall in a featureless
bath. I am the stranger who kissed you. On sunny days
each tree is a glittering chandelier. The power of
mindless beauty! Jocko told a joke and has been dead
since May. A bullethole in his forehead the officers
call a third eye. For a month I milked a barnful of
cows. It is a lot like cleansing a chandelier. Wipe
and polish, wipe and polish, round and round you go.
I have lost my spectacles. Is the book I was reading
still open by the side of our bed? Treat it as a bookmark
saving my place in our story.
(here the letter breaks off)
Mary Ruefle, “The Letter” from Post Meridian. Copyright © 2000 by Mary Ruefle.
Source: Post Meridian (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)
∞
Blood Soup
by Mary Ruefle
The last time I saw father alive he was using
a black umbrella, closed, to beat off some pigeons
hanging outside the marble portals of a museum.
We were visitors, walking very slowly, so father
could stoop and examine everything. We had not been
in the museum, but were resting on its steps.
We saw it all—the fountains, the statues, the parks
and the post office. Cities are made of such things.
Once we encountered a wedding coming out of the cathedral
and were caught in a shower of rice; as the bride
flicked her veiled head father licked his little finger
and in this way saved a grain. On the next block
he announced he was going to heaven. But first let’s
go back to the hotel and rest, he said: I want my mint.
Those were practically his last words. And what did I want
more than anything in the world? Probably the ancient Polish
recipe for blood soup, which was finally told to me
in an empty deli in a deserted mill town in western Massachusetts
by the owner’s mother, who was alone one day when I burst
in and demanded a bowl. But, she said, lacing her fingers
around a jar of morello cherries, it requires one cup of
new blood drawn from the goose whose neck you’ve just wrung
to put in the pot, and where in these days can I find
anything as fresh as that? I had lost track of my life
before, but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of
wayfarer’s bliss when she continued to list, one
by one, the impossible ingredients I needed to live.
We sat at the greasy table far into the night, while
snow fell on the locked doors of the church next door,
dedicated to St. Stanislas, which was rumored to be
beautiful inside, and contain the remains of his beloved head.
Mary Ruefle, “Blood Soup” from Among the Musk OX People: Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Mary Ruefle. (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002)
∞
little city
by Sara Saleh
little city, on your scorched days Rania and I pool our
khamsmiyehs, buy Bonjus from baqqal abu Fadi, sell them
for triple the price, “dollar law samaht”, this country has us
believing we are so clever, so entrepreneurial, them
neighborhood kids should be grateful, “khalto, look at
us, don’t we make you
proud?”
little city, on your anxious nights we gather in
balconies, lighthouse beacons with little-to-no
light, wreathed in smoke, we wait, we
sit, we speak, we speak over each
other, “ya 3layeh inshaAllah”, no one
actually wants to hear the answers,
I can’t afford to trust the morning,
I am still learning to believe it when it
comes.
little city, we want to sing, want to giggle silly over
boys and simple things, but you have different
plans, young men on tanks cuss loudly, young
men on tanks whistle at us, eyes open
empty, this dark, this shatter,
we tell them we have God, but
I don’t think they believe
us.
little city, we climb to the top of the steeple
stairs, quiet and quieter, past jasmine
bushes, past bullet holes, confetti
of ‘86, no one bothers with
plaster, is it any wonder we don’t have
mothers and fathers, how long will you
hate yourself into something we can
love?
little city, trying to forget
little city, how did you survive,
what did they call you…
before Syria, before Israel, before France, before
Ottoman…
before, before…
little city, what becomes of history
if there remain no artists to write of it?
your pages are long, your patience
longer.
From bil 3arabi: 6 poems
∞
Fairouz
by Sara Saleh
Fairouz …
The last one of us has left home…
Fairouz sings, “Oh wind, if you please, take me home …”
What does it mean to lose a person, to lose a country?
Whenever I write about mama and baba, I use ellipses,
I am not fond of endings, and we are a people
of kan zaman and kan ya ma kan…
“Upon the rumble of the bus that was carrying us from the village
of Hamlaya to the village of Tannourine, I remembered you,
and I remember your eyes”
Friday lunch we drape boney fish and
spiced potatoes on the table, fighting over
who is to blame for this mess, Amreeka, amo
says or we brought it on ourselves or some other or …
We stay seated for hours, with our oversized
plates and our oversized grief …
“The people have asked me about you, my darling
They’ve written letters and the wind took them
It’s not easy for me to sing, my darling”
We both come from a wartime where
there is only one hospital, and many shrines
to watch over our dead, their bodies inside out,
which is to say, we only know how to love inside out …
So many times I sent word when you were an island,
unsure if it reached you, my darling, and what if
we are not meant to survive everything?
Fairouz sings, and we are reminded,
every love letter is also an elegy …
“Until When, God?”
“Our land is being reborn”
The man on the TV says, burn the mosques,
burn the textbooks, burn our tender,
this city turns our curses to prayers,
our disciples to the wretched …
“My voice, keep flying,
whirlwind inside the conscience of people,
tell them what’s happening,
so that maybe their conscience wakes up.”
Sing to them, we are a free people …
And sing. and sing. And sing. And …
From bil 3arabi: 6 poems
∞
Advice to a Prophet
by Richard Wilbur
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. FB post by the Poetry Foundation 27 January 2019
∞
Gone is Gone
by Mark Wunderlich
for Lucie Brock-Broido
I was there at the edge of Never,
of Once Been, bearing the night’s hide
stretched across the night sky,
awake with myself disappointing myself,
armed, legged & torsoed in the bed,
my head occupied by enemy forces,
mind not lost entire, but wandering
off the marked path ill-advisedly. This March
Lucie upped and died, and the funny show
of her smoky-throated world began to fade.
I didn’t know how much of me was made
by her, but now I know that this spooky art
in which we staple a thing
to our best sketch of a thing was done
under her direction, and here I am
at 4 AM, scratching a green pen over a notebook
bound in red leather in October.
It’s too warm for a fire. She’d hate that.
And the cats appear here only as apparitions
I glimpse sleeping in a chair, then
Wohin bist du entschwunden? I wise up,
know their likenesses are only inked
on my shoulder’s skin, their chipped ash poured
in twin cinerary jars downstairs. Gone
is gone, said the goose to the shrunken boy
in the mean-spirited Swedish children’s book
I love. I shouldn’t be writing this
at this age or any other. She mothered
a part of me that needed that, lit
a spirit-lantern to spin shapes inside
my obituary head, even though—
I’m nearly certain now—she’s dead.
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Wunderlich. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 23, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
∞
Say Grace
by Emily Jungmin Yoon
In my country our shamans were women
and our gods multiple until white people brought
an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today
glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child
in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell
if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman
whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked
What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said
They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers
and recited them in front of women
I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.
In this country, which calls itself Christian,
what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy
on us. From those who serve different gods. O
clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,
amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet, O sweet. In this country,
point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,
with a hand full of feathers,
and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.
If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic
so be it, let us have magic. Let us have
our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,
our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep
our stars to ourselves and we shall pray
to no one. Let us eat
what makes us holy.
Source: Poetry (November 2017)
∞
An Ordinary Misfortune [“She is girl. She is gravel.”]
by Emily Jungmin Yoon
She is girl. She is gravel. She is grabbed. She is grabbed like handfuls of gravel. Gravel grated by water. Her village is full of gravel fields. It is 1950. She is girl. She is grabbed. She is not my grandmother, though my grandmother is girl. My grandmother’s father closes the gates. Against American soldiers, though they jump over stone walls. To a girl who is not my grandmother. The girl is gravel grabbed. Her language is gravel because it means nothing. Hands full of girl. Fields full of gravel. Korea is gravel and graves. Girl is girl and she will never be a grandmother. She will be girl, girl is gravel and history will skip her like stone over water. Oh girl, oh glory. Girl.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, “An Ordinary Misfortune [”She is girl. She is gravel.”]” from A Cruelty Special to Our Species. Copyright © 2018 by Emily Jungmin Yoon. The Ecco Press (HarperCollins Publishers).
∞
What Carries Us
by Emily Jungmin Yoon
First, there was the horse.
Imagine creatures as majestic,
standing. All their lives they stand, withholding.
Imagine being tamed. Learning to be still,
to be speed. Imagine birds as large
as horses. We would be flying, grabbing
a majestic creature by its collar.
In cylinders of metal, we are four-legged
beast-lives of liminal spaces.
One time I was so tired of flying I wondered
if I will spend all my life packing then unpacking.
A complaint of privilege. We are such spending
creatures. And when I say we are beasts,
is that a metaphor? Metaphor, according to Papastergiadis,
is also transportation, between absence and presence,
“articulating action.” Its “very process,”
in times of extremity, is “akin to prophecy.”
I like the idea of transportation
as articulation, that the end of metaphor is a kind
of arrival, like getting off the train at an unknown stop.
So when I say we are beasts, perhaps what I mean
to do is remember that predators
have forward-facing eyes, and we do
grab others by the collar, and we do fly
in metal, in preparation for the kill.
What I want to do is slow down time.
Imagine love as a horse.
Think about us—a distance
apart only a flying thing could connect us—
standing and pacing, tamed and watching,
then finally with each other, laughing
as if to collapse, unbridled as wild horses.
In this era of brevity in this era of metal in this
era of abbreviation, yes, I’m trying to make you
think of me longer. Yes, this whole time,
the bird, the train, the whole thing
about metaphor, I said to say this,
that this is what carries us, the slow
consideration of what each other is, can be.
And first, there was the horse.
Source: Poetry (April 2020)
∞
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.
Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
It’s edging
into the narrows
between the reef and rocky outcrops.
It inserts its proboscis
its probe
and smiles that smile that is not
a smile.
The shark with my name on it
quivers with instinctive
connective drive
Its pale planetary
eyes dilate.
Sensing my proximity
the shutters come down
nictitating membrane.
Better than an eye roll
a full body twist
a wink that says
silently
I’ve got your number.
Update: I am humbled that Anthony’s sisters Sharyn and Suellen have invited me to read a section from this at Anthony’s commemoration, Thursday 27 December 2018. I am honoured to contribute.
Anthony O’Grady with Bryan Ferry – RAM
One day late in 1979 I was walking along Glebe Point Road in Sydney with my new friend, Stuart Coupe, and Stuart suggested I should write for RAM, Rock Australia Magazine, my bible. He said he’d introduce me to the editor. So I went along to the RAM offices in Crown Street, Darlinghurst, to meet Anthony O’Grady.
The RAM offices were on the second level of a converted terrace building and were kinda funky. People who looked like they belonged in rock’n’roll were fugging up the space. Behind a large desk, with his back to a window overlooking Crown Street, sat Anthony.
Now Anthony had a very soft voice and pretty, feline features. He leaned back in his chair, with a guarded manner. He was watchful and maybe a bit irritated. I did not look rock’n’roll even slightly.
I could not hear a word AO’G said to me above the noise of traffic through the open window. I just kept smiling and nodding, hoping my timing was ok. Then I genuflected and backed out, cautiously.
That evening Stuart phoned me, to check that I was ok. He told me Anthony O’Grady had apologised for being rude to his friend. Anthony had, apparently, told me to fuck off. I had, apparently, just sat there, smiled and nodded.
Anthony said, “Anyone with skin that thick should be a rock music writer.”
Between them, I owe Anthony and Stuart the life I’ve led.
As a writer, I owe incalculably to Anthony.
My first few articles he tore up. Then he took to slashing them with a red pen. He told me what to dump. He told me what to expand. He told me when it pleased. Eventually, he smiled.
About 10 years later, Anthony took several public transport connections from the north shore of the Harbour to visit me in Kings Cross. He was delayed, by about an hour, and we didn’t have cellphones, so he couldn’t text. Back in my first floor, terrace-house apartment, I grew antsy waiting. I went out.
I was not home when Anthony arrived and he was disappointed. It was a hot day. He’d travelled hours, at some inconvenience. He did that, he told me, because he rated me.
Have I mentioned how highly I rate Anthony?
Love, lots of. From me to you, AO’G.
From Anthony:
I met Elly in 1979, in my capacity as founding editor of the rock magazine RAM. Of the many writers who appeared in the magazine during my seven years as editor, I regard Elly as amongst the most outstanding. Her writing was always perceptive, it embodied the attitude that music could be more than satisfactory entertainment, it could be emotionally fulfilling.
She is that rare individual who combines sensitivity with pervading intelligence. I have never ceased to be impressed by her talents as a writer and the vivaciousness of her personality.
Anthony O’Grady
Founding editor, RAM Magazine
Pics sourced online – on the right, cropped from a photograph by Bob King, in a blog post by Debbie Kruger
I nursed my father in my arms as he died
spewing black blood.
Do you think any residue between me and you
means anything
alongside that?
I do a lot of death.
The ones who grow old
The people who don’t
Those who barely made it past the cradle.
I wait in the market in Damascus and
no one is unexpected.
I stand on a bridge and
sooner or later they all pass by.
I extend my hand and
welcome them.
Hello, I say.
I have a room prepared.
Elly McDonald 