January 2012
16 posts
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"Song" By Adrienne Rich
You’re wondering if I’m lonely: OK then, yes, I’m lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean. You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died...
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"This 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....
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"Answer" By Carol Duffy
If you were made of stone, your kiss a fossil sealed up in your lips, your eyes a sightless marble to my touch, your grey hands pooling raindrops for the birds, your long legs cold as rivers locked in ice, if you were stone, if you were made of stone, yes, yes. If you were made of fire, your head a wild Medusa hissing flame, your tongue a red-hot poker in your throat, your heart a small coal...
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"Keeping Things Whole" By Mark Strand
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
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"Cardinal Rules" By Nancy Paddock
nourish yourself close to the ground but when you fly redden the sky with bright wings stay close to the cover of dark branches a red alert to danger but not afraid feed peacefully with small chickadees and sparrows content with crumbs the world provides enough when the jay comes hungry and screaming vanish like a flame extinguished in the wind and in the cold in the days of iron frost do not...
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"Burning the Water Hyacinth" By Audre Lorde
We flame the river to keep the boat paths open your eyes eat my shadow at the light line touchless completing each other’s need to yearn to settle into hunger faceless a waning moon. Plucking desire from my palms like the firehairs of a cactus I know this appetite the greed of a poet or an empty woman trying to touch what matters
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"For Jane" By Charles Bukowski
225 days under grass and you know more than I. they have long taken your blood, you are a dry stick in a basket. is this how it works? in this room the hours of love still make shadows. when you left you took almost everything. I kneel in the nights before tigers that will not let me be. what you were will not happen again. the tigers have found me and I do not care.
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"The Sciences Sing a Lullaby" By Albert Goldbarth
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep. Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch. You aren’t...
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"Rose Poem" By Lyn Lifshin
when it’s behind my knees you’d have to fall to the floor, lower your whole body like horses in a field to smell it. White Rose, Bulgarian rose. I think of sheets I’ve left my scent in as if to stake a claim for someone who could never care for anything alive. This Bulgarian rose, spicy, pungent, rose as my 16th birthday party dress, rose lips, nipples. If you won’t fall to your...
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"Love Letter" By Melissa Stein
I don’t know when the boys began to walk away with parts of myself in their sticky hands; when loving became a process of subtraction. Or why, having given up what seems so much, I’m willing to lose even more — erasing all this body’s known, relearning it with you.
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"Love Poem for a Non-Believer" By Sandra Cisneros
Because I miss you I run my hand along the flat of my thigh curve of the hip mango of the ass Imagine it your hand across the thrum of ribs arpeggio of breasts collarbones you adore that I don’t My neck is thin You could cup it with one hand Yank the life from me if you wanted I’ve cut my hair You can’t tug my hair anymore A jet of black through the fingers now Your hands...
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"Why Things Burn" By Daphne Gottlieb
my fire-eating career came to an end when i could no longer tell when to spit and when to swallow. last night in amsterdam, 1,000 tulips burned to death. i have an alibi. when i walked by your garden, your hand grenades were in bloom. you caught me playing loves me, loves me not, metal pins between my teeth. i forget the difference between seduction and arson, ignition and cognition. i am a girl...
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"Sad Child" By Margaret Atwood
You’re sad because you’re sad. It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. Take up dancing to forget. Forget what? Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it...
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"Scheherazade" By Richard Siken
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright...
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"Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love...
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what’s happening, it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of...
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"Because I Love You" By Marisa de los Santos
I cannot tell you that last night in the exhaust- fume impatience of nearly-stopped traffic through which cars crept, linked with short chains of light, the driver at my front failed for whole minutes to follow closely the blue Buick in front of him, stopped, in fact, entirely, while a thousand engines idled in molasses-sticky Virginia heat. I caught the fine, still cut-out of his face as he...
July 2011
9 posts
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"Shoulders" By Naomi Shihab Nye
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south: because his son is asleep on his shoulder. No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow. This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s...
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"On Hedonism" By Anne Carson
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.
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"Visitation" By Mark Doty
When I heard he had entered the harbor, and circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief. Don’t they depend on a compass lodged in the salt-flooded folds of the brain, some delicate musical mechanism to navigate their true course? How many ways, in our century’s late iron hours, might we have led him...
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"Delta" By Adrienne Rich
If you have taken this rubble for my past raking through it for fragments you could sell know that I long ago moved on deeper into the heart of the matter If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction a delta springing from the riverbed with its five fingers spread
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"Dwelling" By Li-Young Lee
As though touching her might make him known to himself as though his hand moving over her body might find who he is, as though he lay inside her, a country his hand’s traveling uncovered as though such a country arose continually up out of her to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth. And the places on her body have no names. And she is what’s immense about the night....
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"The Abandoned Valley" By Jack Gilbert
Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?
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"Visible World" By Richard Siken
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall. The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. You had not expected this, the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light pummeling you in a stream of fists. You raised your hand to your face as if to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light streamed straight to the bone, as if you were the small room closed in...
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"It Never Goes Away" By Sophie Cabot Black
I will try to know your death exactly As you do. The moon has shown up tonight, Coin in the palm of one we wait for, sunset Long gone. So hard this practice to wake Into no more light, not even in the place You left it. Then each morning comes And you are followed by the rise Of landscape everywhere. We never know How much it takes, this business Of departure; you stare into ocean Outdone by all...
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"Vertigo" By Anne Stevenson
Mind led body to the edge of the precipice. They stared in desire at the naked abyss. If you love me, said mind, take that step into silence. If you love me, said body, turn and exist.