jnb666/poems · Datasets at Hugging Face

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203,552	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35717/larkinesque	Michael Ryan	Larkinesque	Reading in the paper a summary of a five-year psychological study that shows those perceived as most beautiful are treated differently, I think they could have just asked me, remembering a kind of pudgy kid and late puberty, the bloody noses and wisecracks because I wore glasses, though we all know by now how awful it is for the busty starlet no one takes seriously, the loveliest women I've lunched with lamenting the opacity of the body, they can never trust a man's interest even when he seems not just out for sex (eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass), and who would want to live like this? And what does beauty do to a man?- Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron- those fiery eyes and steel jawlines can front a furnace of self-loathing, all those breathless women rushing to him while hubby's at the office or ball game, primed to be consumed by his beauty while he stands next to it, watching. So maybe the looks we're dealt are best. It's only common sense that happiness depends on some bearable deprivation or defect, and who knows what conflicts great beauty could have caused, what cruelties one might have suffered from those now friends, what unmanageable possibilities smiling at every small turn? So if I get up to draw a tumbler of ordinary tap water and think what if this were nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers, will all I've missed knock me senseless? No. Of course not. It won't.
234,480	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54642/virtuosi	Lisel Mueller	Virtuosi	People whose lives have been shaped by history-and it is always tragic- do not want to talk about it, would rather dance, give parties on thrift-shop china. You feel wonderful in their homes, two leaky rooms, nests they stowed inside their hearts on the road into exile. They know how to fix potato peelings and apple cores so you smack your lips. The words start over again hold no terror for them. Obediently they rise and go with only a rucksack or tote bag. If they weep, it's when you're not looking. To tame their nightmares, they choose the most dazzling occupations, swallow the flames in the sunset sky, jump through burning hoops in their elegant tiger suits. Cover your eyes: there's one walking on a thread thirty feet above us- shivering points of light leap across her body, and she works without a net.
202,794	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35337/the-gift-of-the-magi	Peter Meinke	The Gift of the Magi	DECEMBER 1982 PETER MEINKE THE GIFT OF THE MAGI The angel of the Lord sang low and shucked his golden slippers off and stretched his wings as if to show their starlit shadow on the wall and did the old soft shoe, yeah, did the buck and wing. The Magi put their arms around each other, then with chorus-line precision and enormous zest they kicked for Jesus onetwothree high as any Christmas tree and Caspar was the best. And Melchior told a story that had Joseph sighing in the hay while holy Mary rolled her eyes and Jesus smiling where He lay as if He understood, Lord, knew the joke was good. But Balthazar began to weep foreseeing all the scenes to come: the Child upon a darker stage, the star, their spotlight, stuttering out- then shook his head, smiled, and sang louder than before. There was no dignity that night: the shepherds slapped their sheepish knees and tasted too much of the grape that solaces our sober earth- O blesséd be our mirth, hey! Blesséd be our mirth!
238,380	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56852/el-tigre-market	Juan Delgado	El Tigre Market	As apparent as the rest, the asphalt cracks are crowded with yellow weeds, the rust goes beyond its bleeding color, and the lot's rails, battered by cars, cast larger bars by noon. On one side of the market someone painted a row of flower pots, hanging geraniums for the locals who must now go across town. As apparent as the rest, El Tigre walks upright, wears a tiny sombrero and sarape, and pushes a grocery cart full of food. His painted stripes are starting to flake like the bounty he wheels for the families drifting into the parking lot off 3rd Street and next to the train station still waiting to be retrofitted for the big one.
204,588	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36237/in-a-cab	Baron Wormser	In a Cab	Form amends our laboring nerves. Without this blessing, plain life grows eager and soft. The handshaking brio of feckless energy Taints all contentment; gain becomes a reason. Musicians could do otherwise. Instead they chose a solitude that flowers, All frustration funnelled Into an hour or two of studied power. Erring or swift, fingers remain fingers, Yet the famous frozen music of mortar rises and falls and fades. . The red bricks are a little graver. No longer do people intuit what they can't completely do. No longer are tempers lost and restored. Hope is not looked for. I am afraid of how cold it is in the cold winter Without the genius of the little conservatory! A busy silence sits on the city. Places are palpable, but no one has ever Inhabited one of Schubert's songs. The chance to visit some small perfection has gone. IN A CAB Delighted at rush hour To flaunt his emigré wisdom, The Russian cabbie tells me that This country Is heaven: jazz, enough food, No whispering, Cars that work. He smells of onion And cheap hair cream, wears A tweed cap. What is the American Politics of belabored possibility to him? He is no degreed utopian. The radio goes from Stan Getz to A Coltrane hymn; through the steamy windows The goodness of what is random, The busy vapors of Sixth Avenue seep in. Confusion and compromise, brief principle And bent belief Are the cloth of this congested life. The Post's headlines proclaim, but here The worst reprobates, both left and right, Remain men and women, the stuff Of plain-speaking, self-satisfied sloth. Taking the long view down this democratic avenue, My driver gestures with His middle finger and hits the brakes. We swear at the buses and Bolsheviks. Coleman Hawkins sets out. Salt And honey, that is our state.
200,312	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34092/movie-night	Stephen Dunn	Movie Night	On the empty walls some of the newcomers project their private, small Guernicas which no one else can see- while in the large room with the screen Liv Ullman touches Max von Sydow with a lust so deepened by grief the rest of us feel our miseries are amateurish, some of us are even elated to have Bergman for such a friend; oh come over for dinner, Ingmar, and make our loneliness exquisite! The woman sitting next to me, overweight and beautiful, has been crying since I took her hand and whispered "slit wrists, betrayal, viciousness, anything that Ullman does makes me happy". I'm not sure why she's crying, but I know how intimacy begins and it has begun, I know that the best sex rises like a trapped beast from our vacancies, those openings we never knew were there until touched. Ullman now has offered her face to theologians as proof there is a soul; von Sydow is looking off to the side, afraid to let go of some bottom of himself. Later, the woman and I will talk about this in bed, with pleasure. Later, the newcomers will get tired of their shadows and fall asleep by themselves. This is the first stage. The next stage is waking, a throwing off of covers, and more covers; months, years of it.
194,832	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31348/saties-suits	John Koethe	Satie's Suits	Orange is the hue of modernity. Greater than gold, shakey and poetic, Our century's art has been a gentle surrender To this color's nonchalant "stance" Towards hunger and the unknown, and its boldness: For it has replaced us as the subject of the unknown. We still like the same things, but today we handle them differently. Among the signs of occupation in this contemporary war The twelve identical corduroy suits of Erik Satie Locate importance in repetition, where it really belongs, There in the dark, among the lessons that sleep excludes. I want to emphasize the contribution of each one of us To a society which has held us back but which has Allowed love to flourish in this age like a song. Unable to understand very much, But prepared to isolate things in a personal way, The acres of orange paint are a sign Of the machine that powers our amateur hearts. The technical has been driven back By river stages, exposing a vacant lot Strewn with these tools, food and clothing Awaiting the invention of limited strength. We could begin selling ourselves, but the overture Brings no response and the connection remains unsketched. I can see there has been no change. The body's a form of remote control And its success is too exact to assist us. Responding to the ulterior commandment So much has failed in the abstract. The phallus hid in the school bell While the difficult fluid rose in the night. In the apartment wild horses took you away.
224,734	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48458/ovid-in-the-third-reich	Geoffrey Hill	Ovid in the Third Reich	I love my work and my children. God Is distant, difficult. Things happen. Too near the ancient troughs of blood Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere, Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.
210,186	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39046/equinox-56d21c87cb554	Christopher Buckley	Equinox	Wine-sap aura and atmosphere, pale as if flour had been sifted over the horizon's long rope as it cinches up the day and leaves us, leads us to that last ash or amber space between the boughs that a thousand starlings fill like a shower of black stars, reiterating their harsh sense of the dark, which is only the distant shattering of waves. But first there was the hazy fusion of afternoon and all the suspended particulate of the past- chaff and luster, a boy breathing in the ease and comfort of a loneliness sung back vaguely from the sea, salt sting and undertow, the surf-like surging of his blood across the concourse of days- all the assemblies of light extending the spindrift parameters of his arms where he's seen the floating clouds stall with their tinfoil shimmer and reserve, as if Plato's souls were still hovering, wondering whether to come down. Now a wind swims through redwoods and the ridge's alphabet of pines leans high and away -to Peru it's easy to say, where, in a book once, he saw someone equally in mists, mountainside or plateau, playing a flute beside mild animals-that slight tremolo the wind knows in its grey way around the heart, that the grasses know among the stones- the sky open to everything on its own thin exhalation. This is the sky I know. Coal-white geranium of sun, distance clearing and almost colorless, blood smear across glass, the world powder blue and full of the silent desire of air. 4:30 and a little yard-fire smoke recommends a moon, the ionic clouds sleepless again with their old, gilt-edged verisimilitude- that we should never die, that finally there's no secret in all the starlight that has yet to reach us.
233,202	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53840/evolution-of-my-block	Jacob Saenz	Evolution of My Block	As a boy I bicycled the block w/a brown mop top falling into a tail bleached blond, gold-like under golden light, like colors of Noble Knights 'banging on corners, unconcerned w/the colors I bore-a shorty too small to war with, too brown to be down for the block. White Knights became brown Kings still showing black & gold on corners now crowned, the block a branch branded w/la corona graffitied on garage doors by the pawns. As a teen, I could've beamed the crown, walked in w/out the beat down custom, warred w/my cousin who claimed Two-Six, the set on the next block decked in black & beige. But I preferred games to gangs, books to crooks wearing hats crooked to the left or right fighting for a plot, a block to spot & mark w/blood of boys who knew no better way to grow up than throw up the crown & be down for whatever.
168,836	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17612/stallion	Frank Mitalsky	Stallion	Sunset romps past again today Streaking his golden mane; He lifts his flaming nose to neigh, Calling his mate in vain. The trees he brushed are left on fire, The earth rings from his feet: The mountain burns a lost desire As night slips down the street.
163,088	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14393/gray	William Rose Benét	Gray	Fold on fold the purple, crimson then- Gold? I shook my head and turned away. What? I turned and glared in that barbaric den. "Gray!" Ashes, rats! You cannot, cannot mean it, surely? "Yes," I chirped, "I'm weary; I have had a day; One thing only suits me, purely and demurely- Gray." Doves and twilight seas, fog and thistle-down, Granite quarried too; pearl, with all array Of colors quenched within. But you said-a clown !- Gray! "Yes, I understand; but you don't understand I'm the clown of heaven and mean to have my way. Cut me cloak and doublet. This is my command- Gray!"
187,228	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27499/sometimes-and-after	H.D.	Sometimes and After	Yet sometimes I would sweep the floor, I would put daisies in a tumbler, I would have long dreams before, long day-dreams after; there would be no gauntleted knock on the door, or tap-tap with a riding crop, no galloping here and back; but the latch would softly lift, would softly fall, dusk would come slowly, and even dusk could wait till night encompassed us; dawn would come gracious, not too soon, day would come late, and the next day and the next, while I found pansies to take the place of daisies, and a spray of apple-blossom after that, no calendar of fevered hours, Carthago delenda est and the Tyrian night.
186,944	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27356/in-childhoods-chair	Kimon Friar	In Childhood's Chair	KIMON FRIAR IN CHILDHOOD'S CHAIR By antique mirrors blurred with memories, In an old drawing-room of gold and green Hung with Mozartian melodies, she sits In childhood's chair in the late afternoon, The curtains drawn on adolescent streets Where copulate in error lust and dream, And drawn on lilting talk where love is slain With cocktails and hors d'oeuvres on terraces. Her traveled eyes are children at last come home, Estranged and silent, from an illicit land, Keeping a knowledge only children have: Perspectives of a rotted wharf and quay Where sinking tides reveal the mouldering corpse. They break the legs of caribou, and flee, Cut off the tongues of orioles, and sing, Pluck out the eyes of sparrow-hawks, and see. Thus motionless she flies and silent sings And sees in mirrors of her inward eye A blond child running down the long arcades To a white seashore and a sunlit sea: The convoluted corals of the mind Where the bleached skeletons of fishes lie, Their blank eyeballs like marbles, the thin bones Of birds, where blooms the pale anemone. And meets the child there of another sphere Whose hair is black snakes hissing in the wind, With eyes the funnels of a labyrinth Where roars the minotaur, whose heels are winged, Who in his left hand holds the flaming sword. And there the monstrous children, blond and black, Make monstrous love with flaming sword and wing, The black snakes spitting flame on the salt air. She sits in childhood's chair in a cold dream Of luckless children tossing in their beds, Of Love untimely loved, untimely slain, The black snakes silent, smouldering sword, singed heel, And keeps a mystery children cannot tell: Death is self-knowledge, love the marriage bed. The beast with two backs roars, the minotaur Stampedes in the mind, the blond-black children sleep.
201,416	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34644/last-signals	Margaret Kent	Last Signals	I In the vision the particulars rule, but the air's still round and the navigator's fingers are made of glass, sounding the stars like clear test tubes filling with light. But what of our baggage, the farewells? At the runway's edge, the semaphores wave through the rain their cross-boned salute: no one's calling our names. Beneath the curve of the wing, a man in a green jump suit is making the rounds: his arms do their own dance of death across the wet pavement, their own bidding, less willful than we ever imagined. And if details count, a woman in a red hat has confided her name. Her son-in-law lives in Omaha; she puts questions to us later, for instance: how did we come so slowly to rack and ruin? Beside me, in your lap, the blue veins of your hands run like rivers their tracery of deceit, still a landscape I trust. Was I wrong to discard our passports, our maps of the region? u If arrival is nothing but aftermath, what keeps us here afloat, heading somewhere? Are we slowly approaching the mainland? Im How space hovers about us as empty as prayer, all pain suspended, all risk convened in the aisles. To contain it, the world shrinks to cigar shape, fashions itself around bodies limned in mid-air. And how curious it is that the real world still rides the dark wing tip where motion is always arrival and change seen only in passing, not standing still on a streetcorner somewhere, hands rummaging in pockets, as if it might once and for all be apprehended. IV The delicate daring of the stars. Signals without meaning to be signals, flash in their clear dominion. Looking backward, like light as it outruns itself; I choose the vision: waive fear, see the masks like entrails drop before us, dangle, stare. It is enough, I think, to consider we may never arrive.
162,700	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14181/quilts	Mary Willis Shuey	Quilts	They gave me the quilt that Great-aunt Elizabeth made- A quilt of pink roses, and tiny careful stitches. It goes in my chest, for in October I marry. Pink roses, with stems of green on a background of white, And Great-aunt Elizabeth pieced it for her own chest. She pieced it with trembling hands, for her lover had gone To fight with the South. Elizabeth filled in the long days with squares of pink, Fitting the pattern together with quick, nervous fingers; Roses of pink, for love and a bride. But here is a spot of red among the pink roses. I wonder what is stitched into the quilting. She finished it long afterwards, when war Had taken all she had but memories. She pieced her life into a pink-rose quilt When war was making patch-work of her soul. They gave me the quilt that Great-aunt Elizabeth made- A quilt of pink roses with stems of green, for a bride. But I see all the time the splotch of blood in the roses. October is so far when war is near.
202,970	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35425/the-way-of-the-world	Askold Melnyczuk	The Way of the World	December 1980 Reading Duns Scotus, I find this passage, a quotation from Avicenna: Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn or to be beaten and not to be beaten are not identical. The Soviet Army masses at the Polish border. Larry Lee, a living soul, is in Seattle. He is singing. Later tonight I'll read poems by Rudenko, who is in prison for speaking out for the beaten. And you, my unscathed wonder, tell me: The curtains. The colors are wrong. Oh my dear.
173,186	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20051/in-argos	H. L. Davis	In Argos	SE DE VoL. XLII ee No. II A Magazine of Verse MAY 1933 TWO POEMS IN ARGOS You know Troias? Agamemnon? I was born in his town, Was born in Argos. A small town, bordering the sea. I remember not much. Hard work. We used to have olives, Bread soaked in the oil, and wine-sour! Winters it rained. We stayed indoors then, but we never had any fire. Whether it was a good place-to live in, I mean-I don't know. I was a kid-the old folks had the running of me. They were strong religious, and whipped me a good deal. ... But then I have lived here longer than I lived in Hellas-Greece- I came to this country a very long time ago. Worked section in San Francisco. It was time of the earthquake. I had left all my money in my coat, and gone to sleep, And the bed slid, and plaster began falling in my face. I ran out into the street. Then I thought, "My money will burn!" Fire had already caught the place. I fought to go back, but men held me out in the street, And the house and the town burned. Everything. All afire. "Well," I said, "no money-how am I going to eat?" This is a funny thing-I found my money in my shirt. I'd grabbed it without knowing it... . That's how it was in Greece. In Argos we did things without thinking-nothing to decide. Whenever you did something, you knew how much it would hurt. We had everything measured. We were used to doing it from long past. . .. You know? You know how I mean? Norisk. All peace. Pick grapes and olives. Mind Christ. Be satisfied. [62 ] When it's hot, strip off and swim in that Aegean Sea, And sleep on the beach naked. . . . We didn't get rich very fast. I like America for that better. About San Francisco. When I'd found my money, after a few days, they said, "You! Where do you want to go?" I said, "Los Angeles. My cousin is working in Los Angeles-" "You got money?" I showed them my money and they counted it.- "All right! All right!" they said, "that's ten times as much money as you need. Here! Ticket to Los Angeles for this man, to leave to- night!" Old woman and little girl looked at me, and began to cry. She was pretty, that little girl. Clean, too. All white. About fourteen years old, maybe. . . . So then I said- "What's making you cry, mother?" The old woman talked, Smearing her tear-marks with her fingers, till her eyes were red. She wanted to go to Los Angeles. She was broke. The soldiers wouldn't let her go. So I said, "Don't cry. Tl stake you to go to Los Angeles. What the hell!" Then I bought her and that little girl tickets, and I went away. She was pretty, that little girl. Beautiful. Small face, all white. Thin hands-you know, like a dancer. Low voice. Beautiful. I wished that old lady would fall dead, or take sick, before night. You know? . . . I was ignorant then-bashful. Why, I thought, Here I am, nothing but a roundhead steel-driving Greek. And there she is, beautiful. . . . I thought, no, better stay away. I am Greek, and maybe the Greeks frighten her. Not go back, Not ask them how about paying for the tickets I had bought, But wait, learn to be an American, and save my pay- Then go, and say, "You remember me?" . . . Plenty of time yet, Plenty of time. . . . I didn't see them for a long time. I worked with a Los Angeles steel-gang. Sometimes I'd think ; I ought to have had nerve enough to touch her; touch her cheek. Maybe she expected me to; maybe she didn't notice That I was nothing but a steel-driver, a roundhead Greek. Then I would be sad because I hadn't, and go buy a drink. I was buying a drink, when I saw the girl's mother again. "Well!" she said, "I've been looking for you!" She had some men. "Make you acquainted with my old friend Steve," she said. And she said, "Come out to my place with me tonight. My girl's asked about you. We thought maybe you were dead. Come out?" All right. It had red curtains on the doors. She'd taken that white little girl, that beautiful Girl I had not touched, and put her in a house with whores, That girl was more beautiful, and she'd not forgotten who I was. She said, "Why! You're the Greek that paid for bringing us here! Did you go and hide, to keep us from paying you? What's the cause?" I thought, "Now I can touch her!" And I didn't. Some- body said- "The door's ringing, it's some men, too! Hurry up!" So then That girl got up, and I would sooner have known she was dead, And she said, "Well, maybe I'll see you in this place again?" So then, I wanted to go away. No. No, they said, I would have to stay. I sat, and listened to their talk, I watched the door, thinking of the girl, and of the men. At last I found I could move, and I came away. All that time There was a kind of lump itching down in the gullet of my throat, Liable to break loose any minute-and which one, Which woman shall I kill when it breaks? I will come back, And tear which woman and what men to rags with my hands- Tear them to rags, and the blood out of them! . . . Well. I walked, And after a long time it got daylight, time to work. I found some money the old lady had sneaked into my coat. Either I lost it or I spent it-what the hell! But I never went back to that house, never any more. That swelling stayed in my throat for a long time-years. It never broke actually. Only, after a long time, It was not noticeable any longer, and I was old. That's how America is, eh? Whenever these men- I've got to be like them-are angry, or hungry and cold, They work hard like hell, and all their suffering is gone. They do nothing about suffering but work. In Argos, in my country, I'd have killed that old woman and burned down her house. Not here. In Argos, hungry, I'd take somebody's olives and be fed. Not here. In Argos, we had sorrow, but it was soon done. We knew it, and knew what to expect of it, and how long Before new things would carry it away from us. Here, things last. Sometimes they last all of a man's life, they are too strong. In Argos, there was nothing but God to fear. [ 67 ]
251,135	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/155588/battle-of-the-rams	Romeo Oriogun	Battle of the Rams	The field has ceased to be lush wonder, from the eyes of a bird I watched them go again and again, horns finding the softness behind fur. Here, what seek for death is been praised. Young boys jump into the air to know the weightlessness of joy. Every year they come here to know death, to know the last sound of a dying animal is a plea for the knife. I looked from above, sending back the spirit of dead animals into the bodies of little boys. We were never too young to know the tongues of kites are beginnings to rituals and when these boys begged to be set free from seeing a horn spill blood on grasses, what do they mean? We all must know death to know the sadness of a grave. Again, another ram is led to the center, a whistle is heard, another ram is allowed to walk through. The sun kept shining, faithful witness to every war, to every broken horn, to every animal whispering for death. Another ram is fallen. Abdul turned to me, the knife in his hand ready to run through the ram's neck is an act of mercy. This is the ritual of war I was given. In a train in Boston I tried to hide in a book while an old woman kept saying I write for Africa , as if Africa is a little bowl of water, as if our tongues are not divided by borders. She turned to me to say you must know about conflict zones . Even when invisible, I am asked about the origin of war. I opened my palm to spill a ram's blood on her seat. This is what I know, a ram will look death in the eye and run towards it just like a man walking into the night with the weight of a continent on his back.
206,054	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36972/the-uncles	Roberta Spear	The Uncles	They say that as a young child you were especially smitten with the older men-those red-nosed unmarried uncles of your father. They held you up until you brushed the veil of heat that hugged the ceiling. You could see the crescent fold of cheek, flesh pocked and marbled with a hundred dying rivers. Gold suspenders, boaters perched atop the thinning sweat-soaked domes-touches of practical dignity. You found a nesting place in their arms during Sunday drives and funerals. And the day's first shot of whiskey smelled like honey socked inside a willow trunk where you were queen. When the August sun came down square on the warped anvil of this Valley, you were taken off to nap in a darkened room at the back of the house. The elders gathered on the porch with beer and ham on buttered bread, or took the path through sycamores to argue crops and wars and money. One of them would slip away to where you rested in a buttoned slip and socks in the angelic haze of late-day light. He would dip into the coarse woolen field of his trousers and lay it there beside you on the pillow-a coin as round and silver as the moon that would rise before you woke.
190,102	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28967/view-56d21295d8aaa	Judith Van Leeuwen	View	Keep the cliff immovable, keep it in mind, with the light sea reaching, reaching and falling, trying and failing to climb the rock. Not to translate is the greater art Life on leaves of paper sea into meaning, stones into eternity. There is a bottom to all this, comforting none. URBANIZATIONAL They would have died, these knockkneed unhunters and so would I, but for this culture which leaves us at a loss, bewildered, swaddled in vegetable cotton, animal wool. In a street, of all things. I used to think that where was nothing there was always grass. And here we are staring through store windows at one another, with all the goods really between us.
202,110	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34994/perturbation	Aris Alexandhrou	Perturbation	The astronomers receive groups of students, members of the YMCA, Marxists, and roughly explain the installations, permit them to peer at the planet Neptune. There's no way of avoiding such visitors. Whether you want to or not, you will see them yawning behind their hands, standing before a mainspring as though confronting a scorpion, and crying out-ostensibly-in utter enchantment. Don't become exasperated, don't be flattered. Escort them all to the door with stellar politeness and then bury yourself in yesterday's notes. Only one of your colleagues could have calculated the direction, the mass, the speed of your own concern that so wanders in your brain all day until the verses are engraved on irregular elliptical orbits, because always somewhere out there invisible enormous and existing the anonymous pain of man moves on.
186,482	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27120/the-painted-lady	Margaret Danner	The Painted Lady	The Painted Lady is a small African Butterfly gayly toned deep tan and peach That seems as tremulous and delicately sheer As the objects I treasure, yet this cosmopolitan Can cross the sea at the icy time of the year In the trail of the big boats, to France. Mischance is as wide and grey as the lake here In Chicago. Is there strength enough in my Peach paper rose or lavender sea-laced fan?
179,372	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23439/figures-of-space	Marguerite Young	Figures of Space	Why did Nature after such large expense Declare the pact of her unaltered peace And let the invader softly enter in, Sleep, sleep with no defense but the tired sentry Sleeping at the outer wall of space, So wind herself in fleece of that cold flame, In the dream of space, in Jason's silver fleece, Nocturnal rabbits sport above her breast, Upon her vein the white albino flower Suckles a climate mild from pole to pole. She is supine, she fades from her own eyes And fading, sees her image darkening. There is no trust now in her blood-colored cloud Nor in the frigid flame of her bright sea. THE RAVEN
207,040	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37467/respite-56d21adede6fc	J. W. Rivers	Respite	Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie Avec ses chants, ses longs loisirs. Apollinaire We came last week, Running faster than fear, Through a great clangor of horns To take cover in this grove. The meadow haze is lifting. My buddies, calm and composed, Are settled down, Perhaps a bit awkwardly On this cruel ground, Unblinking, their eyes Fixed on the sun Which fills their faces with light. Beneath his camouflage, Tom is resting nearby, growing Into the image he reflects: An ancient garden of rocks and herbs Yearned for all his life. Eddie, a frozen squirrel, White muzzle, pocket bible in hand, Crouches, locked into position Among fallen branches. He always said that after endings Come beginnings, That we should be as farmers Longing for spring planting. In the meadow, a church Whose roof, walls and door, Having survived burning sun, Hailstorms and earthquakes, Collapsed last week. Did the altar, Still standing, Take root? Far from here, geese Go clanging in the air, Souls searching for heaven, And birds with chimes in their throats Sing in ice-bound trees, Calling us to silence. The sounds fade, But I hear echoes Calling us to ourselves. I am learning how to wait. If I gain strength I will put aside my words And gather branches For an Easter Eve bonfire, Select a trunk J- W. RIVERS And carve a cross To carry home In a newly alive world. I will be as a farmer. I will live In my father's house of bread.
161,302	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13363/death-and-the-jester	Ernest Rhys	Death and the Jester	Black crow, art thou come For Dagonet's wit? It is quick as the light Or the dragon-fly's dart. It is born in a smile, It is bred in the heart, It is light, it is laughter. It took life when Eve laughed At the lion-cub's play; It slept then awhile, When her sorrow came after With the son of the snake. Eve's joy was my mother, Not Eve's sorrow; And the bird is my brother That sings as he may. In the close of my day, Lies curl'd up the morrow Like the fox in his bed. And my wit, if I die, Yet shall wake and shall fly- Take music and live When Dagonet's dead.
236,698	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55905/the-house-top	Herman Melville	The House-top	No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain-a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought Balefully glares red Arson-there-and there. The town is taken by its rats-ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe- Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead, And ponderous drag that shakes the wall. Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll Of black artillery; he comes, though late; In code corroborating Calvin's creed And cynic tyrannies of honest kings; He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed, Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, And-more-is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.
194,276	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31070/esther	W. S. Merwin	Esther	Tomorrow they will come for you old female word from the corner lucidity motionless in the dark they will take you out to be bared elsewhere opened before it is May there is no one else here the door wide to the blinding spring the wind one of the family like a cold hen mute about the kitchen the rest away busy the shirts waiting for the iron the calendar ticking tomorrow the animals will keep away we do not believe in happening the sunlight will always lie there even tonight even tomorrow night it was always there but you go back to another time \| it is said as though there is one If tomorrow is really not today how can one believe in anything as you say hands holding each other in paper bags older than they are eyes cut out of your dress hung to dry burst package to be carried past the toys out in the bright dirt past the shadows waving ringing their bells raising their instruments whatever is brought back as you know is not all but if you get later to a place with a blackened wall and two sticks held together by a little smoke maybe they would let you sit by it in the day staring and you could announce what he is doing the animal their sky
187,954	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27875/the-beauty-of-jobs-daughters	Jay Macpherson	The Beauty of Job's Daughters	The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters. Take Job: the beasts the accuser sends at evening Shoulder his house and shake it; he's not there, Attained in age to inwardness of daughters, In all the land no women found so fair. Angels and sons of God are nearest neighbours, And even the accuser may repair To walk with Job in pleasures of his daughters: Wide shining rooms more warmly lit at evening, Gardens beyond whose secrets scent the air. Not wiles of men nor envy of the neighbours, Riches of earth, nor what heaven holds more rare, Can take from Job the beauty of his daughters, The gardens in the rock, music at evening, And cup so full that all who come must share. Perhaps we passed them? it was late, or evening, And surely those were desert stumps, not daughters, In fact we doubt that they were ever there. The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters. In all the land no women found so fair.
248,421	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/149515/small-talk	Momtaza Mehri	Small Talk	you michelangelo's crouching boy/you d'angelo's purr/you dead currency/you dead presidents/you a stick of incense/you a stick-up artist/you haraami/you the hum of a lifetime basined in my lap/count our tallies of loss backward for me/run to the bank & translate it into a fistful of green of your choice/or something else sanctified/or european/pick the synonym of your choice. in a traditional sense/the body holds its arithmetic/exports it outward/to the touch and exhale/the praxis felt best/against a groan of concrete/with the dumb weight of a hand against the small of a back/here, an elevator is our only spiritual ascension/can i be excused from living so slimly? i dream you closer too/beside the honey-colored dog licking its vulva/an abstract laugh swelling inside your throat/ask me about blood clots and spun coins/the cracked skin of heels/anything but the nightly heartbreaks of/too many addresses/and all the ways/i am still auditioning/for this country's approval.
224,756	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48472/snake-56d229bd70868	Dannie Abse	Snake	When the snake bit Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa while he was praying the snake died. (Each day is attended by surprises or it is nothing.) Question: was the bare-footed, smelly Rabbi more poisonous than the snake or so God-adulterated he'd become immune to serpent poison? Oh great-great-great-uncles, your palms weighing air, why are you arguing? Listen, the snake thought (being old and unwell and bad-tempered as hell) Death, where's thy sting? In short, was just testing: a snake's last fling. Yes, the so-called snake was dying anyway, its heart calcified and as old as Eden. No, that snake was A1 fit but while hissing for fun it clumsily bit its own tongue. No, Hanina invented that snake; not for his own sake but for first- class, religious publicity. No no, here's the key to it. Ask: did the Rabbi, later on, become a jumpy, timid man? Remember, he who has been bitten by a snake thereafter becomes frightened of a rope ... Bearded men in darkening rooms sipping lemon tea and arguing about the serpent till the moon of Russia, of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, rose above the alien steeples-centuries of sleep. Now, tonight, a clean-shaven rabbi who once studied in Vienna says snake-venom contains haemolysins, haemo- coagulants, protolysins, cytolysins and neurotoxins and that even in Hanina ben Dosa's day a snake was a snake-unless, of course, it was a penis, an unruly penis, making a noise like one pissing on a mound of fresh hot ashes. Oh great-great-great-uncles did you hear him? And are your handbones weighing moonshine?
236,452	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55771/magi	Brenda Shaughnessy	Magi	If only you'd been a better mother. How could I have been a better mother? I would have needed a better self, and that is a gift I never received. So you're saying it's someone else's fault? The gift of having had a better mother myself, my own mother having had a better mother herself. The gift that keeps on not being given. Who was supposed to give it? How am I supposed to know? Well, how am I supposed to live? I suppose you must live as if you had been given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance. I cut off my hair, to sell for the money to buy you what you wanted. I wanted nothing but your happiness. I can't give you that! What would Jesus do? He had a weird mother too . . . Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if it were given unconditionally, your birthright. It's a riddle. All gifts are a riddle, all lives are in the middle of mother-lives. But it's always winter in this world. There is no end to ending. The season of giving, the season when the bears are never cold, because they are sleeping. The bears are never cold, Mama, but I am one cold, cold bear.
215,088	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41505/silent-film	Kurt Brown	Silent Film	Doors opened and shut, the director shouted orders through a bullhorn, or babbled just out of the frame. A carpenter hammered flats nearby for the next production. All of this, and more, while the actors blocked it out, already living in that small square of light where silence reigned like a tiny theatre for the deaf. Now, almost a century later, it's peaceful, far from the center of action, the last voice on the street reduced to a whisper, then gone. Not even birdsong as evening's opening credits begin to roll. Only the film, shimmering out of a disc thinner than sound, characters moving like fish in their gray element- less than fish- not a hiss, not a bubble, not even a cry from that dim world of silence doubled by time.
162,858	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14267/peace-56d2081b0303b	Agnes Lee	Peace	Sie VoL. XIII BER) e À. No. III A Magazine of Verse DECEMBER, 1918 PEACE Sn bells and flags! Suddenly-door to door - Tidings! Can we believe, We who were used to war? Yet we have dreamed her face, Knowing her light must be, Knowing that she must come. Look-she comes, it is she! Tattered her raiment floats, Blood is upon her wings. Ah, but her eyes are clear! Ah, but her voice outrings! Look-she is here, she lives! Beauty has died for her. Soon where the shrapnel fell Petals shall wake and stir.
253,557	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159811/mathematical-love-poem-with-a-proof	Sharon Olds	Mathematical Love Poem, with a Proof	I am on the plane, in the air, before I see what just happened-I fell in love with him, again, in the car to the airport. It happened sentence by sentence, slowly, like pick-up sticks. As a child, I would lay one atop a precarious nest of its fellows, and then another. With Carl, you don't know when he's going to feel insulted, and get mad at you. But now I had said, "The math in graduate school-was it real, or theoretical?" "What do you mean?" "Well 2 apples plus 2 apples is 4 ... " "It was all theory," he said, "but it had to be proved true, to be used for things, like physics." And for the first time, he tells me about his prelims, and the summer before them. "It's a different world," he said, "I dreamed numbers." And when was that, I asked, in relation to your buying the farmland with your uncle? Gradually we moved through time and space. And your uncle's death?, quiet but not hesitant. We pass something- not a planet, a hill. Six years, and he is willing to fill me in, without that impatience as if I should have known. He drives over a river, past piles of autumn brush, like wood rat nests of pick-up sticks- sticks that at the speed of light would be measurably longer. I love the way his palms face backwards when he walks, with that cattleman walk-and the curls at his nape, black and silver-shot. I love his thick neck! And the way his 3 o'clock shadow can't be told from the dirt he has been working in. When he looks at the stone ledge, which he has been baring, in memory of his brother, over months, I feel as if his mind is making some kind of earthen love with it, I see him, in my sleep, embracing it, throwing it up onto his back- a song made of numbers, he carries it, and I dance with him as if born to it. And I was born to it.
193,724	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30794/historic-pun	George Oppen	Historic Pun	La petite vie, a young man called it later, it had been the last thing offered In that way, A way of behaving, a way of being in public Which we lacked- If there was doubt it was doubt of himself Finding a force In the cafés and bistros Force of the familiar and familiars The force of ease They gather on the steps of Sacre Coeur, Great crowds, sitting on the steps To watch the sunset and the lights- I speak of tourists. But what we see is there Find a word for ourselves Or we will have nothing, neither faith nor will, the will Touched by the dazzle Spring touches the Butte Chaumont, Every morning the children appear In the parks, Paris is beautiful and ludicrous, the leaves of every tree in the city move in the wind The girls have beautiful thighs, beautiful skirts, all simulate courage- Semite: to find a way for myself.
186,550	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27155/birth-56d2111621b5e	Selwyn S. Schwartz	Birth	Born of love, caged in anatomy's miraculous Blood and flesh, my son has known grace; Animated in the beginning, in my home's world, He plays with strange performing toys His innocent interludes of still another world. Flocking jewels on his timeless clocks Tick patiently his hunger's complaint for things; A judge without juries, he re-enacts The new hero at war against old Pharoah, Cradling his innocence with the solitude of Moses. In the spaciousness of purring light He moves through suns to inner flights of windows, Catching and eating from heaven's throbbing beams That later parch the streets and heat the winds... And though rocks erode, his own fires burgeon brightly.
179,890	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23712/on-your-radio-tonight	Joseph D. Bennett	On Your Radio Tonight	In a thousand homes a thousand Brass pianos cluck the keys. Above, Orion stalks the strands And Scorpio crawls through starry seas, The house, roaring, shaking on its earth, Strains its metal mouth and wails. The listeners, crouched to share its mirth, Gash their faces with their nails, Wild honey and locusts nourished John As he watched the shifting stars and signs. The Word in the desert struck at dawn The Baptist, with lightning in his spine. Thus the whirling prophet roared In the wilderness; the Star appeared. And writhing in its bloody core To take the seed, Earth's flesh was seared, Joseph Bennett
174,516	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20838/one-knocking-at-a-door	C. F. MacIntyre	One Knocking at a Door	He knocks, but knocks so lightly none save the ready ear that listens with receptive heart can hear. Then, diffident and silent, he suddenly retires, retracting the extended hand of his desires. Tomorrow you may pass him but lack the eye to heed one with a quiet competence surpassing need.
200,684	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34278/late-echo	John Ashbery	Late Echo	Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different. Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally And the color of the day put in Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting. Only then can the chronic inattention Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.
226,336	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49591/love-of-my-flesh-living-death	Lorna Dee Cervantes	"Love of My Flesh, Living Death"	Once I wasn't always so plain. I was strewn feathers on a cross of dune, an expanse of ocean at my feet, garlands of gulls. Sirens and gulls. They couldn't tame you. You know as well as they: to be a dove is to bear the falcon at your breast, your nights, your seas. My fear is simple, heart-faced above a flare of etchings, a lineage in letters, my sudden stare. It's you. It's you! sang the heart upon its mantel pelvis. Blush of my breath, catch of my see-beautiful bird-It's you.
190,444	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29148/limited-view	James Hearst	Limited View	The clutter and ruck of the stubble publish the time That prompts my steps, I know what I have to do For my bread before frost locks the land against My plow and fire shoulders the chimney flue. Rocks have a word that crows repeat over and over On the cold slopes of winter where the picking is poor, It echoes in empty granaries and I learn by heart To say in the hard days to come, endure, endure. So now I straddle the field and break its back In the vise of my plow while a thresh of weather streams by Sweeping up clouds and birds, leaves, banners of smoke. I gouge out furrows, a starved wind ransacks the sky.
216,364	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/42147/tutelary	Michael Ryan	Tutelary	What a fuckup you are. What dumbshit you do. Your father's voice still whispers in you, despite the joys that sweeten each day. Your Genius it isn't until, dying away, it worms back through the sparkling dream where you drown him in an inch-deep stream: your knee in his back, your strength on his skull, it begins singing praise for your skill.
222,580	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46882/proverbs-56d226f5efe25	Thomas Merton	Proverbs	1. I will tell you what you can do ask me if you do not understand what I just said 2. One thing you can do be a manufacturer make appliances 3. Be a Man-u-fac-tu-rer 4. Make appliances sell them for a high price 5. I will tell you about industry make appliances 6. Make appliances that move 7. Ask me if you do not understand what is move 8. First get the facts 9. Where to apply? Ask industry 10. Do not expect to get by without Mr. and Mrs. Consumer 11. Man-u-fic-tion 12. I am wondering if you got the idea be a manu 13. MAKE FALSE GODS 14. Apply mind energy they will move 15. Mention one of the others see what happens 16. Now apply that to our problem 17. Try not to understand 18. Be a mounte-fictioner 19. Surpass all others in price and profit 20. Assail the public with lies 21. Home-spun-facts-are-more-fun repeat this 22. Prevent spreading on garments 23. Breathe more than others 24. Supply movement and traction 25. Our epidemix will exceed 26. A homemade appliance: no honorable mention 27. Now you can refer to garments and spread out 28. But there are still more facts 29. For excitement: say whose epidemic may be next 30. Apply this to the facts and see what happens 31. Wear dermal gloves in bed 32. Here is an appliance that will terrorize mothers 33. And fight the impossible 34. Man-u-fac-ture: wear it on your head 35. Beat it here come the mothers
250,861	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/155225/forgotten-portraits	Janine Solursh	Forgotten Portraits	Suddenly nobody knows where you are. You're just a memory, an echo, an idea thin as smoke. Your last text, call, letter, Facebook post- only footprints in the surf. Your edges blur and you become a friend's story, a lover's history. Initially, you beat against the panes in set-aside frames begging to be taken out and rolled into motion once more. But after a second winter, then a third, and fourth, there comes something serene and warm behind the haze that smokes the broken hourglass. Something new and just for you. This world belongs to you and yours and when you glance back and recall your life's movement with a sigh of days gone by, you are irrevocably comforted having become that final exhale that hangs in the air after the passing. You pose and hold it. We are all the dead. I am not apart from you for long, except for breath, except for everything.
240,798	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58127/arts-leisure	Jessica Hagedorn	Arts & Leisure	i read your poem over and over in this landscape of women women purring on balconies overlooking the indigo sea my mother's blue taffeta dress is black as the sea she glides out my door to the beach where sleek white boats are anchored under a full, luscious moon still i am still the wind outside my window my mother's ghost evaporates in the long atlantic night i listen to the radio every chance i get for news of your city's latest disaster everything here the color of honey and sand everything there verges on catastrophe a constant preoccupation with real estate everything here a calm horizon taut bodies carefully nurtured oiled & gleaming hair & skin i read your poem over and over turning my head from prying eyes the low hum of women singing in another room i switch stations on the radio turn up the volume i almost touch the air buzzing electricity james brown "live at the apollo" the smooth female d.j. interrupts bo diddley groaning "i'm a man" it is a joke here in this baby-blue resort where art is a full-time hobby art is what everyone claims to do women sprawl like cats on each other's laps licking the salt off each other's skin and i walk in search of the portuguese fishermen who hide in the scorched trees the bleak, blond dunes that line the highway i imagine you asleep in another city i take your poem apart line by line it is a love letter we wrote each other some time ago trying in vain to pinpoint that first, easy thrill.
178,884	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23192/jack-spratt-et-ux	Winfield Townley Scott	Jack Spratt et Ux	Rise up, rise up, Jack Spratt. And you, his wife, Lie down, lie down to hark the risen cock. He splits the darkness with his barnyard laugh, Morning floods in through the simmering crack. Does the sun drink the dew or earth the sun?- Hard, hard to tell in all this battering light. Sun's for singing on, not thinking on; All's opposite meat and here's the eating of it. Sure, Jack, you've heard, your nameless wife has heard The poets and their women cry aloud That night be long, the moon stay up, day wait As if love-doings were but night-insured. But easy folk can rhyme the clock around; Betwixt the two of them, all opposites meet. MUCH HAS BEEN SAID
1,546,341	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53762/someone	Howard Moss	Someone	You watch the night like a material Slowly being crammed into a tube of rooms; It showers into gunshot, pepper, dew, As if a hand had squeezed it at one end, Is blank as innocence when daylight comes Projecting sunlit patches on the wall That fade. Too much is going on, too much Of life, you say, for you to live alone On top of an old tenement, on a train That might start off sometime, but never does. Your view is gone. Turn around, and boom!, A park appears between two fixed ideas Whose narrow aperture of sky in time Will house the slums of 1989 . . . Now New York is feigning its gray dark London winter. Invisible uptown Is out there somewhere, raining on its own. Palmed in the dusty pane, a circle bares A scene that seems reprinted from the past: A man with a dog is walking very fast Along a path among the stunted trees Of the little square below. He disappears.
236,382	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55736/report-from-the-subtropics	Billy Collins	Report from the Subtropics	For one thing, there's no more snow to watch from an evening window, and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow, and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman for her early dinner of wood. No hexagrams of frost to study carefully on the cold glass pages of the bathroom. And there's no black sweater to pull over my head while I wait for the coffee to brew. Instead, I walk around in children's clothes- shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody. The sun never fails to arrive early and refuses to leave the party even after I go from room to room, turning out all the lights, and making a face. And the birds with those long white necks? All they do is swivel their heads to look at me as I walk past as if they all knew my password and the name of the city where I was born.
218,150	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43114/song-of-three-smiles	W. S. Merwin	Song of Three Smiles	Let me call a ghost, Love, so it be little: In December we took No thought for the weather. Whom now shall I thank For this wealth of water? Your heart loves harbors Where I am a stranger. Where was it we lay Needing no other Twelve days and twelve nights In each other's eyes? Or was it at Babel And the days too small We spoke our own tongue Needing no other? If a seed grow green Set a stone upon it That it learn thereby Holy charity. If you must smile Always on that other, Cut me from ear to ear And we all smile together.
252,707	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158160/interrogation-in-a-nail-salon	Khải Đơn	Interrogation in a Nail Salon	[How long have you been here?] From the airplane window, she saw dragon's eyes floating to sheeny green mangrove feet its scales a rainbow mirror dancing light on her mother's mud wall Time found its way onto the skin of roofs she wondered if home remembered or how it sheltered on the crumbling field. [I don't know your place. What does it look like?] Her mother's hair: the white river Her eyes: the blurred pearls blinking on heart-lace, staring plumy red nails crafted waggling American flags Mekong indulged infant cries, feeding shining sesban flowers and bitter gourds Children grew into wandering duckweeds, intertwining themselves in laughter of joys The sky was close from Forbidden Mountain The Goddess sowed brown-eyed seeds giant tamarind tree cuddled the clouds little humans played hide-and-seek A child slips into the mud mouth. [Do you want to marry someone and get a Green Card?] Her tiny nipples wiped out a flood of silence Wedding grew thorns on woven green coconut gate burning purple on periwinkle blooms Her body melted flinching McDonald's yellow sign cloudy face powder, acetone, nail polish Phở broth boiled down particles of her night. [I know a man, good person, you can marry him.] She saw herself in the mirror in the corner toilet of the restaurant at midnight in the chlorine cloud hallucinating her cracked fingers. She hid her hands in the janitor uniform pocket so that any man couldn't see how her face was fading into the storm of keratin dust-spinning manicure drill. [Don't worry, nobody knows about your past here.] Answer: Do you know a service to change bones? Her past was carved in them singing through rainy nights flood season, weeping herons The Plain of Reeds whined through teeth mark of rice. [Do you send a lot of money home?] Her mother sighed. [Why?] A hostage of borders picked shards of memory and called it home.
168,844	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17616/university-portraits	Harriet Monroe	Why Not Poets?	COMMENT WHY NOT POETS? TK recent enterprises for the distribution of books suggest the above question. Both the Book-of-the- Month Club and the Literary Guild offer their subscribers "twelve books a year, one each month," ata cost equal to, or less than, the publishers' retail price. The two projects differ somewhat in principle, but in both cases poetry has been conspicuous by its absence from this wholesale marketing of literary products. Wings, the advertising leaflet of the Literary Guild, expressly says: The selections for one year will probably contain six books of fiction (novels and short stories), and six selected from history, biography, travel, essays, science and public affairs. Here, it will be observed, poetry-after all the highest literary art and one whose recent manifestations in this country have been singularly expressive and varied-is not even mentioned as a possibility. Yet all the announcements of these enterprises, and the widely advertised personnel behind them, imply that they are not mere commercial agencies to "give the public what it wants," but enlightened organizations assuming to develop a more selective public by satisfying its hidden craving for good literature. The Literary Guild heads its ad in a recent Nation: "Lrrerature: Not Just Books." The Book-of-the-Month Club promises to "deliver to you every month the outstanding book of that month"; or, if you don't want that one, however outstanding, it promises to describe numerous others so that you may "choose your reading with more discrimination than ever before." We have no objection to these enterprises if they are managed with impartiality and good taste. The obvious criticism that they are another symptom of the standardi- zation disease may be met by the reflection that the man in the street-the crowded literary street-needs a helping hand, an occasional guide-post, through the welter of blurbs, ads, notices which assails him, a welter provoking such inward turmoil that the effort required to go forth and buy a new book results in his buying none. Your choosy man will still choose, your man of light and leading will go unerringly to the right new book on the special new shelf; but why expect so much from the casual reader whose literary light-o'-loves have just begun to stir up deeper longings in his beauty-hungering soul? This man-or woman-may get much-needed help from the guiding hand, so long as the personality behind the hand is competent and disinterested. He and she-the potential public-can not be violently forced to accept highbrow stimulants, but doubtless the committees try to give them as much "good literature" as they will swallow. Let us examine the make-up of these two committees which do the selecting. For the Book-of-the-Month Club: Henry Seidel Canby, . Heywood Broun, Dorothy Canfield, Christopher Morley, William Allen White. Decidedly New Yorkish, rather Saturday Reviewish, with Mr. White thrown in to mollify the neglected West and emphasize the wholesome human flavor of the group. A committee of super-journalists; of excellent literary judgment but hardly of exceptional divination; with not a poet in it, or even an "outstanding" creative imagination. For the Literary Guild: Carl Van Doren, Glenn Frank, Elinor Wylie, Hendrik van Loon, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Zona Gale. Also New Yorkish, though Zona Gale still hails from Portage, Wisconsin; but with more variety of range and temperament. Indeed, almost unworkable variety, for one can't imagine Elinor Wylie and Glenn Frank ever agreeing upon anything. Here, however, we have a poet, Elinor Wylie, of proved importance, besides Miss Gale, whose early poems were a novelist's side-line. But these two are on the committee, not as poets, but as writers of prose. It is a possible, but rather forlorn, hope that either of these committees may wake up to the importance of modern poetry enough to list a book of verse once in five or ten years, in spite of the complete omission of such an intention in all their announcements. But this matter-of-course neglect of the art and those who practise it, this casual snub from the gilded and up- holstered seats of the mighty, shows that the poets should have a committee of their own leading a similar organiza- tion for the distribution of books of verse. And it has been authoritatively proposed that Porrry should undertake the job of organizing and sponsoring such a movement as a necessary feature of our long campaign for adequate public recognition of the art. Undoubtedly there are some thousands of people in this country who would like to receive a book of verse every two months or so from a committee adequately informed in the art, people who would be willing to pay ten or twelve dollars a year for the privilege of prompt appraisal of new ventures. If even a single thousand such prepaying sub- scribers could be listed, it would be possible, no doubt, to make the necessary arrangements with publishers, and to pay a trifle for the committee-members' time, and for clerical expenses, postage, etc. But the difficulty is to find the people who would be interested. The two associations above-mentioned are conducting an extensive and costly advertizing campaign. Their appeal is to a much larger public than the poets could hope for, so the percentage of return on this financial investment is far beyond anything possible in our specialty. With a thou- sand subscribers at twelve dollars a year-practically the retail cost of six books-the margin between retail and wholesale prices would be too small to leave any money for advertising. Thus the suggestion, however alluring, does not strike the editor as a practicable "commercial proposition." It could not be even tried out without capital-some thousands of dollars-to be spent in preliminary announce- ments. And of course we haven't the capital, and our optimism is not profound enough to prompt us to solicit it with any hope of getting the money back, with or with- out interest. However, we should like to know how such a plan strikes our readers. So let us appoint an imaginary com- mittee to select six books of verse a year: say, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Ezra Pound, Edna Millay, with the editor as chairman; in short, a committee of the best critical minds in this art whom the editor can persuade to serve. She need hardly say that none of the above six has been approached in regard to acceptance of this hypothetical appointment. Will every person who reads, or hears about, this edi- torial, and who would be willing to prepay twelve dollars a year for six books of verse to be selected by such a possible committee, please send in his or her name (nota check) to the editor? In a month or two we may be able to report as to the extent and enthusiasm of the response. At least, we shall have a little more light on the practicability of the plan than we have at present. H.M. REVIEWS
211,614	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39766/respirating-buds	John Tranter	RESPIRATING BUDS	I It's just an empty room in a beach house. You go somewhere for drinks, stay out late, get lost coming home. It's the awful page I choose to look at in a diary, a challenge like walking under a nest of hornets to show I can do it. It's what draws flame down from the sky, it waits for me too, a sad delta wasting and giving the sandy water back to the greedy sea-look closer-at the message the grass has scribbled on the sand-then late at night, a hint of a distant party like radium glowing behind the horizon. Forget death. Indoors, a heap of rags in a corner, paint-smudged clouts of denim, one canvas shoe, a can of bleach and a cheap notebook with all the names of the guests - knock knock, it's the neighbour returning the oars he's had since last September, and Janice, and the neighbour's kids-all sunburnt-there's some ice blox in the ice-box, all right? Only now to lie on the bed of pine needles and smell the iodine stink of seaweed in the air, to trace on the rocks that turn a cold shoulder to the turbulent water the maps of lichen each plotting an outline of a boulder on the back of a boulder, only-it can't be quite II How much have I suppressed? A career and a way of talking enfolding a talent, like a tree and its shadow. Not the shadow of a cut stump blurred on an overcast day when nothing happens in the depths of these woods, but a resonance, a tiny scream ascending into the blue above the bay, above the populated islands, the cloud in its slow roil and tumble spreading like gossip and persisting into an evening of gentle rain. In the morning, patches of bright reflected blue cold among the pine cones beside the rubbish tip, an icicle dripping a tear of distilled water and fractured brown rocks tasselled with ice, these point out to us what's passing: a horrible clatter of wings. There you are, in the snapshot, without clothes, just a drape, a loose swathe of something printed with ripe flowers and knotted buds breathing around you, probably silk, holding out a branch dabbled with what looks like blood. Note: The lines of "Respirating Buds" use the end-words of "Buried at Springs," by James Schuyler. The title is an anagram of "Buried at Springs."
210,212	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39059/beneath-the-plaza-of-illustrious-hombres	William Greenway	Beneath the Plaza of Illustrious Hombres	Whoever knows Mexico beneath the surface, is sad. THE PLUMED SERPENT Perhaps because I was told the city was built above rivers in that high desert, I dream rapids foaming below the streets, my family swirling over boulders to drown beneath the plaza of fountains that's over the car park and tunneling of the new subway, which are beneath the plaza of famous men, their bronze statues green and upraised-armed as cactus, and the dark cathedral where Christ lies a gory plaster cadaver with torn and daubed adobe skin and candles are electric. From the airport at night, we followed potholed roads lined with skulls of high-walled houses mottled with shadows of eucalyptus trees. Young men danced with machetes. Women at Belly High made love to snakes and tequila bottles. In the square a tranced man asked the Virgin for resurrection from heaps of fruit, and the iguana opened its eye. Vendors sold flores para los muertos. Beggars slumped in doorways, covering their eyes with one hand and holding out the other. We walked a Lenten week through diesel air, dead dogs everywhere, and sidewalk holes, human-sized, and rubble, the rubble they lived in- everything crumbling when the earth shuddered, what was left when the sewers exploded, erasing whole blocks of lives and the streets that led to them, under the volcanoes, wakes of lava, ash- the rubble they would live in-the Underground, half-finished houses, their twisted steel sticking from walls like dead trees to overhang sidewalks, street signs sharp as tin roofs that slice cabesas of tall gringos- the flowered rubble someone had lived in, crumbled forts of Coke- and toro-postered walls, foaming purple jacaranda, scarlet bougainvillea, rubble of ancestors, ruins carved with skulls, runed with skeletons, always above their lives somewhere twin towers of cathedrals, even above the alley the cat led us through to the shack where they made their pottery, fired it in a stone kiln with an iron lid where tortillas warmed, where we bought shepherds and wise men chunky as Mayan gods. Over the mountains where Lawrence and Williams lived, we ate the mummies of little smoked fish seined from the lake that is drying up like the rivers that ran beneath the city, leaving dust to mount and mount an army of ghosts from the water we saw the old gods emerge from, dripping. No one seemed afraid of bones, buzzards, WILLIAM GREEN WAY the feeble yellow night-light on the gray adobe skin, jagged metal, caves, mountains, and tunnels that explode and kill. Here, they say, the black-eyed children never cry. We almost ran to the plane that took us up through cold blue air north to no rubble, cleanliness, white light, paved sidewalks, malls, and the dead beneath the earth we will never see.
236,430	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55760/the-american-on-his-first-honeymoon	Rita Mae Reese	The American on His First Honeymoon	What we can say has already been said about each painting in the gallery- about the quality of light, the way she holds her head. So we are silent in the subway, silent in bed. Our bodies too are mute; we fall asleep knowing what we could say has already been said. Over toast and coffee and the newspaper thoroughly read the day unfolds between us. I am too weak to carry this quality of light, the way she holds her head. I would vow to leave if love had left if this were the wedding of two gypsies. But what should I say? It has been said the dead would properly bury the dead and here I am, alive at last and buried by the quality of light, and the way she holds her head. Perhaps women, sex, love are all over-rated. Which of us is the artist and which the light? You see, the words I might say have been better said- words concerning the quality of light, the way you hold your head.
170,790	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/18703/menta-the-drunkard	Emanuel Carnevali	Menta the Drunkard	OBSERVATIONS MENTA THE DRUNKARD Menta, what green phantoms do you see in the bottom of the wine glass? Do they not scare you away, Menta, old woman? What cares have you yet, old woman, for whom the world must be a heap of ashes? What secret marvelous worlds do you construct when your heart, burnt up by wine, is a grenade ready to burst? And when your legs get weak under you, do you feed on thoughts of flying over this town, this awful little town that sneers and grins at you? You stumble on your way but you always find the road to the tavern. In these men's hearts there is also a little envy for you, you who forget, you who send your thoughts away, away, away! Your heart is aflame with sterile fire. Does wine give you wings? No, since you stagger like an old boat. But perhaps you have hidden communications with a hundred little devils, and the church is forbidden to you. Does your mind lift you as high as mountains, nearer to God? Menta, you are an old boiler and it is fire that burns you and makes you go. Menta, old woman, what green phantoms do you see in the bottom of your wine glass? SOME THINGS Some things point at one with a stretched finger and laugh. Some things hide themselves from one's eyes and are heard quietly weeping. Some things fall from heaven: black unformed things, monsters of the night and terror of the days. Some things seem to have been arranged by God and the Devil. Some things seem to have been born in an abyss and grown in darkness. Some things bear the image of goodness as though fire j had bas-reliefed it there.
240,888	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58173/palling-around	Gregory Pardlo	Palling Around	He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec frequencies, he said. When the sun god liquors loose each ashen tongue the planet tattles. We are advised to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his dwindling fuse and the bartender would show him the door. In his honor I tune my form to the emanations of this vibrant life: Either someone's dropped a blue coin and I've picked up the murmur of its ribs-a quarter kiltering beneath the blond brick arcade of the whispering gallery at Grand Central-or someone's table is ready. No matter that I set my phone to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest. The man has passed. I got the text today, and now feel at least obliged to observe silence. Observe this café thick with humid bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam revealing patterns in the glassy chatter. For that he is a phantasm rumoring now a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel of a partial print. For that he is finally transcendent. For that we convened for drinks by some clockwork of urban chance each week, my year adrift in the East Village. For that I renounced him, and now regret having done so. For that I vibed with his passions-more, the deeper we reached in our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical record. I've traveled years through boot-black redactions of thought to find his apparition greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover the bed in which he slept and quested visions toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills, Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity. If you see something . What a fear of hobgoblins and philistines can blind our better senses. At the table beside me children play mosquito tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.
248,775	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150295/grace-5cfa852f5d239	Sarah Gambito	Grace	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
249,731	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152952/spellcaster	Jeannine Hall Gailey	Spellcaster	A golden-haired girl born in a month of sacrifice, poor little lamb throws off her wool coat and pulls out boots she stole and rides off on a reindeer instead and of course she can speak to roses- isn't that the point? Eventually she ends up in a castle but it's not her home. It's a place to liberate, to escape, to decimate. The whole place collapses, a series of chandeliers made of glass and ice. Off she goes. Blackberries and currants in her pockets. Roses blooming in her footpaths. Wouldn't you rather be the girl that casts her own spells?
181,924	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24767/amazing-minute	Kenneth Slade Alling	Amazing Minute	TWO POEMS AMAZING MINUTB The house has the cohesion of the stairs; The stairs cohere in him who makes ascent, Who traverses that brief plateau, the landing- In this amazing minute all who mount Their million terraces of stone or wood And all their purposes are. soluble In his identity, what each ascends for, The open book forgotten on the table, Sleep, petty thieving, fornication, murder, Whatever mission's possible in him. The house contains this elaborate container. All climbs with him now the treads his feet climb. CAR TOP
202,752	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35316/forgotten-men-2	Edward Brash	Forgotten Men 2	Speaking of the south, Walter Inglis Anderson returned there after having left the Pennsylvania Art Museum School to paint the wildlife of Horn Island off the Mississippi coast. He knew how old birds were and felt some ancient inclination to cover nearby surfaces with portraits of inhabitants most men ignore or eat. Two shellfish on newsprint was an elaborate composition for him; most he drew from life: an awkward blade of grass severing a marsh nest, for example, or individual pelicans; none of which was ripe enough to hang beside the citrus and sunlight confections of fellow Pennsylvania graduates, Edmund Tarbell and Cecilia Beaux.
253,281	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159339/land-ho	Kwame Dawes	Land Ho	I cannot speak the languages spoken in that vessel, cannot read the beads promising salvation. I know this only, that when the green of land appeared like light after the horror of this crossing, we straightened our backs and faced the simplicity of new days with flame. I know I have the blood of survivors coursing through my veins; I know the lament of our loss must warm us again and again down in the belly of the whale, here in the belly of the whale where we are still searching for homes. We sing laments so old, so true, then straighten our backs again.
250,643	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154991/the-uncle-poem	Jackson Holbert	The Uncle Poem	avuncular trees or was it avuncular skyscrapers? yea it was the skyscrapers but I don't know man I remember it was tuesday the cars were doing their normal car shit some asshole was blasting Puccini out of his BMW and some other asshole was singing an opera as he walked down Main Street what else I saw my grandmother this wasn't anything crazy tho she's still alive and all that she lives in town she was driving her convertible very slow I waved at her but I'm not sure she recognized me no other family interactions to report something about the day unsettled me tho in the worst way possible I knew I would be going home soon home to the hills where hill things happen but I had thrown that terror into the future like a baseball or a bag of trash and of course it is the future now but I'm not in the hills not yet so why were the skyscrapers avuncular to me me who had many uncles none of whom were skyscrapers I think I have a few less uncles now but it's hard to keep track big family and you know what they say uncles are like crab apples they wither maybe it was that it smelled like crab apples while I walked down Main Street I don't know where that quote comes from probably someone famous but I remember my uncle saying it and it seems like a quote about your uncles dying but that uncle wasn't dying not yet he was very much alive and very much addicted to oxycodone but the consequences would be far in the future but I guess the future is now which means the consequences have already happened which makes perfect sense because that uncle died tho not of overdosing exactly he died of a heart attack induced by fireworks on the fourth of July one of three citizens to do so in the county that day I do not know what made hearts so angry on that particular fourth it was warm but when wasn't it warm in the valley I wasn't there when my uncle died I had picked up overtime at the call center because I needed money to buy some oxycodone for myself I was planning to buy it off of him tho obviously that would be impossible because he is dead and altho it doesn't mean his pills are gone it does mean it would be super uncool to break into his trailer and steal them I have determined that he is the uncle I am referring to when I said the skyscrapers were avuncular tho referring isn't the right word I didn't intend to call them avuncular I felt it and it wouldn't go away like a dog bite but what made the skyscrapers so avuncular my uncle had never been to the city and possibly had never been to any city he was country from his hair to the tip of each toe he was so country that his countryness stretched out from his body and into his car maybe it's because he never saw these skyscrapers that I think of him tho that is bullshit and I know it so why the fuck could I not push the avuncular skyscrapers out of my decidedly non-avuncular brain was it the windows? the black paneling? maybe it isn't the building at all maybe it's the idea of the building and tho I don't believe in ideas I do believe in uncles maybe it is that the building is so high it would take minutes to elevator up and maybe an hour to climb which means by the top you would be in the future the real future the future minutes away not seconds a future farther than a word is from another word and maybe because I look at the skyscraper from the top down I think of those elevators in reverse which means I think of the future in reverse and if those elevators go enough the future will reverse enough to be the past like the real past like a few months ago when my uncle was breathing and taking pills and feeling the high come on like television static turning into tv or like tv turning into television static
229,932	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51985/zebra	C. K. Williams	Zebra	Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms against being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days not to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs? I have a key-chain zebra I bought at the Thanksgiving fair. How do I know she won't kick, or bite at my crotch? Because she's been murdered, machine-gunned: she's dead. Also, she's a she: even so crudely carved, you can tell by the sway of her belly a foal's inside her. Even murdered mothers don't hurt people, do they? And how know she's murdered? Isn't everything murdered? Some dictator's thugs, some rebels, some poachers; some drought, world-drought, world-rot, pollution, extinction. Everything's murdered, but still, not good, a dead thing in with your ID and change. I fling her away, but the death of her clings, the death of her death, her murder, her slaughter. The best part of Thanksgiving Day, though-the parade! Mickey Mouse , Snoopy , Kermit the Frog , enormous as clouds! And the marching bands, majorettes, anthems and drums! When the great bass stomped its galloping boom out to the crowd, my heart swelled with valor and pride. I remembered when we saluted, when we took off our hat.
249,239	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151502/object-lesson-5dc04e2bb70da	Claire Schwartz	Object Lesson	You learn to recognize beauty by its frame. In the gilded hall, in the gilded frame, her milky neck extended as she peers over the drawn bath. A target, a study, a lesson: she requires you to be beautiful. You should save her, no matter the price. No matter the price, the Collector will take it. His collection makes him good, when he lends the woman's image to the museum, where schoolchildren stand before it, anointed with lessons in color and feeling. Pay attention , the teacher scolds the fidgeter in back. Bad , the child whose movement calls to her own beauty, the child whose wails insist his mother is most beautiful of all. Eyes this way , the teacher syrups. All that grows, rots. Good little stillnesses, guardians-to-be. If you are good, one day an embossed invitation will arrive at the door of the house you own. You will sit next to the Collector, light chattering along the chandeliers, your napkin shaped like a swan. To protect your silk, you snap its neck with flourish. The blood, beautiful, reddening your cheeks as you slip into the chair drawn just for you. Sit , the chair says to the patron. Stand , to the guard. The guard shifts on blistered feet. She loves you, she loves you not . The children pluck the daisy bald, discard their little suns in the gutter.
169,216	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17823/the-spotted-birds	Anthony Wrynn	The Spotted Birds	TWO POEMS THE SPOTTED BIRDS I waited where the spotted birds Flew upward from the water and the rocks. I waited, not to watch the claws, The scattered drops, the throats; but thoughts and words Were fettered in my mind. Remote, The wind against my eyes, from that waste shore I watched the sky unmarked by sun Or star or moon, empty as I, when swift And harsh the spotted birds flew up, Shaking the deadened water bright, flew high And wild, trailing their legs from rift On rift of plume, of spotted wings undone In flight upon the sterile sky, And tore the net in which my mind was caught.
209,750	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38825/the-mosaic-of-creation	Debora Greger	The Mosaic of Creation	San Marco, Venice 1 THE FIRST DAY: THE SEPARATION OF LIGHT FROM DARKNESS High in the dark light that we call weak God has six days. He's young, smooth-cheeked- and already something's not to his taste, an angel, as always, in too great haste to roll the earth back into night before he can say, "Wait, there should be light." Before anything in us can be stirred, before either of us has said a word in the dull gold light come raining down the distance turning it to brown, the angel looking about to cry- but that comes later, if God stays dry. Water has risen at his back but he's Venetian -he only cracks where the building does, across his arm lifted to bless the light that warms the dark. The first day, what does he know? The face of the waters gives no clue. Look from the basilica's great porch- the water flickers from torch to torch. 2 THE THIRD DAY: THE SEPARATION OF THE SEAS AND DRY LAND And on the third day God is stuck with too much water, just his luck- where's he to stand in this blue mess to call forth all he's yet to bless, the little things he'll be known for, a burning bush, a wise man's star? Does the young God heave an almighty sigh? He's left the water out to dry and stepped to a green that doesn't give way. For, look, an angel seems to say, now he'll have to figure out what to do with it- perhaps a sprout or two, a fish with feet or wings. Far below, a choir of humans sings for practice: once again a phrase slops at his ankles like a wave. This is Venice, the edge of the world he parted the waters from, the swirled blue tiles the one thing he doesn't bless. The water does what it does best, without his help, taking the land back from under his outstretched hand. 3 ADAM AND EVE IN HIDING It slides, the voice of the soprano, not without effort to stay piano. It snakes up the cupola into the garden where Adam and Even would like to stay hidden: God, out for his daily walk, would like to have a moment's talk about the fruit at their disposal and whether they do know good from evil since there's a fig leaf in Adam's hand to cover himself, though there's no wind, not a breath of cold yet, nor a leaf stirred except by Eve to cover her words, the air around them rich with gilt as if something more than light has spilt into the garden this afternoon so endless the next scene comes too soon- a door will open in the gold, a door to a world where they'll grow old. Already the leaves are tinged with fall. How young they look denying it all.
239,680	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57535/poem-written-with-issa-in-my-dream	Matthew Rohrer	Poem Written with Issa [“In my dream”]	In my dream his voice began to fade I had to call him the next day I feel about average he said I'm going out to buy some juice a huge frog was in the driveway a small boat drifting the river flowed in silence
221,634	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46304/retrospect-56d226248e844	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle	Retrospect	There is a better thing, dear heart, Than youthful flush or girlish grace. There is the faith that never fails, The courage in the danger place, The duty seen, and duty done, The heart that yearns for all in need, The lady soul which could not stoop To selfish thought or lowly deed. All that we ever dreamed, dear wife, Seems drab and common by the truth, The sweet sad mellow things of life Are more than golden dreams of youth.
250,061	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153974/how-to-stuff-a-pepper	Nancy Willard	How to Stuff a Pepper	Now, said the cook, I will teach you how to stuff a pepper with rice. Take your pepper green, and gently, for peppers are shy. No matter which side you approach, it's always the backside. Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps. In its silk tights, it dreams of somersaults and parsley, of the days when the sexes were one. Slash open the sleeve as if you were cutting a paper lantern, and enter a moon, spilled like a melon, a fever of pearls, a conversation of glaciers. It is a temple built to the worship of morning light. I have sat under the great globe of seeds on the roof of that chamber, too dazzled to gather the taste I came for. I have taken the pepper in hand, smooth and blind, a runt in the rich evolution of roses and ferns. You say I have not yet taught you to stuff a pepper? Cooking takes time. Next time we'll consider the rice.
221,568	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46231/cool-pastoral-on-bloor-street	John Reibetanz	Cool Pastoral on Bloor Street	1. Consider the tragic fortitude of mannikins, the courage it takes under casual poses to do nothing interminably each day. To face unflinching (through sunlit glass that bars them from it) the rushing surf of life within reach where they must stand marooned on their islands' plastic turf, and not to cry out: more heroic than those Romans the lava rain stunned to statues-misshaped by the panic that twisted their limbs, glazed with their pain in black rock-friezes of agony. You would never know, from the relaxed swivel of this woman's wrist as she completes a backhand with her racket, that she will never take another swing, or from her smile that she has stood balanced here on one foot all summer like one of Dante's damned, and not cracked. 2. 'Cracked' is my father's word for 'crazy,' as in 'You'd have to be cracked to pay that much for a pair of shoes.' He's not crazy, but he forgets, and today as we pay out his visit's hours strolling on Bloor, he thinks up the same questions again minutes after he's nodded and smiled at answers to them. Looking for things to look at and not think, I focus on another grove of mummers: headless, their necks poke out like worms from the smartly turned-over collars of turtlenecks and jackets. You can tell they've also lost their arms from the way the sleeves plummet slackly off their shoulders-although they, ashamed to show the mutilation, act cool and tuck the cuffs into their pockets. I look at my father-hands trembling, head crazed like china with minute cracks through which years exit invisibly- and must remind myself his show is kinder, the long-running comedy where he's played every part, from fresh-faced mooning lover to child-duped parent to doddering senex: still free now (while heart and limbs play their duet) to do a walk-on, ad lib, bow out. He sweats a little in the sunshine. Summer stock, lacking the tragic poise that freezes these actors in their scene, we move on towards a shadier place.
226,756	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49901/reading-a-memoir-at-cedar-island	Nicole Pekarske	Reading a Memoir at Cedar Island	We arrive eight hours before morning but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand prickled with fringes of eelgrass, and the world's baby teeth ground down to this pall of sand. It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight - You can see in each stunted and strung-out live oak the shape of the wind's hands. On this last stand before the Outer Banks Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters to shelter stunned and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes . The groove fits my tongue so for forty more pages I keep the light on, pulled by a man oaring his way through childhood to a stung and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied lessing & moring of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason this freight of rain, salt in my hair. That child I was, what was she mourning before death charged his first fare? We wake and hurry to slip our moorings. The ferry's there.
172,586	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19716/the-steppe	Helene S Pulse	The Steppe	IN UKRAINE THE STEPPE How good, when two friends walk the steppe together, To top low hills that show a sudden town, All pink and blue, that sets them guessing whether It's better looking on or plunging down Into the streets where bare-foot, red-scarfed girls Sit in the sun with soldiers free a day, Where little Jewesses with rook-black curls And small blue-eyed Ukrainians shout at play. The windows hold geraniums all the year, Even the windows of half-underground Unlovely hovels. Sometimes clothes-lines wear Long towels with scarlet cocks on them; around The small mud huts cocks strut about in plumes That call to mind the courts of Kubla Khan; In lowest doors girls shake their dirty brooms, Their faces fair as Dante looked upon. There are some mornings when the lacquered grass So shines that all the tales of death are tales : Only; across this steppe no want may pass, No bitter memory may use these vales. There are some evenings when the yellow moon Gilds the blue Dnieper, and young lovers sing [ 200 ] Helene Searcy Pulse To their accordions a Tartar tune. Then revolution is a mythic thing, A dreary yarn once told and soon forgot; And belching factories and noisy trains, Paid for in food, are little more than what The peals of thunder were in last year's rains. THE VILLAGE GIRL
190,060	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28946/the-rothko-paintings	Michael Goldman	The Rothko Paintings	Currents around a pole, or a fire damping to stillness, they conduce to our calm in their process, terminal, voiceless. Unbound, yet selves in the exigence of merely having to be, like a new map, these continents explore us to the sea. LYRIC (ll) This house is shrieking with consent, unfetter the air: braced walls explode, windows rumple and spray like sea, bricks trumpet to the sun, floors swell and tear, like flowers bubbling their hearts' grave wine in dusty sills, until day's heat is done, the chains flutter to rest and through the dark, contention falls on the house like peace, like air.
194,338	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31101/home-thoughts	Lewis Turco	Home Thoughts	Time buzzes in the ear. Somewhere nearby, beyond my peripheral vision, an insect throbs its heartsong to the couch. A twilleter fuzzes against a burning lamp. Outdoors, a common goatsucker strings twelve yellow streetlights on its bill. Between its hoarse shrieks, the town sky drops pieces of clum among my snoring neighbors. II close my eyes, a crack along the wall comes sliving my lids to split the mind's dry sight. Look inward: a plaster skull sifts dust down upon old webs which hang, buzzing, as darkness moves ruthlessly to feast on something small and hollow with blind, jewelled eyes.
199,750	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33811/andy	Paul Backhurst	Andy	PAUL BACKHURST ANDY Hearing the flimsy plastic tap again on the casement glass (it seemed it wished to gain admittance-now to boldly force entrance and by reverberation shatter the pane), I turn to acknowledge the plaintive wind, now mixed with rain in a gentle rhythm falling, to loose the grasp of time, to soothe the mind, not far away, rain, on a skylight, falling. One fall brought me to university, and to avoid the cupboard life of dorms (but more because I feared uncertainty in a radical time), I chose fraternity. At Rush the strippers danced with Carl Hoch- in underwear, all over the quaking stairs. Whether from shifting overweights the house shook, or nervous belly laughs, the oak held fast. Decision made, yet tentative, I surveyed by daylight, other rooms in the vacant glare. With opening doors a distant figure waded into form: Andy looked at me with laughing eyes. I see before me now a homespun slim with chestnut hair, handsome forehead, and tools, but then I saw nothing but moving limbs, the unconsuming fire in his frame. How often I would stare through casement windows toward the carriage house and open all the doors with my mind. Andy lived in isolation there, playing loner-hoarding memories. Between times, he (House Manager) and I would clean the house: this music in my ears made the task a pleasure. Once, done early, Andy lifted me, spun me overhead through form to tears. Whoever understands disorder well might speak of love, and so unsheath the id- iot's curse of reason: look, I'm dizzy still! I see me dressed in immaturity, some would say straw of innocence but we shall feed internal fires always as we go. Ignorant (fearing other eyes and his), I slapped his naked back hard not to let him know. The damage done and not to be forgotten, hurt forced a blossom on that well-turned back. At dusk the driveway seemed a pier, the house a ship; Andy's lights burned brighter and went out.
1,546,786	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55103/the-return-56d236479a5c2	Jan Owen	The Return	Mondays Began with one plait loose, a pip in your teeth and late for Geography, lined and blank, facts to the right, tall stories left. To sail the heat in a weatherboard classroom boat with banana and vegemite colouring the air sargasso green. To ship ten thousand things on cursive seas to the edge of the known page -coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. To import small desires and grown-up needs in little packets of time for show and tell. To carve your name on the prow. To wait for the bell. In the Parlour only the French clock answered back. They sat cross-legged on the Persian carpet; destinations flashed by the smell of Marveer, lavender, dusty velvet. They opened their eyes in the olden times to fossick under the coffin flaps of the jarrah window seat for proper advice from disheveled magazines: nose straighteners, recipes, posture improvers, the runt who smoked and the chap who rowed. They didn't see foresight's guarded smile, they didn't hear hindsight howl like a dog; the riddles were wordy, the clues were dumb: lopped head of a doll, silk wedding sleeve, gilt volumes, silverfish, and in the glass case, untouchable figurines locked away as grown-ups always seemed to be: shepherd and shepherdess on their marks, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Limoges? The real thing? Almond Trees cover Willunga Plains: like the misty breath of winter children, the blossom hovers. Dearth, says the black bark, splits to let scent through with open questions where when why what who? As for that earliest aroma fear, she'd smell it, taste it, anywhere, one part in a million, pungent as coffee or smoke, already there in her mother's milk. Against its grey unbeing she caught at talismans - black stones on a white plate, concrete nouns clattering out of thought. Marking time down the dead-end street to morning. Why was it always dark in the quiet hall? Through a memory crack of light an edge squeezed round the door: regret to inform stop missing in stop the air elliptic with tracer fire, familiar eyes glancing away, prismatic as flies'. Voices crept and huddled, where's Daddy's girl? He did come back, but who? They could not tell. Collections began. The tang of foreign coins lent her a lingo and currency for the unknown; Brother stuck down squares of expedited love with serrated edges. And they were invited to a fancy-dress ball with games of us and them. Father could not come for he was lame and Mother had to watch and wait not play so they learned dolls and trains and night and day and Snakes and Ladders and Hide and Seek. Knight's gambit. Castle your king. Check. And when the black door opened and they knew threshold was famished, Brother stepped through. Now fear had her ID and her address. Best send an invitation. Tell her guest the lightest thing she served would ward off harm - a stick, a stone, a cloud of white perfume, thought itself, needing a go-between to say 'this fragrance is like newborn skin, these quickening trees, like Mary's aging cousin conceiving all baptism out of season'. She Collected Dictionaries as other women take up men and shelve them: manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh, like a passion for clothes that would hang unworn in the dark, for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls in a shut case, nouns declined. Each unknown word shone with delicious fire and the alien phrases silked her skin with their genders and connotations. She might have been the end house on the waterfront of Macau welcoming every sailor in. But the longing for many tongues to part her lips - si, igen, ja, ah oui, yes, yes - was departure's smile, a leaning to the wind that sweeps a glitter of light across the sea and sets a silvery chill at the neck. Quick, to those books guarding the mantelpiece, ISBNs snug as a span of days; to bread and fruit and sparkling wine. She had been given a cyclamen with scent, some new trick that married violet and rose, as if a flower should yearn to sing and the pink timbre tremble into quietest words. She touched her flesh and knew that it would fade as speech did and did not. And yet it was not language that she sought, nor the music of any meaning. An old allegiance drew her on beyond the first ground of thought and the idea even of silence to the fifth season which must at last return with its weather of recognition and its lost ends.
202,668	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35274/meeting-place	A. R. Ammons	Meeting Place	The water nearing the ledge leans down with grooved speed at the spill then, quickly groundless in air, bends its flat bottom plates up for the circular but crashes into irregularities of lower ledge, then breaks into the white bluffs of warped lace in free fall that breaking with acceleration against air unweave billowing string-maze floats: then the splintery regathering on the surface below where imbalances form new currents to wind the water away: the wind acts in these shapes, too, and in many more, as the falls also does in many more, some actions haphazardly unfolding, some central and accountably essential: are they, those actions, indifferent, nevertheless ancestral: when I call out to them as to flowing bones in my naked self, is my address attribution's burden and abuse: of course not, they're unchanged, unaffected: but have I fouled their real nature for myself by wrenching their meaning, if any, to destinations of my own forming: by the gladness in the recognition as I lean into the swerves and become multiple and dull in the mists' dreams, I know instruction is underway, an answering is calling me, bidding me rise, or is giving me figures visible to summon the deep-lying fathers from myself, the spirits, feelings howling, appearing there.
217,890	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42956/empire-of-dreams	Charles Simic	Empire of Dreams	On the first page of my dreambook It's always evening In an occupied country. Hour before the curfew. A small provincial city. The houses all dark. The storefronts gutted. I am on a street corner Where I shouldn't be. Alone and coatless I have gone out to look For a black dog who answers to my whistle. I have a kind of Halloween mask Which I am afraid to put on.
246,473	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/145654/naming-the-heartbeats	Aimee Nezhukumatathil	Naming the Heartbeats	I've become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie, Honeybunch, Snugglebear-and that's just for my children. What I call my husband is unprintable. You're welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally-I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening's first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don't yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we've only visited in our dreams.
237,558	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56394/wild-kingdom	Tyrone Williams	Wild Kingdom	This is your foreign correspondent, Aristotle, for The Poetics, reporting live from the Mediterranean where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians crown the tradeships of His Majesty, wave back and forth: starfish-moons-Februaries. To my right, our military advisor, Hernando Cortez, oversees operations at the Aztec/ Mexican border where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water a dove collects its nest egg upon the skeleton of a hummingbird. To my left, our scribe-in-residence, St. Nickle-and-Dime-'Em-To-Debt, scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future where the last rites of man and of-man are delivered at the near-twin births of the lyric and gunpowder.
179,410	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23459/airplanes-1938	Edward Weismiller	Airplanes, 1938	That was when flight was the long, silver dream Curling with cloud, and spangled by the sun: Teaching no death, except what heaven might seem; No end of time; only how time might run Endless and endless, over and under space, Always the same, and being the same, not there- Strong as a circling web of metal lace, Or frail as the cold spider's shivering stair. That was when flight was the clean, silver song Heard in the huge buildings, down the dark lanes; When we could live forever-but not long Without the consuming music of the planes. They are the cuckoo's young. Separate and grim They have left the crucible, and do not at all . Follow the makers' words now, but a hymn Of ruin: the sirens' call; Restless, they mouth the wind. In their flying Will be malice and time, the doom of kings, Both hired; so they start out low and crying, The trade-marks of oblivion on their wings- They beat a pathway up through a kind of heaven For idiot hate that spills its seeds in air- And so they come, cold, always groaning, driven Toward cities only loved, and never fair: They come: they have beat through time to this one hour. The raging musics mingle over the walls. The builder runs mad from the staggering tower. The world roars, and falls. That was when flight was the dream, the silver song. It is over now-not as the moon wanes. We wake in the shrieking dark to the downward, long Fall of time; to the endlessness of planes.
169,338	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17888/earth-grows-old	Audrey Wurdemann	Earth Grows Old	Soundless she turns on poles of crystaline And ancient ice, where steadfastly she's grown, Leaf-garmented and wrapped in living green That merges in the agate veins of stone. Wearied with fruitful years, she, in a way That planets have, essays a knowing smile, Not to be thought too old for many a day- Death's all the kinder if he waits awhile. She watches the uncoiling of the stars That whet their blades against the firmament. Impervious to unsheathed scimitars, She peers against the blinded night. Intent She listens, while the waters rush to meet Eternity about her ice-bound feet.
243,577	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90842/la-salamandre	Galway Kinnell	The Salamander	Î And now you are Douve in the last room of summer. A salamander darts on the wall. Its gentle human head gives off the death of summer. "I want to be engulfed in you, narrow life," cries Douve. "Empty flash, run on my lips, pierce me! "I love blinding myself, surrendering myself to the earth. I love no longer knowing what cold teeth possess me." u All one night I dreamed you were made of wood, Douve, the better to give you to the flames. And green statue wed by bark, the better to delight in your glittering head. Probing with my fingers the debate between fire and lips: I could see you smiling at me. And this great day in you of embers was making me blind. mm "Look at me, look at me, I ran!" I am near you, Douve, I give you light. Nothing remains between us but this stony lamp, this little soothed shadow, our hands awaited by shadow. Startled salamander, you do not move. Having lived the instant when the nearest flesh becomes knowl- edge. w Ainsi restions-nous éveillés au sommet de la nuit de l'être. Un buisson ceda. Rupture secréte, par quel oiseau de sang circulais-tu dans nos ténèbres? Quelle chambre rejoignais-tu, où s'aggravait l'horreur de l'aube sur les vitres? Quand reparut la salamandre, le soleil Était déjà très bas sur toute terre, Les dalles se paraient de ce corps rayonnant. Et déjà il avait rompu cette dernière Attache qu'est le cœur que l'on touche dans l'ombre. Sa blessure créa, paysage rocheux, Une combe où mourir sous un ciel immobile. Tourné encor à toutes vitres, son visage S'illymina de ces vieux arbres où mourir. Was already very low on every land, The flag-stones were painting themselves with this radiant body. And already he had cut that last Bond which is the heart one touches in the dark. And, rocky landscape, his wound made A ravine to die in, under a motionless sky. Still turned towards every window, his face Shone with those ancient trees where one could die.
222,714	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46966/little-bo-peep	Mother Goose	Little Bo-Peep	Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep, And can't tell where to find them; Leave them alone, and they'll come home, Bringing their tails behind them. Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep, And dreamt she heard them bleating; But when she awoke, she found it a joke, For they were still all fleeting. Then up she took her little crook, Determined for to find them; She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed, For they'd left their tails behind them. It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray Into a meadow hard by, There she espied their tails, side by side, All hung on a tree to dry. She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye, And over the hillocks she raced; And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should, That each tail be properly placed.
189,906	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28869/the-change-of-life	James Scully	The Change of Life	JAMES SCULLY THE CHANGE OF LIFE Into what silence had your still life cried? You seemed unchanged, and yet were something new- poised in pure being, a winter's bride, like snow that stays, a moment, on the sea. ... Mother, the water taps gushed from their worn mouths; the loose slip wrinkled like a snake- skin pouring from your thighs. And being born childless, your moistening body woke. Recovering in the bath, you were amazed to find the life-long wound without a scar; and fearless as a child, with nothing on, you watched the cooling fog. And the cleared air disclosed those papered walls, and cold sweat glazed the black-and-white engraving of a swan.
175,000	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21121/without-ceremony	Carl Bulosan	Without Ceremony	THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY WITHOUT CEREMONY Hurriedly the crowd disappeared at the street's end. Forever the curious faces look and stare, obscuring, Leaving the possible truth unseen - Open and big faces are nothing but blurred images. These are faces that are saddened by the spying years, Faces that once gleamed with a surge of promise And strength, strength tautened with reservations, From the deep tunnel of winter ploughing, I see faces growing fragmentary with stale careers. Under the furious triumph of winter rain, the mind Quickens. A little leakage of memory fills, drains, And opens a new wound of queer poignancy. From the savage lines of faces, it moves, coils, And sets a fire. Thought is like a mountain storm Threatening the hunters. How steep is time, How deep is sleep -
174,564	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20863/twilight-56d20c4154753	Laura Lee Bird	Twilight	This is the star-quiescent hour of night When water-lilies lift the tapers of their light Along still lakes. The sunken vales lie deep, And hills of pearl where dews in clover sleep Their blessed silver silence keep. The winging moon glides beautifully free - The argent shadow of a sable swallow, she Whose pinions lull to peace the lyre of day. Only the rain-dove purls a plaintive lay, And he is far away... And he is far away.
241,688	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58590/beverly-huh	Jamila Woods	beverly, huh.	you must be made of money. your parents must have grown on trees. bet you're black tinged with green. bet you sleep on bags of it. bet your barbies climb it. bet you never wanted. bet you never had to ask. bet you golf. bet you tennis. bet you got a summer house. bet you got a credit card for your 5th birthday. bet you played with bills for toys. bet you chew them up for dinner. bet you spit your black out like tobacco that's why you talk so bet you listen to green day. bet you ain't never heard of al. bet your daddy wears a robe around the house. bet his hands are soft as a frog's belly. bet your house is on a hill. bet the grass is freshly cut. bet you feel like a princess. bet the police protect your house. bet you know their first names. bet your house has a hundred rooms. bet a black lady comes to clean them.
221,522	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46177/business	A. F. Moritz	Business	Stiff, thick: the white hair of the broad-faced father, who leads his shambling son along cracked sidewalks, by dusty glass half hiding goods never sold. The son is the taller one but still a child: not aware of his clothes, of what expressions seize on his soft face. His gait lolls, loosely directed from some weak, distant center, scarcely devoted to any purpose but following along and looking. Thick lenses glint with watery blue: his small eyes, veiled and placid, as far off as the milky August sky. The father, all the time glancing at him and talking as man to man, seems to forget it would be better for this one to have been like all the rest. He has his son still with him, the others have grown up and gone away-but when he dies, then what will happen to the boy? Even this thought is absorbed now in their ordinary errand, men's business: grateful going out through the day, talk with the owners, the salesmen, a mechanic in the scent of grease and sawdust of machined metal, the sifting through tools and parts that flow, spill, gleam like seeds, like sand-looking for what fits, finding what will work. Afterwards to stop for food, then walk back home down the clear streets, when starlings, hunting and restless before sleep, and children are the loudest things, with the dark foaming among maples, glinting, as it comes in.
1,546,239	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53107/how-wonderful	Irving Feldman	How Wonderful	How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you-and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is! And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they're the right things if you are, which you're not, that someone -a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone's fun. And so you don't mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful -and you understand this, how wonderful!- that you've been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.
207,034	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37464/in-his-sleep-my-father-inspects-the-work-of-the-army-corps-of-engineers	Brent Hendricks	In His Sleep, My Father Inspects the Work of the Army Corps of Engineers	As part of the Arkansas River Project, Allowee, Oklahoma, was flooded in 1947. With his arms held wide he dives into the black water, swims away from the light on the dock, down to the lake bottom where he was born. Past the gas station, the general store, and out the one long dirt road toward home. But first he must pass his best friend's white house, then a scarred elm which carries his name, then the tin mailbox with the route number worn clean, where bloated cows hover in his father's fields. So he begins wading toward the house, churning his arms, tries to call out for someone home but the thick water chokes him back. And when he reaches the gate, climbs onto the front porch, he has the vague feeling he's been expected, that his parents are only lingering in the deep fields. He opens the door, walks into the silent rooms, sits down to wait in the sunken light.
165,408	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15703/suddenly	Jessica Nelson North	Suddenly	We have a gray room. The walls are gray and bare. I have hung pictures and set flowers there. I have made curtains with wide and snowy hem For our tiny windows to make the best of them. You look at me. Your look is still and gray. Your look is cool and dim and far away. I cannot open the stubborn husks that shut Your heart away like the kernel in a nut. I am afraid of what is in your heart. I must probe deep; I must tear your mood apart. Suddenly like a rocket, unaware, Your eyes blossom and flare!
228,140	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50758/the-work-56d22e11a1f7a	Tom Sleigh	The Work	1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding Back like a dam the flood overtops-but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ... And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted, He hears the Voices begin to die down The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling Sunup to sundown falls gradually still -Unappeasable, the silence that will follow When his every last drop has been poured out. 2. Countdown In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across Your face siphoning air into your lungs, You lie helpless as an astronaut Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious To ours, your body's fevered presence Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail Up the pipe of the crematory oven: How distant we will seem after Such intensity ... We drift in your stare Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility. Already you are space immeasurable By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted Payload, liftoff, escape velocity. 3. Prayer In the house of the dead I pace the halls: The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert Or flatten into horizonless ocean. I step outside, the door clicking shut Comforting in its finality ... Now I see the house as if I looked down From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused, Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits: I can't look you in the face, you see only The openness of sky rising above mountains. (Only after the world had emptied You and filled you with its openness Will I feel the love I pray to feel?) 4. The God a dream A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere. Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure, I cradle you, I sponge you clean As if you were my son, the emptiness you Drink like heavy black milk erasing Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain. The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven By the god, blinded by the god's Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads In this place the god commands: Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you are nothing in my hands but my hands moving. 5. His Stare Absently there in a moment of pure being He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring: The air's transparence gains solidity From his looking; while his emaciated features, The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones, Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green Of the trees he is too weak to prune. And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing And enters and becomes each spectral vibration; So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare. 6. The Current The numbing current of the Demorol Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night He lives in slowly begins to darken, His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness Blinding as an underwater cave. Already He filters the dark water through gills aligned To strain that element he more and more resembles: Like walls of water held in miraculous Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially Above him, my hands holding his tightening Its grip even as his hand loosens ... As if my hand could lead him past that undulating Weight towering above us out of sight. 7. The Rehearsal I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair, The rank rich air of breathing flesh- But like fumes rising from earth's molten core The voices of the dead reach out to you, Your whispering parents, dead for forty years, Entreating me to turn-and so I Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die, You dwindle, blur into unfillable Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ... But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus -Only this voice rehearsing breath By breath in words you'll never read these Lines stolen from your death.
219,560	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44320/yesterday-56d2235e36a70	Edgar Albert Guest	Yesterday	I've trod the links with many a man, And played him club for club; 'Tis scarce a year since I began And I am still a dub. But this I've noticed as we strayed Along the bunkered way, No one with me has ever played As he did yesterday. It makes no difference what the drive, Together as we walk, Till we up to the ball arrive, I get the same old talk: "To-day there's something wrong with me, Just what I cannot say. Would you believe I got a three For this hole-yesterday?" I see them top and slice a shot, And fail to follow through, And with their brassies plough the lot, The very way I do. To six and seven their figures run, And then they sadly say: "I neither dubbed nor foozled one When I played-yesterday!" I have no yesterdays to count, No good work to recall; Each morning sees hope proudly mount, Each evening sees it fall. And in the locker room at night, When men discuss their play, I hear them and I wish I might Have seen them-yesterday. Oh, dear old yesterday! What store Of joys for men you hold! I'm sure there is no day that's more Remembered or extolled. I'm off my task myself a bit, My mind has run astray; I think, perhaps, I should have writ These verses-yesterday.
207,564	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37730/still-life-belt-on-bureau	Robert B. Shaw	Still Life: Belt on Bureau	Surely it must be asleep. And camouflaged, brown against brown, although its grain, more delicate, can't match the wood's precisely. It lies in a loose coil, relaxed, but self-protective. The immemorial shape of menace and potential. There, at the center of its limp constriction, you can make out most of its brazen head, the stiff prong of a tongue now tasting nothing. Every morning it waits to be tamed anew, and you have long since learned its proper handling: threading it backwards through the accustomed bands, tricking it yet once more into biting its own tail.
165,614	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15817/never-did-i-dream	Harold Lewis Cook	Never Did I Dream	Harold Cook NEVER DID I DREAM I never thought that I should walk In ecstasy the streets of town, Or find a heart more beautiful Than red leaves fluttering down. I did not know archangels pass In human guise among the trees; And never, never did I dream That I should walk with these. But by my side one went today; I saw, and I had speech with him: And I forgot, who ne'er forgot, How cold are streets, how grim! Harold Cook
206,124	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37007/mystery-play	Henry H. Hart	Mystery Play	HENRY HART MYSTERY PLAY November 22, 1963 It is almost Christmas. A blue woman kneels over the bandaged child, the hay ringed with wooden cattle. Above, angels flutter from windows. The star on the créche sticks its spokes into everything. How suddenly it happens, the faces rearing in judgment, the loudspeaker shaking with its terrible news. The busses wait as always in their arc of silence, ready to ferry us across dry rivers. It is almost winter. Again and again we see his head slumped in its cradle of bone. Dawn's gray wing folds the barberry and thistle in snow and apples fallen into thorns. Nothing will be the same. Windows darken into mirrors. We wait like birds over deepening seeds.
192,750	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30307/the-affair	Marvin Bell	The Affair	For R. He learned early to turn out the light. He could do no wrong: too much of New England and a heady share of pain- soldier's, poet's, teacher's pain, the agonizing husbandry- all the years of his beating. All men met in him a life wholly above dreams, a posture so banded we could picture him wigged as he might have crossed the Delaware and slept in the Washington home. He was that upright: thinking signals in his blood a Puritan code he could not break for years, the seeds of awful pleasures, by innumerable tokens, rose up within him and he was given to be repented what the good man only loves. He called her "Mistress Forever" for her love of guilt, and she called him a little obscene endearment to the end. Afterwards, he took it out on fish and pheasant- making the fair game tremble in the face of his righteous accuracy, taking on the elements that they might take from him love's triangular life. But she was in him forever, laid in the house of lore. All of his dreams would follow him, and all of his wife, after that first happy ending.
205,550	https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36719/over-brogno	Sydney Lea	Over Brogno	If from behind the stars the perilous Archangel came down, our thunderous heartbeats would kill us. Rilke After the ten or twenty quiet minutes within the empty church at San Giovanni, the lisping wavelets of the Como arm of the lake even less audible than the little implosions of dove-flight in the tower above like the shuffle of cards in a deck- After my bourgeois reverie and rote prayers for the absent ones, wife, children, friends, the lungs and torso at length as light as wings, as thought was transformed by consciousness of the cosmos below, the thronged dead, their buoyant deep dust beneath soft stone on which I sat all weightless now in the pew- the bells of noon had the ploosh sound of iron anchors cast over into water. I stepped out onto the dazzled piazza, near blind to the chic ragazza as she passed to the wharf's corner, where she'd eat and read her glossy review. Her personhood weighted me too, and thus I made my sudden decision to turn, rise, go south to the snowy mountain along the ancient mule paths, avoiding the heavy trucks, clutched lovers, cars so close I could almost touch them on the wire-thin limestone roads banked high with rock, where escape seemed all but hopeless. I wanted to rise above all, withdraw from millennia's mulched refuse underneath me, innocent as it was, innocent as the Virgin whose icons at every bridge across the torrente were littered with candle, flower, coin- earthy leavings and spillings of quick and dead alike, moving along these tracks like the bent illiterate contadino of whom I asked directions, who courtly and gravely gestured: "At every fork, choose one that climbs, if you must." To him there clung sweet dung, dirt, dust, as to others I passed, whom passing, I commended to God, a Dio. At which they would bow in respect, it seemed, but seemed bemused, as if the expression I used signalled not greeting but intention. Did I think I was climbing a Dio? Did they smile because it was odd to encounter someone like me over Brogno? Or at the superstition that the higher powers are something one has to seek in a higher order? But they returned to their labors. Enough had passed on these mountain paths that another oddness could pass. Somewhere within my heart I thanked them, for only a troubled abstraction could have been my answer if they had asked me where I was going. And what was this humming, far past the final boulder-built hovel? There on the summit, in the absence of wind, the tall tower, the unfleshed skull and bones on the chilling sign -Pericolo di morte! And something seen or seeming seen, an immanence, an aura. I thought beyond to our time's angelic throngs: What deadly secrets in satellites soaring? What particles abroad? What spectres of light that is more than light? Brogno far below, its inn and bar, and I up there, and what radio waves winging by and bearing what lethal abstraction from what capital, what lecture hall, what briefing room? Clamorous heartbeat, its clap within like thunder. Without, the Angel. I felt the heart must burst or draw me down to cottage and shack, to human traffic, where souls move close to ground.

203,552

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35717/larkinesque

Michael Ryan

Larkinesque

Reading in the paper a summary of a five-year psychological study that shows those perceived as most beautiful are treated differently, I think they could have just asked me, remembering a kind of pudgy kid and late puberty, the bloody noses and wisecracks because I wore glasses, though we all know by now how awful it is for the busty starlet no one takes seriously, the loveliest women I've lunched with lamenting the opacity of the body, they can never trust a man's interest even when he seems not just out for sex (eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass), and who would want to live like this? And what does beauty do to a man?- Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron- those fiery eyes and steel jawlines can front a furnace of self-loathing, all those breathless women rushing to him while hubby's at the office or ball game, primed to be consumed by his beauty while he stands next to it, watching. So maybe the looks we're dealt are best. It's only common sense that happiness depends on some bearable deprivation or defect, and who knows what conflicts great beauty could have caused, what cruelties one might have suffered from those now friends, what unmanageable possibilities smiling at every small turn? So if I get up to draw a tumbler of ordinary tap water and think what if this were nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers, will all I've missed knock me senseless? No. Of course not. It won't.

234,480

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54642/virtuosi

Lisel Mueller

Virtuosi

People whose lives have been shaped by history-and it is always tragic- do not want to talk about it, would rather dance, give parties on thrift-shop china. You feel wonderful in their homes, two leaky rooms, nests they stowed inside their hearts on the road into exile. They know how to fix potato peelings and apple cores so you smack your lips. The words start over again hold no terror for them. Obediently they rise and go with only a rucksack or tote bag. If they weep, it's when you're not looking. To tame their nightmares, they choose the most dazzling occupations, swallow the flames in the sunset sky, jump through burning hoops in their elegant tiger suits. Cover your eyes: there's one walking on a thread thirty feet above us- shivering points of light leap across her body, and she works without a net.

202,794

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35337/the-gift-of-the-magi

Peter Meinke

The Gift of the Magi

DECEMBER 1982 PETER MEINKE THE GIFT OF THE MAGI The angel of the Lord sang low and shucked his golden slippers off and stretched his wings as if to show their starlit shadow on the wall and did the old soft shoe, yeah, did the buck and wing. The Magi put their arms around each other, then with chorus-line precision and enormous zest they kicked for Jesus onetwothree high as any Christmas tree and Caspar was the best. And Melchior told a story that had Joseph sighing in the hay while holy Mary rolled her eyes and Jesus smiling where He lay as if He understood, Lord, knew the joke was good. But Balthazar began to weep foreseeing all the scenes to come: the Child upon a darker stage, the star, their spotlight, stuttering out- then shook his head, smiled, and sang louder than before. There was no dignity that night: the shepherds slapped their sheepish knees and tasted too much of the grape that solaces our sober earth- O blesséd be our mirth, hey! Blesséd be our mirth!

238,380

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56852/el-tigre-market

Juan Delgado

El Tigre Market

As apparent as the rest, the asphalt cracks are crowded with yellow weeds, the rust goes beyond its bleeding color, and the lot's rails, battered by cars, cast larger bars by noon. On one side of the market someone painted a row of flower pots, hanging geraniums for the locals who must now go across town. As apparent as the rest, El Tigre walks upright, wears a tiny sombrero and sarape, and pushes a grocery cart full of food. His painted stripes are starting to flake like the bounty he wheels for the families drifting into the parking lot off 3rd Street and next to the train station still waiting to be retrofitted for the big one.

204,588

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36237/in-a-cab

Baron Wormser

In a Cab

Form amends our laboring nerves. Without this blessing, plain life grows eager and soft. The handshaking brio of feckless energy Taints all contentment; gain becomes a reason. Musicians could do otherwise. Instead they chose a solitude that flowers, All frustration funnelled Into an hour or two of studied power. Erring or swift, fingers remain fingers, Yet the famous frozen music of mortar rises and falls and fades. . The red bricks are a little graver. No longer do people intuit what they can't completely do. No longer are tempers lost and restored. Hope is not looked for. I am afraid of how cold it is in the cold winter Without the genius of the little conservatory! A busy silence sits on the city. Places are palpable, but no one has ever Inhabited one of Schubert's songs. The chance to visit some small perfection has gone. IN A CAB Delighted at rush hour To flaunt his emigré wisdom, The Russian cabbie tells me that This country Is heaven: jazz, enough food, No whispering, Cars that work. He smells of onion And cheap hair cream, wears A tweed cap. What is the American Politics of belabored possibility to him? He is no degreed utopian. The radio goes from Stan Getz to A Coltrane hymn; through the steamy windows The goodness of what is random, The busy vapors of Sixth Avenue seep in. Confusion and compromise, brief principle And bent belief Are the cloth of this congested life. The Post's headlines proclaim, but here The worst reprobates, both left and right, Remain men and women, the stuff Of plain-speaking, self-satisfied sloth. Taking the long view down this democratic avenue, My driver gestures with His middle finger and hits the brakes. We swear at the buses and Bolsheviks. Coleman Hawkins sets out. Salt And honey, that is our state.

200,312

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34092/movie-night

Stephen Dunn

Movie Night

On the empty walls some of the newcomers project their private, small Guernicas which no one else can see- while in the large room with the screen Liv Ullman touches Max von Sydow with a lust so deepened by grief the rest of us feel our miseries are amateurish, some of us are even elated to have Bergman for such a friend; oh come over for dinner, Ingmar, and make our loneliness exquisite! The woman sitting next to me, overweight and beautiful, has been crying since I took her hand and whispered "slit wrists, betrayal, viciousness, anything that Ullman does makes me happy". I'm not sure why she's crying, but I know how intimacy begins and it has begun, I know that the best sex rises like a trapped beast from our vacancies, those openings we never knew were there until touched. Ullman now has offered her face to theologians as proof there is a soul; von Sydow is looking off to the side, afraid to let go of some bottom of himself. Later, the woman and I will talk about this in bed, with pleasure. Later, the newcomers will get tired of their shadows and fall asleep by themselves. This is the first stage. The next stage is waking, a throwing off of covers, and more covers; months, years of it.

194,832

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31348/saties-suits

John Koethe

Satie's Suits

Orange is the hue of modernity. Greater than gold, shakey and poetic, Our century's art has been a gentle surrender To this color's nonchalant "stance" Towards hunger and the unknown, and its boldness: For it has replaced us as the subject of the unknown. We still like the same things, but today we handle them differently. Among the signs of occupation in this contemporary war The twelve identical corduroy suits of Erik Satie Locate importance in repetition, where it really belongs, There in the dark, among the lessons that sleep excludes. I want to emphasize the contribution of each one of us To a society which has held us back but which has Allowed love to flourish in this age like a song. Unable to understand very much, But prepared to isolate things in a personal way, The acres of orange paint are a sign Of the machine that powers our amateur hearts. The technical has been driven back By river stages, exposing a vacant lot Strewn with these tools, food and clothing Awaiting the invention of limited strength. We could begin selling ourselves, but the overture Brings no response and the connection remains unsketched. I can see there has been no change. The body's a form of remote control And its success is too exact to assist us. Responding to the ulterior commandment So much has failed in the abstract. The phallus hid in the school bell While the difficult fluid rose in the night. In the apartment wild horses took you away.

224,734

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48458/ovid-in-the-third-reich

Geoffrey Hill

Ovid in the Third Reich

I love my work and my children. God Is distant, difficult. Things happen. Too near the ancient troughs of blood Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere, Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

210,186

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39046/equinox-56d21c87cb554

Christopher Buckley

Equinox

Wine-sap aura and atmosphere, pale as if flour had been sifted over the horizon's long rope as it cinches up the day and leaves us, leads us to that last ash or amber space between the boughs that a thousand starlings fill like a shower of black stars, reiterating their harsh sense of the dark, which is only the distant shattering of waves. But first there was the hazy fusion of afternoon and all the suspended particulate of the past- chaff and luster, a boy breathing in the ease and comfort of a loneliness sung back vaguely from the sea, salt sting and undertow, the surf-like surging of his blood across the concourse of days- all the assemblies of light extending the spindrift parameters of his arms where he's seen the floating clouds stall with their tinfoil shimmer and reserve, as if Plato's souls were still hovering, wondering whether to come down. Now a wind swims through redwoods and the ridge's alphabet of pines leans high and away -to Peru it's easy to say, where, in a book once, he saw someone equally in mists, mountainside or plateau, playing a flute beside mild animals-that slight tremolo the wind knows in its grey way around the heart, that the grasses know among the stones- the sky open to everything on its own thin exhalation. This is the sky I know. Coal-white geranium of sun, distance clearing and almost colorless, blood smear across glass, the world powder blue and full of the silent desire of air. 4:30 and a little yard-fire smoke recommends a moon, the ionic clouds sleepless again with their old, gilt-edged verisimilitude- that we should never die, that finally there's no secret in all the starlight that has yet to reach us.

233,202

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53840/evolution-of-my-block

Jacob Saenz

Evolution of My Block

As a boy I bicycled the block w/a brown mop top falling into a tail bleached blond, gold-like under golden light, like colors of Noble Knights 'banging on corners, unconcerned w/the colors I bore-a shorty too small to war with, too brown to be down for the block. White Knights became brown Kings still showing black & gold on corners now crowned, the block a branch branded w/la corona graffitied on garage doors by the pawns. As a teen, I could've beamed the crown, walked in w/out the beat down custom, warred w/my cousin who claimed Two-Six, the set on the next block decked in black & beige. But I preferred games to gangs, books to crooks wearing hats crooked to the left or right fighting for a plot, a block to spot & mark w/blood of boys who knew no better way to grow up than throw up the crown & be down for whatever.

168,836

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17612/stallion

Frank Mitalsky

Stallion

Sunset romps past again today Streaking his golden mane; He lifts his flaming nose to neigh, Calling his mate in vain. The trees he brushed are left on fire, The earth rings from his feet: The mountain burns a lost desire As night slips down the street.

163,088

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14393/gray

William Rose Benét

Gray

Fold on fold the purple, crimson then- Gold? I shook my head and turned away. What? I turned and glared in that barbaric den. "Gray!" Ashes, rats! You cannot, cannot mean it, surely? "Yes," I chirped, "I'm weary; I have had a day; One thing only suits me, purely and demurely- Gray." Doves and twilight seas, fog and thistle-down, Granite quarried too; pearl, with all array Of colors quenched within. But you said-a clown !- Gray! "Yes, I understand; but you don't understand I'm the clown of heaven and mean to have my way. Cut me cloak and doublet. This is my command- Gray!"

187,228

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27499/sometimes-and-after

H.D.

Sometimes and After

Yet sometimes I would sweep the floor, I would put daisies in a tumbler, I would have long dreams before, long day-dreams after; there would be no gauntleted knock on the door, or tap-tap with a riding crop, no galloping here and back; but the latch would softly lift, would softly fall, dusk would come slowly, and even dusk could wait till night encompassed us; dawn would come gracious, not too soon, day would come late, and the next day and the next, while I found pansies to take the place of daisies, and a spray of apple-blossom after that, no calendar of fevered hours, Carthago delenda est and the Tyrian night.

186,944

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27356/in-childhoods-chair

Kimon Friar

In Childhood's Chair

KIMON FRIAR IN CHILDHOOD'S CHAIR By antique mirrors blurred with memories, In an old drawing-room of gold and green Hung with Mozartian melodies, she sits In childhood's chair in the late afternoon, The curtains drawn on adolescent streets Where copulate in error lust and dream, And drawn on lilting talk where love is slain With cocktails and hors d'oeuvres on terraces. Her traveled eyes are children at last come home, Estranged and silent, from an illicit land, Keeping a knowledge only children have: Perspectives of a rotted wharf and quay Where sinking tides reveal the mouldering corpse. They break the legs of caribou, and flee, Cut off the tongues of orioles, and sing, Pluck out the eyes of sparrow-hawks, and see. Thus motionless she flies and silent sings And sees in mirrors of her inward eye A blond child running down the long arcades To a white seashore and a sunlit sea: The convoluted corals of the mind Where the bleached skeletons of fishes lie, Their blank eyeballs like marbles, the thin bones Of birds, where blooms the pale anemone. And meets the child there of another sphere Whose hair is black snakes hissing in the wind, With eyes the funnels of a labyrinth Where roars the minotaur, whose heels are winged, Who in his left hand holds the flaming sword. And there the monstrous children, blond and black, Make monstrous love with flaming sword and wing, The black snakes spitting flame on the salt air. She sits in childhood's chair in a cold dream Of luckless children tossing in their beds, Of Love untimely loved, untimely slain, The black snakes silent, smouldering sword, singed heel, And keeps a mystery children cannot tell: Death is self-knowledge, love the marriage bed. The beast with two backs roars, the minotaur Stampedes in the mind, the blond-black children sleep.

201,416

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34644/last-signals

Margaret Kent

Last Signals

I In the vision the particulars rule, but the air's still round and the navigator's fingers are made of glass, sounding the stars like clear test tubes filling with light. But what of our baggage, the farewells? At the runway's edge, the semaphores wave through the rain their cross-boned salute: no one's calling our names. Beneath the curve of the wing, a man in a green jump suit is making the rounds: his arms do their own dance of death across the wet pavement, their own bidding, less willful than we ever imagined. And if details count, a woman in a red hat has confided her name. Her son-in-law lives in Omaha; she puts questions to us later, for instance: how did we come so slowly to rack and ruin? Beside me, in your lap, the blue veins of your hands run like rivers their tracery of deceit, still a landscape I trust. Was I wrong to discard our passports, our maps of the region? u If arrival is nothing but aftermath, what keeps us here afloat, heading somewhere? Are we slowly approaching the mainland? Im How space hovers about us as empty as prayer, all pain suspended, all risk convened in the aisles. To contain it, the world shrinks to cigar shape, fashions itself around bodies limned in mid-air. And how curious it is that the real world still rides the dark wing tip where motion is always arrival and change seen only in passing, not standing still on a streetcorner somewhere, hands rummaging in pockets, as if it might once and for all be apprehended. IV The delicate daring of the stars. Signals without meaning to be signals, flash in their clear dominion. Looking backward, like light as it outruns itself; I choose the vision: waive fear, see the masks like entrails drop before us, dangle, stare. It is enough, I think, to consider we may never arrive.

162,700

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14181/quilts

Mary Willis Shuey

Quilts

They gave me the quilt that Great-aunt Elizabeth made- A quilt of pink roses, and tiny careful stitches. It goes in my chest, for in October I marry. Pink roses, with stems of green on a background of white, And Great-aunt Elizabeth pieced it for her own chest. She pieced it with trembling hands, for her lover had gone To fight with the South. Elizabeth filled in the long days with squares of pink, Fitting the pattern together with quick, nervous fingers; Roses of pink, for love and a bride. But here is a spot of red among the pink roses. I wonder what is stitched into the quilting. She finished it long afterwards, when war Had taken all she had but memories. She pieced her life into a pink-rose quilt When war was making patch-work of her soul. They gave me the quilt that Great-aunt Elizabeth made- A quilt of pink roses with stems of green, for a bride. But I see all the time the splotch of blood in the roses. October is so far when war is near.

202,970

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35425/the-way-of-the-world

Askold Melnyczuk

The Way of the World

December 1980 Reading Duns Scotus, I find this passage, a quotation from Avicenna: Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn or to be beaten and not to be beaten are not identical. The Soviet Army masses at the Polish border. Larry Lee, a living soul, is in Seattle. He is singing. Later tonight I'll read poems by Rudenko, who is in prison for speaking out for the beaten. And you, my unscathed wonder, tell me: The curtains. The colors are wrong. Oh my dear.

173,186

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20051/in-argos

H. L. Davis

In Argos

SE DE VoL. XLII ee No. II A Magazine of Verse MAY 1933 TWO POEMS IN ARGOS You know Troias? Agamemnon? I was born in his town, Was born in Argos. A small town, bordering the sea. I remember not much. Hard work. We used to have olives, Bread soaked in the oil, and wine-sour! Winters it rained. We stayed indoors then, but we never had any fire. Whether it was a good place-to live in, I mean-I don't know. I was a kid-the old folks had the running of me. They were strong religious, and whipped me a good deal. ... But then I have lived here longer than I lived in Hellas-Greece- I came to this country a very long time ago. Worked section in San Francisco. It was time of the earthquake. I had left all my money in my coat, and gone to sleep, And the bed slid, and plaster began falling in my face. I ran out into the street. Then I thought, "My money will burn!" Fire had already caught the place. I fought to go back, but men held me out in the street, And the house and the town burned. Everything. All afire. "Well," I said, "no money-how am I going to eat?" This is a funny thing-I found my money in my shirt. I'd grabbed it without knowing it... . That's how it was in Greece. In Argos we did things without thinking-nothing to decide. Whenever you did something, you knew how much it would hurt. We had everything measured. We were used to doing it from long past. . .. You know? You know how I mean? Norisk. All peace. Pick grapes and olives. Mind Christ. Be satisfied. [62 ] When it's hot, strip off and swim in that Aegean Sea, And sleep on the beach naked. . . . We didn't get rich very fast. I like America for that better. About San Francisco. When I'd found my money, after a few days, they said, "You! Where do you want to go?" I said, "Los Angeles. My cousin is working in Los Angeles-" "You got money?" I showed them my money and they counted it.- "All right! All right!" they said, "that's ten times as much money as you need. Here! Ticket to Los Angeles for this man, to leave to- night!" Old woman and little girl looked at me, and began to cry. She was pretty, that little girl. Clean, too. All white. About fourteen years old, maybe. . . . So then I said- "What's making you cry, mother?" The old woman talked, Smearing her tear-marks with her fingers, till her eyes were red. She wanted to go to Los Angeles. She was broke. The soldiers wouldn't let her go. So I said, "Don't cry. Tl stake you to go to Los Angeles. What the hell!" Then I bought her and that little girl tickets, and I went away. She was pretty, that little girl. Beautiful. Small face, all white. Thin hands-you know, like a dancer. Low voice. Beautiful. I wished that old lady would fall dead, or take sick, before night. You know? . . . I was ignorant then-bashful. Why, I thought, Here I am, nothing but a roundhead steel-driving Greek. And there she is, beautiful. . . . I thought, no, better stay away. I am Greek, and maybe the Greeks frighten her. Not go back, Not ask them how about paying for the tickets I had bought, But wait, learn to be an American, and save my pay- Then go, and say, "You remember me?" . . . Plenty of time yet, Plenty of time. . . . I didn't see them for a long time. I worked with a Los Angeles steel-gang. Sometimes I'd think ; I ought to have had nerve enough to touch her; touch her cheek. Maybe she expected me to; maybe she didn't notice That I was nothing but a steel-driver, a roundhead Greek. Then I would be sad because I hadn't, and go buy a drink. I was buying a drink, when I saw the girl's mother again. "Well!" she said, "I've been looking for you!" She had some men. "Make you acquainted with my old friend Steve," she said. And she said, "Come out to my place with me tonight. My girl's asked about you. We thought maybe you were dead. Come out?" All right. It had red curtains on the doors. She'd taken that white little girl, that beautiful Girl I had not touched, and put her in a house with whores, That girl was more beautiful, and she'd not forgotten who I was. She said, "Why! You're the Greek that paid for bringing us here! Did you go and hide, to keep us from paying you? What's the cause?" I thought, "Now I can touch her!" And I didn't. Some- body said- "The door's ringing, it's some men, too! Hurry up!" So then That girl got up, and I would sooner have known she was dead, And she said, "Well, maybe I'll see you in this place again?" So then, I wanted to go away. No. No, they said, I would have to stay. I sat, and listened to their talk, I watched the door, thinking of the girl, and of the men. At last I found I could move, and I came away. All that time There was a kind of lump itching down in the gullet of my throat, Liable to break loose any minute-and which one, Which woman shall I kill when it breaks? I will come back, And tear which woman and what men to rags with my hands- Tear them to rags, and the blood out of them! . . . Well. I walked, And after a long time it got daylight, time to work. I found some money the old lady had sneaked into my coat. Either I lost it or I spent it-what the hell! But I never went back to that house, never any more. That swelling stayed in my throat for a long time-years. It never broke actually. Only, after a long time, It was not noticeable any longer, and I was old. That's how America is, eh? Whenever these men- I've got to be like them-are angry, or hungry and cold, They work hard like hell, and all their suffering is gone. They do nothing about suffering but work. In Argos, in my country, I'd have killed that old woman and burned down her house. Not here. In Argos, hungry, I'd take somebody's olives and be fed. Not here. In Argos, we had sorrow, but it was soon done. We knew it, and knew what to expect of it, and how long Before new things would carry it away from us. Here, things last. Sometimes they last all of a man's life, they are too strong. In Argos, there was nothing but God to fear. [ 67 ]

251,135

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/155588/battle-of-the-rams

Romeo Oriogun

Battle of the Rams

The field has ceased to be lush wonder, from the eyes of a bird I watched them go again and again, horns finding the softness behind fur. Here, what seek for death is been praised. Young boys jump into the air to know the weightlessness of joy. Every year they come here to know death, to know the last sound of a dying animal is a plea for the knife. I looked from above, sending back the spirit of dead animals into the bodies of little boys. We were never too young to know the tongues of kites are beginnings to rituals and when these boys begged to be set free from seeing a horn spill blood on grasses, what do they mean? We all must know death to know the sadness of a grave. Again, another ram is led to the center, a whistle is heard, another ram is allowed to walk through. The sun kept shining, faithful witness to every war, to every broken horn, to every animal whispering for death. Another ram is fallen. Abdul turned to me, the knife in his hand ready to run through the ram's neck is an act of mercy. This is the ritual of war I was given. In a train in Boston I tried to hide in a book while an old woman kept saying I write for Africa , as if Africa is a little bowl of water, as if our tongues are not divided by borders. She turned to me to say you must know about conflict zones . Even when invisible, I am asked about the origin of war. I opened my palm to spill a ram's blood on her seat. This is what I know, a ram will look death in the eye and run towards it just like a man walking into the night with the weight of a continent on his back.

206,054

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36972/the-uncles

Roberta Spear

The Uncles

They say that as a young child you were especially smitten with the older men-those red-nosed unmarried uncles of your father. They held you up until you brushed the veil of heat that hugged the ceiling. You could see the crescent fold of cheek, flesh pocked and marbled with a hundred dying rivers. Gold suspenders, boaters perched atop the thinning sweat-soaked domes-touches of practical dignity. You found a nesting place in their arms during Sunday drives and funerals. And the day's first shot of whiskey smelled like honey socked inside a willow trunk where you were queen. When the August sun came down square on the warped anvil of this Valley, you were taken off to nap in a darkened room at the back of the house. The elders gathered on the porch with beer and ham on buttered bread, or took the path through sycamores to argue crops and wars and money. One of them would slip away to where you rested in a buttoned slip and socks in the angelic haze of late-day light. He would dip into the coarse woolen field of his trousers and lay it there beside you on the pillow-a coin as round and silver as the moon that would rise before you woke.

190,102

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28967/view-56d21295d8aaa

Judith Van Leeuwen

View

Keep the cliff immovable, keep it in mind, with the light sea reaching, reaching and falling, trying and failing to climb the rock. Not to translate is the greater art Life on leaves of paper sea into meaning, stones into eternity. There is a bottom to all this, comforting none. URBANIZATIONAL They would have died, these knockkneed unhunters and so would I, but for this culture which leaves us at a loss, bewildered, swaddled in vegetable cotton, animal wool. In a street, of all things. I used to think that where was nothing there was always grass. And here we are staring through store windows at one another, with all the goods really between us.

202,110

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34994/perturbation

Aris Alexandhrou

Perturbation

The astronomers receive groups of students, members of the YMCA, Marxists, and roughly explain the installations, permit them to peer at the planet Neptune. There's no way of avoiding such visitors. Whether you want to or not, you will see them yawning behind their hands, standing before a mainspring as though confronting a scorpion, and crying out-ostensibly-in utter enchantment. Don't become exasperated, don't be flattered. Escort them all to the door with stellar politeness and then bury yourself in yesterday's notes. Only one of your colleagues could have calculated the direction, the mass, the speed of your own concern that so wanders in your brain all day until the verses are engraved on irregular elliptical orbits, because always somewhere out there invisible enormous and existing the anonymous pain of man moves on.

186,482

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27120/the-painted-lady

Margaret Danner

The Painted Lady

The Painted Lady is a small African Butterfly gayly toned deep tan and peach That seems as tremulous and delicately sheer As the objects I treasure, yet this cosmopolitan Can cross the sea at the icy time of the year In the trail of the big boats, to France. Mischance is as wide and grey as the lake here In Chicago. Is there strength enough in my Peach paper rose or lavender sea-laced fan?

179,372

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23439/figures-of-space

Marguerite Young

Figures of Space

Why did Nature after such large expense Declare the pact of her unaltered peace And let the invader softly enter in, Sleep, sleep with no defense but the tired sentry Sleeping at the outer wall of space, So wind herself in fleece of that cold flame, In the dream of space, in Jason's silver fleece, Nocturnal rabbits sport above her breast, Upon her vein the white albino flower Suckles a climate mild from pole to pole. She is supine, she fades from her own eyes And fading, sees her image darkening. There is no trust now in her blood-colored cloud Nor in the frigid flame of her bright sea. THE RAVEN

207,040

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37467/respite-56d21adede6fc

J. W. Rivers

Respite

Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie Avec ses chants, ses longs loisirs. Apollinaire We came last week, Running faster than fear, Through a great clangor of horns To take cover in this grove. The meadow haze is lifting. My buddies, calm and composed, Are settled down, Perhaps a bit awkwardly On this cruel ground, Unblinking, their eyes Fixed on the sun Which fills their faces with light. Beneath his camouflage, Tom is resting nearby, growing Into the image he reflects: An ancient garden of rocks and herbs Yearned for all his life. Eddie, a frozen squirrel, White muzzle, pocket bible in hand, Crouches, locked into position Among fallen branches. He always said that after endings Come beginnings, That we should be as farmers Longing for spring planting. In the meadow, a church Whose roof, walls and door, Having survived burning sun, Hailstorms and earthquakes, Collapsed last week. Did the altar, Still standing, Take root? Far from here, geese Go clanging in the air, Souls searching for heaven, And birds with chimes in their throats Sing in ice-bound trees, Calling us to silence. The sounds fade, But I hear echoes Calling us to ourselves. I am learning how to wait. If I gain strength I will put aside my words And gather branches For an Easter Eve bonfire, Select a trunk J- W. RIVERS And carve a cross To carry home In a newly alive world. I will be as a farmer. I will live In my father's house of bread.

161,302

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13363/death-and-the-jester

Ernest Rhys

Death and the Jester

Black crow, art thou come For Dagonet's wit? It is quick as the light Or the dragon-fly's dart. It is born in a smile, It is bred in the heart, It is light, it is laughter. It took life when Eve laughed At the lion-cub's play; It slept then awhile, When her sorrow came after With the son of the snake. Eve's joy was my mother, Not Eve's sorrow; And the bird is my brother That sings as he may. In the close of my day, Lies curl'd up the morrow Like the fox in his bed. And my wit, if I die, Yet shall wake and shall fly- Take music and live When Dagonet's dead.

236,698

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55905/the-house-top

Herman Melville

The House-top

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain-a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought Balefully glares red Arson-there-and there. The town is taken by its rats-ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe- Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead, And ponderous drag that shakes the wall. Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll Of black artillery; he comes, though late; In code corroborating Calvin's creed And cynic tyrannies of honest kings; He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed, Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, And-more-is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

194,276

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31070/esther

W. S. Merwin

Esther

Tomorrow they will come for you old female word from the corner lucidity motionless in the dark they will take you out to be bared elsewhere opened before it is May there is no one else here the door wide to the blinding spring the wind one of the family like a cold hen mute about the kitchen the rest away busy the shirts waiting for the iron the calendar ticking tomorrow the animals will keep away we do not believe in happening the sunlight will always lie there even tonight even tomorrow night it was always there but you go back to another time | it is said as though there is one If tomorrow is really not today how can one believe in anything as you say hands holding each other in paper bags older than they are eyes cut out of your dress hung to dry burst package to be carried past the toys out in the bright dirt past the shadows waving ringing their bells raising their instruments whatever is brought back as you know is not all but if you get later to a place with a blackened wall and two sticks held together by a little smoke maybe they would let you sit by it in the day staring and you could announce what he is doing the animal their sky

187,954

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27875/the-beauty-of-jobs-daughters

Jay Macpherson

The Beauty of Job's Daughters

The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters. Take Job: the beasts the accuser sends at evening Shoulder his house and shake it; he's not there, Attained in age to inwardness of daughters, In all the land no women found so fair. Angels and sons of God are nearest neighbours, And even the accuser may repair To walk with Job in pleasures of his daughters: Wide shining rooms more warmly lit at evening, Gardens beyond whose secrets scent the air. Not wiles of men nor envy of the neighbours, Riches of earth, nor what heaven holds more rare, Can take from Job the beauty of his daughters, The gardens in the rock, music at evening, And cup so full that all who come must share. Perhaps we passed them? it was late, or evening, And surely those were desert stumps, not daughters, In fact we doubt that they were ever there. The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters. In all the land no women found so fair.

248,421

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/149515/small-talk

Momtaza Mehri

Small Talk

you michelangelo's crouching boy/you d'angelo's purr/you dead currency/you dead presidents/you a stick of incense/you a stick-up artist/you haraami/you the hum of a lifetime basined in my lap/count our tallies of loss backward for me/run to the bank & translate it into a fistful of green of your choice/or something else sanctified/or european/pick the synonym of your choice. in a traditional sense/the body holds its arithmetic/exports it outward/to the touch and exhale/the praxis felt best/against a groan of concrete/with the dumb weight of a hand against the small of a back/here, an elevator is our only spiritual ascension/can i be excused from living so slimly? i dream you closer too/beside the honey-colored dog licking its vulva/an abstract laugh swelling inside your throat/ask me about blood clots and spun coins/the cracked skin of heels/anything but the nightly heartbreaks of/too many addresses/and all the ways/i am still auditioning/for this country's approval.

224,756

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48472/snake-56d229bd70868

Dannie Abse

Snake

When the snake bit Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa while he was praying the snake died. (Each day is attended by surprises or it is nothing.) Question: was the bare-footed, smelly Rabbi more poisonous than the snake or so God-adulterated he'd become immune to serpent poison? Oh great-great-great-uncles, your palms weighing air, why are you arguing? Listen, the snake thought (being old and unwell and bad-tempered as hell) Death, where's thy sting? In short, was just testing: a snake's last fling. Yes, the so-called snake was dying anyway, its heart calcified and as old as Eden. No, that snake was A1 fit but while hissing for fun it clumsily bit its own tongue. No, Hanina invented that snake; not for his own sake but for first- class, religious publicity. No no, here's the key to it. Ask: did the Rabbi, later on, become a jumpy, timid man? Remember, he who has been bitten by a snake thereafter becomes frightened of a rope ... Bearded men in darkening rooms sipping lemon tea and arguing about the serpent till the moon of Russia, of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, rose above the alien steeples-centuries of sleep. Now, tonight, a clean-shaven rabbi who once studied in Vienna says snake-venom contains haemolysins, haemo- coagulants, protolysins, cytolysins and neurotoxins and that even in Hanina ben Dosa's day a snake was a snake-unless, of course, it was a penis, an unruly penis, making a noise like one pissing on a mound of fresh hot ashes. Oh great-great-great-uncles did you hear him? And are your handbones weighing moonshine?

236,452

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55771/magi

Brenda Shaughnessy

Magi

If only you'd been a better mother. How could I have been a better mother? I would have needed a better self, and that is a gift I never received. So you're saying it's someone else's fault? The gift of having had a better mother myself, my own mother having had a better mother herself. The gift that keeps on not being given. Who was supposed to give it? How am I supposed to know? Well, how am I supposed to live? I suppose you must live as if you had been given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance. I cut off my hair, to sell for the money to buy you what you wanted. I wanted nothing but your happiness. I can't give you that! What would Jesus do? He had a weird mother too . . . Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if it were given unconditionally, your birthright. It's a riddle. All gifts are a riddle, all lives are in the middle of mother-lives. But it's always winter in this world. There is no end to ending. The season of giving, the season when the bears are never cold, because they are sleeping. The bears are never cold, Mama, but I am one cold, cold bear.

215,088

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41505/silent-film

Kurt Brown

Silent Film

Doors opened and shut, the director shouted orders through a bullhorn, or babbled just out of the frame. A carpenter hammered flats nearby for the next production. All of this, and more, while the actors blocked it out, already living in that small square of light where silence reigned like a tiny theatre for the deaf. Now, almost a century later, it's peaceful, far from the center of action, the last voice on the street reduced to a whisper, then gone. Not even birdsong as evening's opening credits begin to roll. Only the film, shimmering out of a disc thinner than sound, characters moving like fish in their gray element- less than fish- not a hiss, not a bubble, not even a cry from that dim world of silence doubled by time.

162,858

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14267/peace-56d2081b0303b

Agnes Lee

Peace

Sie VoL. XIII BER) e À. No. III A Magazine of Verse DECEMBER, 1918 PEACE Sn bells and flags! Suddenly-door to door - Tidings! Can we believe, We who were used to war? Yet we have dreamed her face, Knowing her light must be, Knowing that she must come. Look-she comes, it is she! Tattered her raiment floats, Blood is upon her wings. Ah, but her eyes are clear! Ah, but her voice outrings! Look-she is here, she lives! Beauty has died for her. Soon where the shrapnel fell Petals shall wake and stir.

253,557

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159811/mathematical-love-poem-with-a-proof

Sharon Olds

Mathematical Love Poem, with a Proof

I am on the plane, in the air, before I see what just happened-I fell in love with him, again, in the car to the airport. It happened sentence by sentence, slowly, like pick-up sticks. As a child, I would lay one atop a precarious nest of its fellows, and then another. With Carl, you don't know when he's going to feel insulted, and get mad at you. But now I had said, "The math in graduate school-was it real, or theoretical?" "What do you mean?" "Well 2 apples plus 2 apples is 4 ... " "It was all theory," he said, "but it had to be proved true, to be used for things, like physics." And for the first time, he tells me about his prelims, and the summer before them. "It's a different world," he said, "I dreamed numbers." And when was that, I asked, in relation to your buying the farmland with your uncle? Gradually we moved through time and space. And your uncle's death?, quiet but not hesitant. We pass something- not a planet, a hill. Six years, and he is willing to fill me in, without that impatience as if I should have known. He drives over a river, past piles of autumn brush, like wood rat nests of pick-up sticks- sticks that at the speed of light would be measurably longer. I love the way his palms face backwards when he walks, with that cattleman walk-and the curls at his nape, black and silver-shot. I love his thick neck! And the way his 3 o'clock shadow can't be told from the dirt he has been working in. When he looks at the stone ledge, which he has been baring, in memory of his brother, over months, I feel as if his mind is making some kind of earthen love with it, I see him, in my sleep, embracing it, throwing it up onto his back- a song made of numbers, he carries it, and I dance with him as if born to it. And I was born to it.

193,724

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30794/historic-pun

George Oppen

Historic Pun

La petite vie, a young man called it later, it had been the last thing offered In that way, A way of behaving, a way of being in public Which we lacked- If there was doubt it was doubt of himself Finding a force In the cafés and bistros Force of the familiar and familiars The force of ease They gather on the steps of Sacre Coeur, Great crowds, sitting on the steps To watch the sunset and the lights- I speak of tourists. But what we see is there Find a word for ourselves Or we will have nothing, neither faith nor will, the will Touched by the dazzle Spring touches the Butte Chaumont, Every morning the children appear In the parks, Paris is beautiful and ludicrous, the leaves of every tree in the city move in the wind The girls have beautiful thighs, beautiful skirts, all simulate courage- Semite: to find a way for myself.

186,550

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27155/birth-56d2111621b5e

Selwyn S. Schwartz

Birth

Born of love, caged in anatomy's miraculous Blood and flesh, my son has known grace; Animated in the beginning, in my home's world, He plays with strange performing toys His innocent interludes of still another world. Flocking jewels on his timeless clocks Tick patiently his hunger's complaint for things; A judge without juries, he re-enacts The new hero at war against old Pharoah, Cradling his innocence with the solitude of Moses. In the spaciousness of purring light He moves through suns to inner flights of windows, Catching and eating from heaven's throbbing beams That later parch the streets and heat the winds... And though rocks erode, his own fires burgeon brightly.

179,890

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23712/on-your-radio-tonight

Joseph D. Bennett

On Your Radio Tonight

In a thousand homes a thousand Brass pianos cluck the keys. Above, Orion stalks the strands And Scorpio crawls through starry seas, The house, roaring, shaking on its earth, Strains its metal mouth and wails. The listeners, crouched to share its mirth, Gash their faces with their nails, Wild honey and locusts nourished John As he watched the shifting stars and signs. The Word in the desert struck at dawn The Baptist, with lightning in his spine. Thus the whirling prophet roared In the wilderness; the Star appeared. And writhing in its bloody core To take the seed, Earth's flesh was seared, Joseph Bennett

174,516

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20838/one-knocking-at-a-door

C. F. MacIntyre

One Knocking at a Door

He knocks, but knocks so lightly none save the ready ear that listens with receptive heart can hear. Then, diffident and silent, he suddenly retires, retracting the extended hand of his desires. Tomorrow you may pass him but lack the eye to heed one with a quiet competence surpassing need.

200,684

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34278/late-echo

John Ashbery

Late Echo

Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different. Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally And the color of the day put in Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting. Only then can the chronic inattention Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

226,336

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49591/love-of-my-flesh-living-death

Lorna Dee Cervantes

"Love of My Flesh, Living Death"

Once I wasn't always so plain. I was strewn feathers on a cross of dune, an expanse of ocean at my feet, garlands of gulls. Sirens and gulls. They couldn't tame you. You know as well as they: to be a dove is to bear the falcon at your breast, your nights, your seas. My fear is simple, heart-faced above a flare of etchings, a lineage in letters, my sudden stare. It's you. It's you! sang the heart upon its mantel pelvis. Blush of my breath, catch of my see-beautiful bird-It's you.

190,444

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29148/limited-view

James Hearst

Limited View

The clutter and ruck of the stubble publish the time That prompts my steps, I know what I have to do For my bread before frost locks the land against My plow and fire shoulders the chimney flue. Rocks have a word that crows repeat over and over On the cold slopes of winter where the picking is poor, It echoes in empty granaries and I learn by heart To say in the hard days to come, endure, endure. So now I straddle the field and break its back In the vise of my plow while a thresh of weather streams by Sweeping up clouds and birds, leaves, banners of smoke. I gouge out furrows, a starved wind ransacks the sky.

216,364

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/42147/tutelary

Michael Ryan

Tutelary

What a fuckup you are. What dumbshit you do. Your father's voice still whispers in you, despite the joys that sweeten each day. Your Genius it isn't until, dying away, it worms back through the sparkling dream where you drown him in an inch-deep stream: your knee in his back, your strength on his skull, it begins singing praise for your skill.

222,580

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46882/proverbs-56d226f5efe25

Thomas Merton

Proverbs

1. I will tell you what you can do ask me if you do not understand what I just said 2. One thing you can do be a manufacturer make appliances 3. Be a Man-u-fac-tu-rer 4. Make appliances sell them for a high price 5. I will tell you about industry make appliances 6. Make appliances that move 7. Ask me if you do not understand what is move 8. First get the facts 9. Where to apply? Ask industry 10. Do not expect to get by without Mr. and Mrs. Consumer 11. Man-u-fic-tion 12. I am wondering if you got the idea be a manu 13. MAKE FALSE GODS 14. Apply mind energy they will move 15. Mention one of the others see what happens 16. Now apply that to our problem 17. Try not to understand 18. Be a mounte-fictioner 19. Surpass all others in price and profit 20. Assail the public with lies 21. Home-spun-facts-are-more-fun repeat this 22. Prevent spreading on garments 23. Breathe more than others 24. Supply movement and traction 25. Our epidemix will exceed 26. A homemade appliance: no honorable mention 27. Now you can refer to garments and spread out 28. But there are still more facts 29. For excitement: say whose epidemic may be next 30. Apply this to the facts and see what happens 31. Wear dermal gloves in bed 32. Here is an appliance that will terrorize mothers 33. And fight the impossible 34. Man-u-fac-ture: wear it on your head 35. Beat it here come the mothers

250,861

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/155225/forgotten-portraits

Janine Solursh

Forgotten Portraits

Suddenly nobody knows where you are. You're just a memory, an echo, an idea thin as smoke. Your last text, call, letter, Facebook post- only footprints in the surf. Your edges blur and you become a friend's story, a lover's history. Initially, you beat against the panes in set-aside frames begging to be taken out and rolled into motion once more. But after a second winter, then a third, and fourth, there comes something serene and warm behind the haze that smokes the broken hourglass. Something new and just for you. This world belongs to you and yours and when you glance back and recall your life's movement with a sigh of days gone by, you are irrevocably comforted having become that final exhale that hangs in the air after the passing. You pose and hold it. We are all the dead. I am not apart from you for long, except for breath, except for everything.

240,798

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58127/arts-leisure

Jessica Hagedorn

Arts & Leisure

i read your poem over and over in this landscape of women women purring on balconies overlooking the indigo sea my mother's blue taffeta dress is black as the sea she glides out my door to the beach where sleek white boats are anchored under a full, luscious moon still i am still the wind outside my window my mother's ghost evaporates in the long atlantic night i listen to the radio every chance i get for news of your city's latest disaster everything here the color of honey and sand everything there verges on catastrophe a constant preoccupation with real estate everything here a calm horizon taut bodies carefully nurtured oiled & gleaming hair & skin i read your poem over and over turning my head from prying eyes the low hum of women singing in another room i switch stations on the radio turn up the volume i almost touch the air buzzing electricity james brown "live at the apollo" the smooth female d.j. interrupts bo diddley groaning "i'm a man" it is a joke here in this baby-blue resort where art is a full-time hobby art is what everyone claims to do women sprawl like cats on each other's laps licking the salt off each other's skin and i walk in search of the portuguese fishermen who hide in the scorched trees the bleak, blond dunes that line the highway i imagine you asleep in another city i take your poem apart line by line it is a love letter we wrote each other some time ago trying in vain to pinpoint that first, easy thrill.

178,884

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23192/jack-spratt-et-ux

Winfield Townley Scott

Jack Spratt et Ux

Rise up, rise up, Jack Spratt. And you, his wife, Lie down, lie down to hark the risen cock. He splits the darkness with his barnyard laugh, Morning floods in through the simmering crack. Does the sun drink the dew or earth the sun?- Hard, hard to tell in all this battering light. Sun's for singing on, not thinking on; All's opposite meat and here's the eating of it. Sure, Jack, you've heard, your nameless wife has heard The poets and their women cry aloud That night be long, the moon stay up, day wait As if love-doings were but night-insured. But easy folk can rhyme the clock around; Betwixt the two of them, all opposites meet. MUCH HAS BEEN SAID

1,546,341

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53762/someone

Howard Moss

Someone

You watch the night like a material Slowly being crammed into a tube of rooms; It showers into gunshot, pepper, dew, As if a hand had squeezed it at one end, Is blank as innocence when daylight comes Projecting sunlit patches on the wall That fade. Too much is going on, too much Of life, you say, for you to live alone On top of an old tenement, on a train That might start off sometime, but never does. Your view is gone. Turn around, and boom!, A park appears between two fixed ideas Whose narrow aperture of sky in time Will house the slums of 1989 . . . Now New York is feigning its gray dark London winter. Invisible uptown Is out there somewhere, raining on its own. Palmed in the dusty pane, a circle bares A scene that seems reprinted from the past: A man with a dog is walking very fast Along a path among the stunted trees Of the little square below. He disappears.

236,382

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55736/report-from-the-subtropics

Billy Collins

Report from the Subtropics

For one thing, there's no more snow to watch from an evening window, and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow, and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman for her early dinner of wood. No hexagrams of frost to study carefully on the cold glass pages of the bathroom. And there's no black sweater to pull over my head while I wait for the coffee to brew. Instead, I walk around in children's clothes- shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody. The sun never fails to arrive early and refuses to leave the party even after I go from room to room, turning out all the lights, and making a face. And the birds with those long white necks? All they do is swivel their heads to look at me as I walk past as if they all knew my password and the name of the city where I was born.

218,150

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43114/song-of-three-smiles

W. S. Merwin

Song of Three Smiles

Let me call a ghost, Love, so it be little: In December we took No thought for the weather. Whom now shall I thank For this wealth of water? Your heart loves harbors Where I am a stranger. Where was it we lay Needing no other Twelve days and twelve nights In each other's eyes? Or was it at Babel And the days too small We spoke our own tongue Needing no other? If a seed grow green Set a stone upon it That it learn thereby Holy charity. If you must smile Always on that other, Cut me from ear to ear And we all smile together.

252,707

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158160/interrogation-in-a-nail-salon

Khải Đơn

Interrogation in a Nail Salon

[How long have you been here?] From the airplane window, she saw dragon's eyes floating to sheeny green mangrove feet its scales a rainbow mirror dancing light on her mother's mud wall Time found its way onto the skin of roofs she wondered if home remembered or how it sheltered on the crumbling field. [I don't know your place. What does it look like?] Her mother's hair: the white river Her eyes: the blurred pearls blinking on heart-lace, staring plumy red nails crafted waggling American flags Mekong indulged infant cries, feeding shining sesban flowers and bitter gourds Children grew into wandering duckweeds, intertwining themselves in laughter of joys The sky was close from Forbidden Mountain The Goddess sowed brown-eyed seeds giant tamarind tree cuddled the clouds little humans played hide-and-seek A child slips into the mud mouth. [Do you want to marry someone and get a Green Card?] Her tiny nipples wiped out a flood of silence Wedding grew thorns on woven green coconut gate burning purple on periwinkle blooms Her body melted flinching McDonald's yellow sign cloudy face powder, acetone, nail polish Phở broth boiled down particles of her night. [I know a man, good person, you can marry him.] She saw herself in the mirror in the corner toilet of the restaurant at midnight in the chlorine cloud hallucinating her cracked fingers. She hid her hands in the janitor uniform pocket so that any man couldn't see how her face was fading into the storm of keratin dust-spinning manicure drill. [Don't worry, nobody knows about your past here.] Answer: Do you know a service to change bones? Her past was carved in them singing through rainy nights flood season, weeping herons The Plain of Reeds whined through teeth mark of rice. [Do you send a lot of money home?] Her mother sighed. [Why?] A hostage of borders picked shards of memory and called it home.

168,844

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17616/university-portraits

Harriet Monroe

Why Not Poets?

COMMENT WHY NOT POETS? TK recent enterprises for the distribution of books suggest the above question. Both the Book-of-the- Month Club and the Literary Guild offer their subscribers "twelve books a year, one each month," ata cost equal to, or less than, the publishers' retail price. The two projects differ somewhat in principle, but in both cases poetry has been conspicuous by its absence from this wholesale marketing of literary products. Wings, the advertising leaflet of the Literary Guild, expressly says: The selections for one year will probably contain six books of fiction (novels and short stories), and six selected from history, biography, travel, essays, science and public affairs. Here, it will be observed, poetry-after all the highest literary art and one whose recent manifestations in this country have been singularly expressive and varied-is not even mentioned as a possibility. Yet all the announcements of these enterprises, and the widely advertised personnel behind them, imply that they are not mere commercial agencies to "give the public what it wants," but enlightened organizations assuming to develop a more selective public by satisfying its hidden craving for good literature. The Literary Guild heads its ad in a recent Nation: "Lrrerature: Not Just Books." The Book-of-the-Month Club promises to "deliver to you every month the outstanding book of that month"; or, if you don't want that one, however outstanding, it promises to describe numerous others so that you may "choose your reading with more discrimination than ever before." We have no objection to these enterprises if they are managed with impartiality and good taste. The obvious criticism that they are another symptom of the standardi- zation disease may be met by the reflection that the man in the street-the crowded literary street-needs a helping hand, an occasional guide-post, through the welter of blurbs, ads, notices which assails him, a welter provoking such inward turmoil that the effort required to go forth and buy a new book results in his buying none. Your choosy man will still choose, your man of light and leading will go unerringly to the right new book on the special new shelf; but why expect so much from the casual reader whose literary light-o'-loves have just begun to stir up deeper longings in his beauty-hungering soul? This man-or woman-may get much-needed help from the guiding hand, so long as the personality behind the hand is competent and disinterested. He and she-the potential public-can not be violently forced to accept highbrow stimulants, but doubtless the committees try to give them as much "good literature" as they will swallow. Let us examine the make-up of these two committees which do the selecting. For the Book-of-the-Month Club: Henry Seidel Canby, . Heywood Broun, Dorothy Canfield, Christopher Morley, William Allen White. Decidedly New Yorkish, rather Saturday Reviewish, with Mr. White thrown in to mollify the neglected West and emphasize the wholesome human flavor of the group. A committee of super-journalists; of excellent literary judgment but hardly of exceptional divination; with not a poet in it, or even an "outstanding" creative imagination. For the Literary Guild: Carl Van Doren, Glenn Frank, Elinor Wylie, Hendrik van Loon, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Zona Gale. Also New Yorkish, though Zona Gale still hails from Portage, Wisconsin; but with more variety of range and temperament. Indeed, almost unworkable variety, for one can't imagine Elinor Wylie and Glenn Frank ever agreeing upon anything. Here, however, we have a poet, Elinor Wylie, of proved importance, besides Miss Gale, whose early poems were a novelist's side-line. But these two are on the committee, not as poets, but as writers of prose. It is a possible, but rather forlorn, hope that either of these committees may wake up to the importance of modern poetry enough to list a book of verse once in five or ten years, in spite of the complete omission of such an intention in all their announcements. But this matter-of-course neglect of the art and those who practise it, this casual snub from the gilded and up- holstered seats of the mighty, shows that the poets should have a committee of their own leading a similar organiza- tion for the distribution of books of verse. And it has been authoritatively proposed that Porrry should undertake the job of organizing and sponsoring such a movement as a necessary feature of our long campaign for adequate public recognition of the art. Undoubtedly there are some thousands of people in this country who would like to receive a book of verse every two months or so from a committee adequately informed in the art, people who would be willing to pay ten or twelve dollars a year for the privilege of prompt appraisal of new ventures. If even a single thousand such prepaying sub- scribers could be listed, it would be possible, no doubt, to make the necessary arrangements with publishers, and to pay a trifle for the committee-members' time, and for clerical expenses, postage, etc. But the difficulty is to find the people who would be interested. The two associations above-mentioned are conducting an extensive and costly advertizing campaign. Their appeal is to a much larger public than the poets could hope for, so the percentage of return on this financial investment is far beyond anything possible in our specialty. With a thou- sand subscribers at twelve dollars a year-practically the retail cost of six books-the margin between retail and wholesale prices would be too small to leave any money for advertising. Thus the suggestion, however alluring, does not strike the editor as a practicable "commercial proposition." It could not be even tried out without capital-some thousands of dollars-to be spent in preliminary announce- ments. And of course we haven't the capital, and our optimism is not profound enough to prompt us to solicit it with any hope of getting the money back, with or with- out interest. However, we should like to know how such a plan strikes our readers. So let us appoint an imaginary com- mittee to select six books of verse a year: say, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Ezra Pound, Edna Millay, with the editor as chairman; in short, a committee of the best critical minds in this art whom the editor can persuade to serve. She need hardly say that none of the above six has been approached in regard to acceptance of this hypothetical appointment. Will every person who reads, or hears about, this edi- torial, and who would be willing to prepay twelve dollars a year for six books of verse to be selected by such a possible committee, please send in his or her name (nota check) to the editor? In a month or two we may be able to report as to the extent and enthusiasm of the response. At least, we shall have a little more light on the practicability of the plan than we have at present. H.M. REVIEWS

211,614

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39766/respirating-buds

John Tranter

RESPIRATING BUDS

I It's just an empty room in a beach house. You go somewhere for drinks, stay out late, get lost coming home. It's the awful page I choose to look at in a diary, a challenge like walking under a nest of hornets to show I can do it. It's what draws flame down from the sky, it waits for me too, a sad delta wasting and giving the sandy water back to the greedy sea-look closer-at the message the grass has scribbled on the sand-then late at night, a hint of a distant party like radium glowing behind the horizon. Forget death. Indoors, a heap of rags in a corner, paint-smudged clouts of denim, one canvas shoe, a can of bleach and a cheap notebook with all the names of the guests - knock knock, it's the neighbour returning the oars he's had since last September, and Janice, and the neighbour's kids-all sunburnt-there's some ice blox in the ice-box, all right? Only now to lie on the bed of pine needles and smell the iodine stink of seaweed in the air, to trace on the rocks that turn a cold shoulder to the turbulent water the maps of lichen each plotting an outline of a boulder on the back of a boulder, only-it can't be quite II How much have I suppressed? A career and a way of talking enfolding a talent, like a tree and its shadow. Not the shadow of a cut stump blurred on an overcast day when nothing happens in the depths of these woods, but a resonance, a tiny scream ascending into the blue above the bay, above the populated islands, the cloud in its slow roil and tumble spreading like gossip and persisting into an evening of gentle rain. In the morning, patches of bright reflected blue cold among the pine cones beside the rubbish tip, an icicle dripping a tear of distilled water and fractured brown rocks tasselled with ice, these point out to us what's passing: a horrible clatter of wings. There you are, in the snapshot, without clothes, just a drape, a loose swathe of something printed with ripe flowers and knotted buds breathing around you, probably silk, holding out a branch dabbled with what looks like blood. Note: The lines of "Respirating Buds" use the end-words of "Buried at Springs," by James Schuyler. The title is an anagram of "Buried at Springs."

210,212

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39059/beneath-the-plaza-of-illustrious-hombres

William Greenway

Beneath the Plaza of Illustrious Hombres

Whoever knows Mexico beneath the surface, is sad. THE PLUMED SERPENT Perhaps because I was told the city was built above rivers in that high desert, I dream rapids foaming below the streets, my family swirling over boulders to drown beneath the plaza of fountains that's over the car park and tunneling of the new subway, which are beneath the plaza of famous men, their bronze statues green and upraised-armed as cactus, and the dark cathedral where Christ lies a gory plaster cadaver with torn and daubed adobe skin and candles are electric. From the airport at night, we followed potholed roads lined with skulls of high-walled houses mottled with shadows of eucalyptus trees. Young men danced with machetes. Women at Belly High made love to snakes and tequila bottles. In the square a tranced man asked the Virgin for resurrection from heaps of fruit, and the iguana opened its eye. Vendors sold flores para los muertos. Beggars slumped in doorways, covering their eyes with one hand and holding out the other. We walked a Lenten week through diesel air, dead dogs everywhere, and sidewalk holes, human-sized, and rubble, the rubble they lived in- everything crumbling when the earth shuddered, what was left when the sewers exploded, erasing whole blocks of lives and the streets that led to them, under the volcanoes, wakes of lava, ash- the rubble they would live in-the Underground, half-finished houses, their twisted steel sticking from walls like dead trees to overhang sidewalks, street signs sharp as tin roofs that slice cabesas of tall gringos- the flowered rubble someone had lived in, crumbled forts of Coke- and toro-postered walls, foaming purple jacaranda, scarlet bougainvillea, rubble of ancestors, ruins carved with skulls, runed with skeletons, always above their lives somewhere twin towers of cathedrals, even above the alley the cat led us through to the shack where they made their pottery, fired it in a stone kiln with an iron lid where tortillas warmed, where we bought shepherds and wise men chunky as Mayan gods. Over the mountains where Lawrence and Williams lived, we ate the mummies of little smoked fish seined from the lake that is drying up like the rivers that ran beneath the city, leaving dust to mount and mount an army of ghosts from the water we saw the old gods emerge from, dripping. No one seemed afraid of bones, buzzards, WILLIAM GREEN WAY the feeble yellow night-light on the gray adobe skin, jagged metal, caves, mountains, and tunnels that explode and kill. Here, they say, the black-eyed children never cry. We almost ran to the plane that took us up through cold blue air north to no rubble, cleanliness, white light, paved sidewalks, malls, and the dead beneath the earth we will never see.

236,430

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55760/the-american-on-his-first-honeymoon

Rita Mae Reese

The American on His First Honeymoon

What we can say has already been said about each painting in the gallery- about the quality of light, the way she holds her head. So we are silent in the subway, silent in bed. Our bodies too are mute; we fall asleep knowing what we could say has already been said. Over toast and coffee and the newspaper thoroughly read the day unfolds between us. I am too weak to carry this quality of light, the way she holds her head. I would vow to leave if love had left if this were the wedding of two gypsies. But what should I say? It has been said the dead would properly bury the dead and here I am, alive at last and buried by the quality of light, and the way she holds her head. Perhaps women, sex, love are all over-rated. Which of us is the artist and which the light? You see, the words I might say have been better said- words concerning the quality of light, the way you hold your head.

170,790

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/18703/menta-the-drunkard

Emanuel Carnevali

Menta the Drunkard

OBSERVATIONS MENTA THE DRUNKARD Menta, what green phantoms do you see in the bottom of the wine glass? Do they not scare you away, Menta, old woman? What cares have you yet, old woman, for whom the world must be a heap of ashes? What secret marvelous worlds do you construct when your heart, burnt up by wine, is a grenade ready to burst? And when your legs get weak under you, do you feed on thoughts of flying over this town, this awful little town that sneers and grins at you? You stumble on your way but you always find the road to the tavern. In these men's hearts there is also a little envy for you, you who forget, you who send your thoughts away, away, away! Your heart is aflame with sterile fire. Does wine give you wings? No, since you stagger like an old boat. But perhaps you have hidden communications with a hundred little devils, and the church is forbidden to you. Does your mind lift you as high as mountains, nearer to God? Menta, you are an old boiler and it is fire that burns you and makes you go. Menta, old woman, what green phantoms do you see in the bottom of your wine glass? SOME THINGS Some things point at one with a stretched finger and laugh. Some things hide themselves from one's eyes and are heard quietly weeping. Some things fall from heaven: black unformed things, monsters of the night and terror of the days. Some things seem to have been arranged by God and the Devil. Some things seem to have been born in an abyss and grown in darkness. Some things bear the image of goodness as though fire j had bas-reliefed it there.

240,888

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58173/palling-around

Gregory Pardlo

Palling Around

He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec frequencies, he said. When the sun god liquors loose each ashen tongue the planet tattles. We are advised to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his dwindling fuse and the bartender would show him the door. In his honor I tune my form to the emanations of this vibrant life: Either someone's dropped a blue coin and I've picked up the murmur of its ribs-a quarter kiltering beneath the blond brick arcade of the whispering gallery at Grand Central-or someone's table is ready. No matter that I set my phone to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest. The man has passed. I got the text today, and now feel at least obliged to observe silence. Observe this café thick with humid bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam revealing patterns in the glassy chatter. For that he is a phantasm rumoring now a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel of a partial print. For that he is finally transcendent. For that we convened for drinks by some clockwork of urban chance each week, my year adrift in the East Village. For that I renounced him, and now regret having done so. For that I vibed with his passions-more, the deeper we reached in our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical record. I've traveled years through boot-black redactions of thought to find his apparition greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover the bed in which he slept and quested visions toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills, Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity. If you see something . What a fear of hobgoblins and philistines can blind our better senses. At the table beside me children play mosquito tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.

248,775

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150295/grace-5cfa852f5d239

Sarah Gambito

Grace

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

249,731

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152952/spellcaster

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Spellcaster

A golden-haired girl born in a month of sacrifice, poor little lamb throws off her wool coat and pulls out boots she stole and rides off on a reindeer instead and of course she can speak to roses- isn't that the point? Eventually she ends up in a castle but it's not her home. It's a place to liberate, to escape, to decimate. The whole place collapses, a series of chandeliers made of glass and ice. Off she goes. Blackberries and currants in her pockets. Roses blooming in her footpaths. Wouldn't you rather be the girl that casts her own spells?

181,924

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24767/amazing-minute

Kenneth Slade Alling

Amazing Minute

TWO POEMS AMAZING MINUTB The house has the cohesion of the stairs; The stairs cohere in him who makes ascent, Who traverses that brief plateau, the landing- In this amazing minute all who mount Their million terraces of stone or wood And all their purposes are. soluble In his identity, what each ascends for, The open book forgotten on the table, Sleep, petty thieving, fornication, murder, Whatever mission's possible in him. The house contains this elaborate container. All climbs with him now the treads his feet climb. CAR TOP

202,752

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35316/forgotten-men-2

Edward Brash

Forgotten Men 2

Speaking of the south, Walter Inglis Anderson returned there after having left the Pennsylvania Art Museum School to paint the wildlife of Horn Island off the Mississippi coast. He knew how old birds were and felt some ancient inclination to cover nearby surfaces with portraits of inhabitants most men ignore or eat. Two shellfish on newsprint was an elaborate composition for him; most he drew from life: an awkward blade of grass severing a marsh nest, for example, or individual pelicans; none of which was ripe enough to hang beside the citrus and sunlight confections of fellow Pennsylvania graduates, Edmund Tarbell and Cecilia Beaux.

253,281

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159339/land-ho

Kwame Dawes

Land Ho

I cannot speak the languages spoken in that vessel, cannot read the beads promising salvation. I know this only, that when the green of land appeared like light after the horror of this crossing, we straightened our backs and faced the simplicity of new days with flame. I know I have the blood of survivors coursing through my veins; I know the lament of our loss must warm us again and again down in the belly of the whale, here in the belly of the whale where we are still searching for homes. We sing laments so old, so true, then straighten our backs again.

250,643

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154991/the-uncle-poem

Jackson Holbert

The Uncle Poem

avuncular trees or was it avuncular skyscrapers? yea it was the skyscrapers but I don't know man I remember it was tuesday the cars were doing their normal car shit some asshole was blasting Puccini out of his BMW and some other asshole was singing an opera as he walked down Main Street what else I saw my grandmother this wasn't anything crazy tho she's still alive and all that she lives in town she was driving her convertible very slow I waved at her but I'm not sure she recognized me no other family interactions to report something about the day unsettled me tho in the worst way possible I knew I would be going home soon home to the hills where hill things happen but I had thrown that terror into the future like a baseball or a bag of trash and of course it is the future now but I'm not in the hills not yet so why were the skyscrapers avuncular to me me who had many uncles none of whom were skyscrapers I think I have a few less uncles now but it's hard to keep track big family and you know what they say uncles are like crab apples they wither maybe it was that it smelled like crab apples while I walked down Main Street I don't know where that quote comes from probably someone famous but I remember my uncle saying it and it seems like a quote about your uncles dying but that uncle wasn't dying not yet he was very much alive and very much addicted to oxycodone but the consequences would be far in the future but I guess the future is now which means the consequences have already happened which makes perfect sense because that uncle died tho not of overdosing exactly he died of a heart attack induced by fireworks on the fourth of July one of three citizens to do so in the county that day I do not know what made hearts so angry on that particular fourth it was warm but when wasn't it warm in the valley I wasn't there when my uncle died I had picked up overtime at the call center because I needed money to buy some oxycodone for myself I was planning to buy it off of him tho obviously that would be impossible because he is dead and altho it doesn't mean his pills are gone it does mean it would be super uncool to break into his trailer and steal them I have determined that he is the uncle I am referring to when I said the skyscrapers were avuncular tho referring isn't the right word I didn't intend to call them avuncular I felt it and it wouldn't go away like a dog bite but what made the skyscrapers so avuncular my uncle had never been to the city and possibly had never been to any city he was country from his hair to the tip of each toe he was so country that his countryness stretched out from his body and into his car maybe it's because he never saw these skyscrapers that I think of him tho that is bullshit and I know it so why the fuck could I not push the avuncular skyscrapers out of my decidedly non-avuncular brain was it the windows? the black paneling? maybe it isn't the building at all maybe it's the idea of the building and tho I don't believe in ideas I do believe in uncles maybe it is that the building is so high it would take minutes to elevator up and maybe an hour to climb which means by the top you would be in the future the real future the future minutes away not seconds a future farther than a word is from another word and maybe because I look at the skyscraper from the top down I think of those elevators in reverse which means I think of the future in reverse and if those elevators go enough the future will reverse enough to be the past like the real past like a few months ago when my uncle was breathing and taking pills and feeling the high come on like television static turning into tv or like tv turning into television static

229,932

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51985/zebra

C. K. Williams

Zebra

Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms against being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days not to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs? I have a key-chain zebra I bought at the Thanksgiving fair. How do I know she won't kick, or bite at my crotch? Because she's been murdered, machine-gunned: she's dead. Also, she's a she: even so crudely carved, you can tell by the sway of her belly a foal's inside her. Even murdered mothers don't hurt people, do they? And how know she's murdered? Isn't everything murdered? Some dictator's thugs, some rebels, some poachers; some drought, world-drought, world-rot, pollution, extinction. Everything's murdered, but still, not good, a dead thing in with your ID and change. I fling her away, but the death of her clings, the death of her death, her murder, her slaughter. The best part of Thanksgiving Day, though-the parade! Mickey Mouse , Snoopy , Kermit the Frog , enormous as clouds! And the marching bands, majorettes, anthems and drums! When the great bass stomped its galloping boom out to the crowd, my heart swelled with valor and pride. I remembered when we saluted, when we took off our hat.

249,239

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151502/object-lesson-5dc04e2bb70da

Claire Schwartz

Object Lesson

You learn to recognize beauty by its frame. In the gilded hall, in the gilded frame, her milky neck extended as she peers over the drawn bath. A target, a study, a lesson: she requires you to be beautiful. You should save her, no matter the price. No matter the price, the Collector will take it. His collection makes him good, when he lends the woman's image to the museum, where schoolchildren stand before it, anointed with lessons in color and feeling. Pay attention , the teacher scolds the fidgeter in back. Bad , the child whose movement calls to her own beauty, the child whose wails insist his mother is most beautiful of all. Eyes this way , the teacher syrups. All that grows, rots. Good little stillnesses, guardians-to-be. If you are good, one day an embossed invitation will arrive at the door of the house you own. You will sit next to the Collector, light chattering along the chandeliers, your napkin shaped like a swan. To protect your silk, you snap its neck with flourish. The blood, beautiful, reddening your cheeks as you slip into the chair drawn just for you. Sit , the chair says to the patron. Stand , to the guard. The guard shifts on blistered feet. She loves you, she loves you not . The children pluck the daisy bald, discard their little suns in the gutter.

169,216

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17823/the-spotted-birds

Anthony Wrynn

The Spotted Birds

TWO POEMS THE SPOTTED BIRDS I waited where the spotted birds Flew upward from the water and the rocks. I waited, not to watch the claws, The scattered drops, the throats; but thoughts and words Were fettered in my mind. Remote, The wind against my eyes, from that waste shore I watched the sky unmarked by sun Or star or moon, empty as I, when swift And harsh the spotted birds flew up, Shaking the deadened water bright, flew high And wild, trailing their legs from rift On rift of plume, of spotted wings undone In flight upon the sterile sky, And tore the net in which my mind was caught.

209,750

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38825/the-mosaic-of-creation

Debora Greger

The Mosaic of Creation

San Marco, Venice 1 THE FIRST DAY: THE SEPARATION OF LIGHT FROM DARKNESS High in the dark light that we call weak God has six days. He's young, smooth-cheeked- and already something's not to his taste, an angel, as always, in too great haste to roll the earth back into night before he can say, "Wait, there should be light." Before anything in us can be stirred, before either of us has said a word in the dull gold light come raining down the distance turning it to brown, the angel looking about to cry- but that comes later, if God stays dry. Water has risen at his back but he's Venetian -he only cracks where the building does, across his arm lifted to bless the light that warms the dark. The first day, what does he know? The face of the waters gives no clue. Look from the basilica's great porch- the water flickers from torch to torch. 2 THE THIRD DAY: THE SEPARATION OF THE SEAS AND DRY LAND And on the third day God is stuck with too much water, just his luck- where's he to stand in this blue mess to call forth all he's yet to bless, the little things he'll be known for, a burning bush, a wise man's star? Does the young God heave an almighty sigh? He's left the water out to dry and stepped to a green that doesn't give way. For, look, an angel seems to say, now he'll have to figure out what to do with it- perhaps a sprout or two, a fish with feet or wings. Far below, a choir of humans sings for practice: once again a phrase slops at his ankles like a wave. This is Venice, the edge of the world he parted the waters from, the swirled blue tiles the one thing he doesn't bless. The water does what it does best, without his help, taking the land back from under his outstretched hand. 3 ADAM AND EVE IN HIDING It slides, the voice of the soprano, not without effort to stay piano. It snakes up the cupola into the garden where Adam and Even would like to stay hidden: God, out for his daily walk, would like to have a moment's talk about the fruit at their disposal and whether they do know good from evil since there's a fig leaf in Adam's hand to cover himself, though there's no wind, not a breath of cold yet, nor a leaf stirred except by Eve to cover her words, the air around them rich with gilt as if something more than light has spilt into the garden this afternoon so endless the next scene comes too soon- a door will open in the gold, a door to a world where they'll grow old. Already the leaves are tinged with fall. How young they look denying it all.

239,680

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57535/poem-written-with-issa-in-my-dream

Matthew Rohrer

Poem Written with Issa [“In my dream”]

In my dream his voice began to fade I had to call him the next day I feel about average he said I'm going out to buy some juice a huge frog was in the driveway a small boat drifting the river flowed in silence

221,634

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46304/retrospect-56d226248e844

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Retrospect

There is a better thing, dear heart, Than youthful flush or girlish grace. There is the faith that never fails, The courage in the danger place, The duty seen, and duty done, The heart that yearns for all in need, The lady soul which could not stoop To selfish thought or lowly deed. All that we ever dreamed, dear wife, Seems drab and common by the truth, The sweet sad mellow things of life Are more than golden dreams of youth.

250,061

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153974/how-to-stuff-a-pepper

Nancy Willard

How to Stuff a Pepper

Now, said the cook, I will teach you how to stuff a pepper with rice. Take your pepper green, and gently, for peppers are shy. No matter which side you approach, it's always the backside. Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps. In its silk tights, it dreams of somersaults and parsley, of the days when the sexes were one. Slash open the sleeve as if you were cutting a paper lantern, and enter a moon, spilled like a melon, a fever of pearls, a conversation of glaciers. It is a temple built to the worship of morning light. I have sat under the great globe of seeds on the roof of that chamber, too dazzled to gather the taste I came for. I have taken the pepper in hand, smooth and blind, a runt in the rich evolution of roses and ferns. You say I have not yet taught you to stuff a pepper? Cooking takes time. Next time we'll consider the rice.

221,568

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46231/cool-pastoral-on-bloor-street

John Reibetanz

Cool Pastoral on Bloor Street

1. Consider the tragic fortitude of mannikins, the courage it takes under casual poses to do nothing interminably each day. To face unflinching (through sunlit glass that bars them from it) the rushing surf of life within reach where they must stand marooned on their islands' plastic turf, and not to cry out: more heroic than those Romans the lava rain stunned to statues-misshaped by the panic that twisted their limbs, glazed with their pain in black rock-friezes of agony. You would never know, from the relaxed swivel of this woman's wrist as she completes a backhand with her racket, that she will never take another swing, or from her smile that she has stood balanced here on one foot all summer like one of Dante's damned, and not cracked. 2. 'Cracked' is my father's word for 'crazy,' as in 'You'd have to be cracked to pay that much for a pair of shoes.' He's not crazy, but he forgets, and today as we pay out his visit's hours strolling on Bloor, he thinks up the same questions again minutes after he's nodded and smiled at answers to them. Looking for things to look at and not think, I focus on another grove of mummers: headless, their necks poke out like worms from the smartly turned-over collars of turtlenecks and jackets. You can tell they've also lost their arms from the way the sleeves plummet slackly off their shoulders-although they, ashamed to show the mutilation, act cool and tuck the cuffs into their pockets. I look at my father-hands trembling, head crazed like china with minute cracks through which years exit invisibly- and must remind myself his show is kinder, the long-running comedy where he's played every part, from fresh-faced mooning lover to child-duped parent to doddering senex: still free now (while heart and limbs play their duet) to do a walk-on, ad lib, bow out. He sweats a little in the sunshine. Summer stock, lacking the tragic poise that freezes these actors in their scene, we move on towards a shadier place.

226,756

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49901/reading-a-memoir-at-cedar-island

Nicole Pekarske

Reading a Memoir at Cedar Island

We arrive eight hours before morning but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand prickled with fringes of eelgrass, and the world's baby teeth ground down to this pall of sand. It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight - You can see in each stunted and strung-out live oak the shape of the wind's hands. On this last stand before the Outer Banks Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters to shelter stunned and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes . The groove fits my tongue so for forty more pages I keep the light on, pulled by a man oaring his way through childhood to a stung and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied lessing & moring of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason this freight of rain, salt in my hair. That child I was, what was she mourning before death charged his first fare? We wake and hurry to slip our moorings. The ferry's there.

172,586

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19716/the-steppe

Helene S Pulse

The Steppe

IN UKRAINE THE STEPPE How good, when two friends walk the steppe together, To top low hills that show a sudden town, All pink and blue, that sets them guessing whether It's better looking on or plunging down Into the streets where bare-foot, red-scarfed girls Sit in the sun with soldiers free a day, Where little Jewesses with rook-black curls And small blue-eyed Ukrainians shout at play. The windows hold geraniums all the year, Even the windows of half-underground Unlovely hovels. Sometimes clothes-lines wear Long towels with scarlet cocks on them; around The small mud huts cocks strut about in plumes That call to mind the courts of Kubla Khan; In lowest doors girls shake their dirty brooms, Their faces fair as Dante looked upon. There are some mornings when the lacquered grass So shines that all the tales of death are tales : Only; across this steppe no want may pass, No bitter memory may use these vales. There are some evenings when the yellow moon Gilds the blue Dnieper, and young lovers sing [ 200 ] Helene Searcy Pulse To their accordions a Tartar tune. Then revolution is a mythic thing, A dreary yarn once told and soon forgot; And belching factories and noisy trains, Paid for in food, are little more than what The peals of thunder were in last year's rains. THE VILLAGE GIRL

190,060

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28946/the-rothko-paintings

Michael Goldman

The Rothko Paintings

Currents around a pole, or a fire damping to stillness, they conduce to our calm in their process, terminal, voiceless. Unbound, yet selves in the exigence of merely having to be, like a new map, these continents explore us to the sea. LYRIC (ll) This house is shrieking with consent, unfetter the air: braced walls explode, windows rumple and spray like sea, bricks trumpet to the sun, floors swell and tear, like flowers bubbling their hearts' grave wine in dusty sills, until day's heat is done, the chains flutter to rest and through the dark, contention falls on the house like peace, like air.

194,338

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31101/home-thoughts

Lewis Turco

Home Thoughts

Time buzzes in the ear. Somewhere nearby, beyond my peripheral vision, an insect throbs its heartsong to the couch. A twilleter fuzzes against a burning lamp. Outdoors, a common goatsucker strings twelve yellow streetlights on its bill. Between its hoarse shrieks, the town sky drops pieces of clum among my snoring neighbors. II close my eyes, a crack along the wall comes sliving my lids to split the mind's dry sight. Look inward: a plaster skull sifts dust down upon old webs which hang, buzzing, as darkness moves ruthlessly to feast on something small and hollow with blind, jewelled eyes.

199,750

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33811/andy

Paul Backhurst

Andy

PAUL BACKHURST ANDY Hearing the flimsy plastic tap again on the casement glass (it seemed it wished to gain admittance-now to boldly force entrance and by reverberation shatter the pane), I turn to acknowledge the plaintive wind, now mixed with rain in a gentle rhythm falling, to loose the grasp of time, to soothe the mind, not far away, rain, on a skylight, falling. One fall brought me to university, and to avoid the cupboard life of dorms (but more because I feared uncertainty in a radical time), I chose fraternity. At Rush the strippers danced with Carl Hoch- in underwear, all over the quaking stairs. Whether from shifting overweights the house shook, or nervous belly laughs, the oak held fast. Decision made, yet tentative, I surveyed by daylight, other rooms in the vacant glare. With opening doors a distant figure waded into form: Andy looked at me with laughing eyes. I see before me now a homespun slim with chestnut hair, handsome forehead, and tools, but then I saw nothing but moving limbs, the unconsuming fire in his frame. How often I would stare through casement windows toward the carriage house and open all the doors with my mind. Andy lived in isolation there, playing loner-hoarding memories. Between times, he (House Manager) and I would clean the house: this music in my ears made the task a pleasure. Once, done early, Andy lifted me, spun me overhead through form to tears. Whoever understands disorder well might speak of love, and so unsheath the id- iot's curse of reason: look, I'm dizzy still! I see me dressed in immaturity, some would say straw of innocence but we shall feed internal fires always as we go. Ignorant (fearing other eyes and his), I slapped his naked back hard not to let him know. The damage done and not to be forgotten, hurt forced a blossom on that well-turned back. At dusk the driveway seemed a pier, the house a ship; Andy's lights burned brighter and went out.

1,546,786

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55103/the-return-56d236479a5c2

Jan Owen

The Return

Mondays Began with one plait loose, a pip in your teeth and late for Geography, lined and blank, facts to the right, tall stories left. To sail the heat in a weatherboard classroom boat with banana and vegemite colouring the air sargasso green. To ship ten thousand things on cursive seas to the edge of the known page -coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. To import small desires and grown-up needs in little packets of time for show and tell. To carve your name on the prow. To wait for the bell. In the Parlour only the French clock answered back. They sat cross-legged on the Persian carpet; destinations flashed by the smell of Marveer, lavender, dusty velvet. They opened their eyes in the olden times to fossick under the coffin flaps of the jarrah window seat for proper advice from disheveled magazines: nose straighteners, recipes, posture improvers, the runt who smoked and the chap who rowed. They didn't see foresight's guarded smile, they didn't hear hindsight howl like a dog; the riddles were wordy, the clues were dumb: lopped head of a doll, silk wedding sleeve, gilt volumes, silverfish, and in the glass case, untouchable figurines locked away as grown-ups always seemed to be: shepherd and shepherdess on their marks, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Limoges? The real thing? Almond Trees cover Willunga Plains: like the misty breath of winter children, the blossom hovers. Dearth, says the black bark, splits to let scent through with open questions where when why what who? As for that earliest aroma fear, she'd smell it, taste it, anywhere, one part in a million, pungent as coffee or smoke, already there in her mother's milk. Against its grey unbeing she caught at talismans - black stones on a white plate, concrete nouns clattering out of thought. Marking time down the dead-end street to morning. Why was it always dark in the quiet hall? Through a memory crack of light an edge squeezed round the door: regret to inform stop missing in stop the air elliptic with tracer fire, familiar eyes glancing away, prismatic as flies'. Voices crept and huddled, where's Daddy's girl? He did come back, but who? They could not tell. Collections began. The tang of foreign coins lent her a lingo and currency for the unknown; Brother stuck down squares of expedited love with serrated edges. And they were invited to a fancy-dress ball with games of us and them. Father could not come for he was lame and Mother had to watch and wait not play so they learned dolls and trains and night and day and Snakes and Ladders and Hide and Seek. Knight's gambit. Castle your king. Check. And when the black door opened and they knew threshold was famished, Brother stepped through. Now fear had her ID and her address. Best send an invitation. Tell her guest the lightest thing she served would ward off harm - a stick, a stone, a cloud of white perfume, thought itself, needing a go-between to say 'this fragrance is like newborn skin, these quickening trees, like Mary's aging cousin conceiving all baptism out of season'. She Collected Dictionaries as other women take up men and shelve them: manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh, like a passion for clothes that would hang unworn in the dark, for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls in a shut case, nouns declined. Each unknown word shone with delicious fire and the alien phrases silked her skin with their genders and connotations. She might have been the end house on the waterfront of Macau welcoming every sailor in. But the longing for many tongues to part her lips - si, igen, ja, ah oui, yes, yes - was departure's smile, a leaning to the wind that sweeps a glitter of light across the sea and sets a silvery chill at the neck. Quick, to those books guarding the mantelpiece, ISBNs snug as a span of days; to bread and fruit and sparkling wine. She had been given a cyclamen with scent, some new trick that married violet and rose, as if a flower should yearn to sing and the pink timbre tremble into quietest words. She touched her flesh and knew that it would fade as speech did and did not. And yet it was not language that she sought, nor the music of any meaning. An old allegiance drew her on beyond the first ground of thought and the idea even of silence to the fifth season which must at last return with its weather of recognition and its lost ends.

202,668

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35274/meeting-place

A. R. Ammons

Meeting Place

The water nearing the ledge leans down with grooved speed at the spill then, quickly groundless in air, bends its flat bottom plates up for the circular but crashes into irregularities of lower ledge, then breaks into the white bluffs of warped lace in free fall that breaking with acceleration against air unweave billowing string-maze floats: then the splintery regathering on the surface below where imbalances form new currents to wind the water away: the wind acts in these shapes, too, and in many more, as the falls also does in many more, some actions haphazardly unfolding, some central and accountably essential: are they, those actions, indifferent, nevertheless ancestral: when I call out to them as to flowing bones in my naked self, is my address attribution's burden and abuse: of course not, they're unchanged, unaffected: but have I fouled their real nature for myself by wrenching their meaning, if any, to destinations of my own forming: by the gladness in the recognition as I lean into the swerves and become multiple and dull in the mists' dreams, I know instruction is underway, an answering is calling me, bidding me rise, or is giving me figures visible to summon the deep-lying fathers from myself, the spirits, feelings howling, appearing there.

217,890

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42956/empire-of-dreams

Charles Simic

Empire of Dreams

On the first page of my dreambook It's always evening In an occupied country. Hour before the curfew. A small provincial city. The houses all dark. The storefronts gutted. I am on a street corner Where I shouldn't be. Alone and coatless I have gone out to look For a black dog who answers to my whistle. I have a kind of Halloween mask Which I am afraid to put on.

246,473

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/145654/naming-the-heartbeats

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Naming the Heartbeats

I've become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie, Honeybunch, Snugglebear-and that's just for my children. What I call my husband is unprintable. You're welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally-I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening's first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don't yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we've only visited in our dreams.

237,558

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56394/wild-kingdom

Tyrone Williams

Wild Kingdom

This is your foreign correspondent, Aristotle, for The Poetics, reporting live from the Mediterranean where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians crown the tradeships of His Majesty, wave back and forth: starfish-moons-Februaries. To my right, our military advisor, Hernando Cortez, oversees operations at the Aztec/ Mexican border where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water a dove collects its nest egg upon the skeleton of a hummingbird. To my left, our scribe-in-residence, St. Nickle-and-Dime-'Em-To-Debt, scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future where the last rites of man and of-man are delivered at the near-twin births of the lyric and gunpowder.

179,410

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23459/airplanes-1938

Edward Weismiller

Airplanes, 1938

That was when flight was the long, silver dream Curling with cloud, and spangled by the sun: Teaching no death, except what heaven might seem; No end of time; only how time might run Endless and endless, over and under space, Always the same, and being the same, not there- Strong as a circling web of metal lace, Or frail as the cold spider's shivering stair. That was when flight was the clean, silver song Heard in the huge buildings, down the dark lanes; When we could live forever-but not long Without the consuming music of the planes. They are the cuckoo's young. Separate and grim They have left the crucible, and do not at all . Follow the makers' words now, but a hymn Of ruin: the sirens' call; Restless, they mouth the wind. In their flying Will be malice and time, the doom of kings, Both hired; so they start out low and crying, The trade-marks of oblivion on their wings- They beat a pathway up through a kind of heaven For idiot hate that spills its seeds in air- And so they come, cold, always groaning, driven Toward cities only loved, and never fair: They come: they have beat through time to this one hour. The raging musics mingle over the walls. The builder runs mad from the staggering tower. The world roars, and falls. That was when flight was the dream, the silver song. It is over now-not as the moon wanes. We wake in the shrieking dark to the downward, long Fall of time; to the endlessness of planes.

169,338

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17888/earth-grows-old

Audrey Wurdemann

Earth Grows Old

Soundless she turns on poles of crystaline And ancient ice, where steadfastly she's grown, Leaf-garmented and wrapped in living green That merges in the agate veins of stone. Wearied with fruitful years, she, in a way That planets have, essays a knowing smile, Not to be thought too old for many a day- Death's all the kinder if he waits awhile. She watches the uncoiling of the stars That whet their blades against the firmament. Impervious to unsheathed scimitars, She peers against the blinded night. Intent She listens, while the waters rush to meet Eternity about her ice-bound feet.

243,577

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90842/la-salamandre

Galway Kinnell

The Salamander

Î And now you are Douve in the last room of summer. A salamander darts on the wall. Its gentle human head gives off the death of summer. "I want to be engulfed in you, narrow life," cries Douve. "Empty flash, run on my lips, pierce me! "I love blinding myself, surrendering myself to the earth. I love no longer knowing what cold teeth possess me." u All one night I dreamed you were made of wood, Douve, the better to give you to the flames. And green statue wed by bark, the better to delight in your glittering head. Probing with my fingers the debate between fire and lips: I could see you smiling at me. And this great day in you of embers was making me blind. mm "Look at me, look at me, I ran!" I am near you, Douve, I give you light. Nothing remains between us but this stony lamp, this little soothed shadow, our hands awaited by shadow. Startled salamander, you do not move. Having lived the instant when the nearest flesh becomes knowl- edge. w Ainsi restions-nous éveillés au sommet de la nuit de l'être. Un buisson ceda. Rupture secréte, par quel oiseau de sang circulais-tu dans nos ténèbres? Quelle chambre rejoignais-tu, où s'aggravait l'horreur de l'aube sur les vitres? Quand reparut la salamandre, le soleil Était déjà très bas sur toute terre, Les dalles se paraient de ce corps rayonnant. Et déjà il avait rompu cette dernière Attache qu'est le cœur que l'on touche dans l'ombre. Sa blessure créa, paysage rocheux, Une combe où mourir sous un ciel immobile. Tourné encor à toutes vitres, son visage S'illymina de ces vieux arbres où mourir. Was already very low on every land, The flag-stones were painting themselves with this radiant body. And already he had cut that last Bond which is the heart one touches in the dark. And, rocky landscape, his wound made A ravine to die in, under a motionless sky. Still turned towards every window, his face Shone with those ancient trees where one could die.

222,714

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46966/little-bo-peep

Mother Goose

Little Bo-Peep

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep, And can't tell where to find them; Leave them alone, and they'll come home, Bringing their tails behind them. Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep, And dreamt she heard them bleating; But when she awoke, she found it a joke, For they were still all fleeting. Then up she took her little crook, Determined for to find them; She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed, For they'd left their tails behind them. It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray Into a meadow hard by, There she espied their tails, side by side, All hung on a tree to dry. She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye, And over the hillocks she raced; And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should, That each tail be properly placed.

189,906

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28869/the-change-of-life

James Scully

The Change of Life

JAMES SCULLY THE CHANGE OF LIFE Into what silence had your still life cried? You seemed unchanged, and yet were something new- poised in pure being, a winter's bride, like snow that stays, a moment, on the sea. ... Mother, the water taps gushed from their worn mouths; the loose slip wrinkled like a snake- skin pouring from your thighs. And being born childless, your moistening body woke. Recovering in the bath, you were amazed to find the life-long wound without a scar; and fearless as a child, with nothing on, you watched the cooling fog. And the cleared air disclosed those papered walls, and cold sweat glazed the black-and-white engraving of a swan.

175,000

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21121/without-ceremony

Carl Bulosan

Without Ceremony

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY WITHOUT CEREMONY Hurriedly the crowd disappeared at the street's end. Forever the curious faces look and stare, obscuring, Leaving the possible truth unseen - Open and big faces are nothing but blurred images. These are faces that are saddened by the spying years, Faces that once gleamed with a surge of promise And strength, strength tautened with reservations, From the deep tunnel of winter ploughing, I see faces growing fragmentary with stale careers. Under the furious triumph of winter rain, the mind Quickens. A little leakage of memory fills, drains, And opens a new wound of queer poignancy. From the savage lines of faces, it moves, coils, And sets a fire. Thought is like a mountain storm Threatening the hunters. How steep is time, How deep is sleep -

174,564

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20863/twilight-56d20c4154753

Laura Lee Bird

Twilight

This is the star-quiescent hour of night When water-lilies lift the tapers of their light Along still lakes. The sunken vales lie deep, And hills of pearl where dews in clover sleep Their blessed silver silence keep. The winging moon glides beautifully free - The argent shadow of a sable swallow, she Whose pinions lull to peace the lyre of day. Only the rain-dove purls a plaintive lay, And he is far away... And he is far away.

241,688

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58590/beverly-huh

Jamila Woods

beverly, huh.

you must be made of money. your parents must have grown on trees. bet you're black tinged with green. bet you sleep on bags of it. bet your barbies climb it. bet you never wanted. bet you never had to ask. bet you golf. bet you tennis. bet you got a summer house. bet you got a credit card for your 5th birthday. bet you played with bills for toys. bet you chew them up for dinner. bet you spit your black out like tobacco that's why you talk so bet you listen to green day. bet you ain't never heard of al. bet your daddy wears a robe around the house. bet his hands are soft as a frog's belly. bet your house is on a hill. bet the grass is freshly cut. bet you feel like a princess. bet the police protect your house. bet you know their first names. bet your house has a hundred rooms. bet a black lady comes to clean them.

221,522

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46177/business

A. F. Moritz

Business

Stiff, thick: the white hair of the broad-faced father, who leads his shambling son along cracked sidewalks, by dusty glass half hiding goods never sold. The son is the taller one but still a child: not aware of his clothes, of what expressions seize on his soft face. His gait lolls, loosely directed from some weak, distant center, scarcely devoted to any purpose but following along and looking. Thick lenses glint with watery blue: his small eyes, veiled and placid, as far off as the milky August sky. The father, all the time glancing at him and talking as man to man, seems to forget it would be better for this one to have been like all the rest. He has his son still with him, the others have grown up and gone away-but when he dies, then what will happen to the boy? Even this thought is absorbed now in their ordinary errand, men's business: grateful going out through the day, talk with the owners, the salesmen, a mechanic in the scent of grease and sawdust of machined metal, the sifting through tools and parts that flow, spill, gleam like seeds, like sand-looking for what fits, finding what will work. Afterwards to stop for food, then walk back home down the clear streets, when starlings, hunting and restless before sleep, and children are the loudest things, with the dark foaming among maples, glinting, as it comes in.

1,546,239

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53107/how-wonderful

Irving Feldman

How Wonderful

How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you-and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is! And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they're the right things if you are, which you're not, that someone -a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone's fun. And so you don't mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful -and you understand this, how wonderful!- that you've been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.

207,034

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37464/in-his-sleep-my-father-inspects-the-work-of-the-army-corps-of-engineers

Brent Hendricks

In His Sleep, My Father Inspects the Work of the Army Corps of Engineers

As part of the Arkansas River Project, Allowee, Oklahoma, was flooded in 1947. With his arms held wide he dives into the black water, swims away from the light on the dock, down to the lake bottom where he was born. Past the gas station, the general store, and out the one long dirt road toward home. But first he must pass his best friend's white house, then a scarred elm which carries his name, then the tin mailbox with the route number worn clean, where bloated cows hover in his father's fields. So he begins wading toward the house, churning his arms, tries to call out for someone home but the thick water chokes him back. And when he reaches the gate, climbs onto the front porch, he has the vague feeling he's been expected, that his parents are only lingering in the deep fields. He opens the door, walks into the silent rooms, sits down to wait in the sunken light.

165,408

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15703/suddenly

Jessica Nelson North

Suddenly

We have a gray room. The walls are gray and bare. I have hung pictures and set flowers there. I have made curtains with wide and snowy hem For our tiny windows to make the best of them. You look at me. Your look is still and gray. Your look is cool and dim and far away. I cannot open the stubborn husks that shut Your heart away like the kernel in a nut. I am afraid of what is in your heart. I must probe deep; I must tear your mood apart. Suddenly like a rocket, unaware, Your eyes blossom and flare!

228,140

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50758/the-work-56d22e11a1f7a

Tom Sleigh

The Work

1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding Back like a dam the flood overtops-but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ... And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted, He hears the Voices begin to die down The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling Sunup to sundown falls gradually still -Unappeasable, the silence that will follow When his every last drop has been poured out. 2. Countdown In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across Your face siphoning air into your lungs, You lie helpless as an astronaut Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious To ours, your body's fevered presence Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail Up the pipe of the crematory oven: How distant we will seem after Such intensity ... We drift in your stare Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility. Already you are space immeasurable By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted Payload, liftoff, escape velocity. 3. Prayer In the house of the dead I pace the halls: The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert Or flatten into horizonless ocean. I step outside, the door clicking shut Comforting in its finality ... Now I see the house as if I looked down From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused, Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits: I can't look you in the face, you see only The openness of sky rising above mountains. (Only after the world had emptied You and filled you with its openness Will I feel the love I pray to feel?) 4. The God a dream A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere. Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure, I cradle you, I sponge you clean As if you were my son, the emptiness you Drink like heavy black milk erasing Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain. The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven By the god, blinded by the god's Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads In this place the god commands: Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you are nothing in my hands but my hands moving. 5. His Stare Absently there in a moment of pure being He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring: The air's transparence gains solidity From his looking; while his emaciated features, The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones, Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green Of the trees he is too weak to prune. And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing And enters and becomes each spectral vibration; So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare. 6. The Current The numbing current of the Demorol Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night He lives in slowly begins to darken, His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness Blinding as an underwater cave. Already He filters the dark water through gills aligned To strain that element he more and more resembles: Like walls of water held in miraculous Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially Above him, my hands holding his tightening Its grip even as his hand loosens ... As if my hand could lead him past that undulating Weight towering above us out of sight. 7. The Rehearsal I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair, The rank rich air of breathing flesh- But like fumes rising from earth's molten core The voices of the dead reach out to you, Your whispering parents, dead for forty years, Entreating me to turn-and so I Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die, You dwindle, blur into unfillable Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ... But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus -Only this voice rehearsing breath By breath in words you'll never read these Lines stolen from your death.

219,560

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44320/yesterday-56d2235e36a70

Edgar Albert Guest

Yesterday

I've trod the links with many a man, And played him club for club; 'Tis scarce a year since I began And I am still a dub. But this I've noticed as we strayed Along the bunkered way, No one with me has ever played As he did yesterday. It makes no difference what the drive, Together as we walk, Till we up to the ball arrive, I get the same old talk: "To-day there's something wrong with me, Just what I cannot say. Would you believe I got a three For this hole-yesterday?" I see them top and slice a shot, And fail to follow through, And with their brassies plough the lot, The very way I do. To six and seven their figures run, And then they sadly say: "I neither dubbed nor foozled one When I played-yesterday!" I have no yesterdays to count, No good work to recall; Each morning sees hope proudly mount, Each evening sees it fall. And in the locker room at night, When men discuss their play, I hear them and I wish I might Have seen them-yesterday. Oh, dear old yesterday! What store Of joys for men you hold! I'm sure there is no day that's more Remembered or extolled. I'm off my task myself a bit, My mind has run astray; I think, perhaps, I should have writ These verses-yesterday.

207,564

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37730/still-life-belt-on-bureau

Robert B. Shaw

Still Life: Belt on Bureau

Surely it must be asleep. And camouflaged, brown against brown, although its grain, more delicate, can't match the wood's precisely. It lies in a loose coil, relaxed, but self-protective. The immemorial shape of menace and potential. There, at the center of its limp constriction, you can make out most of its brazen head, the stiff prong of a tongue now tasting nothing. Every morning it waits to be tamed anew, and you have long since learned its proper handling: threading it backwards through the accustomed bands, tricking it yet once more into biting its own tail.

165,614

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15817/never-did-i-dream

Harold Lewis Cook

Never Did I Dream

Harold Cook NEVER DID I DREAM I never thought that I should walk In ecstasy the streets of town, Or find a heart more beautiful Than red leaves fluttering down. I did not know archangels pass In human guise among the trees; And never, never did I dream That I should walk with these. But by my side one went today; I saw, and I had speech with him: And I forgot, who ne'er forgot, How cold are streets, how grim! Harold Cook

206,124

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37007/mystery-play

Henry H. Hart

Mystery Play

HENRY HART MYSTERY PLAY November 22, 1963 It is almost Christmas. A blue woman kneels over the bandaged child, the hay ringed with wooden cattle. Above, angels flutter from windows. The star on the créche sticks its spokes into everything. How suddenly it happens, the faces rearing in judgment, the loudspeaker shaking with its terrible news. The busses wait as always in their arc of silence, ready to ferry us across dry rivers. It is almost winter. Again and again we see his head slumped in its cradle of bone. Dawn's gray wing folds the barberry and thistle in snow and apples fallen into thorns. Nothing will be the same. Windows darken into mirrors. We wait like birds over deepening seeds.

192,750

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30307/the-affair

Marvin Bell

The Affair

For R. He learned early to turn out the light. He could do no wrong: too much of New England and a heady share of pain- soldier's, poet's, teacher's pain, the agonizing husbandry- all the years of his beating. All men met in him a life wholly above dreams, a posture so banded we could picture him wigged as he might have crossed the Delaware and slept in the Washington home. He was that upright: thinking signals in his blood a Puritan code he could not break for years, the seeds of awful pleasures, by innumerable tokens, rose up within him and he was given to be repented what the good man only loves. He called her "Mistress Forever" for her love of guilt, and she called him a little obscene endearment to the end. Afterwards, he took it out on fish and pheasant- making the fair game tremble in the face of his righteous accuracy, taking on the elements that they might take from him love's triangular life. But she was in him forever, laid in the house of lore. All of his dreams would follow him, and all of his wife, after that first happy ending.

205,550

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36719/over-brogno

Sydney Lea

Over Brogno

If from behind the stars the perilous Archangel came down, our thunderous heartbeats would kill us. Rilke After the ten or twenty quiet minutes within the empty church at San Giovanni, the lisping wavelets of the Como arm of the lake even less audible than the little implosions of dove-flight in the tower above like the shuffle of cards in a deck- After my bourgeois reverie and rote prayers for the absent ones, wife, children, friends, the lungs and torso at length as light as wings, as thought was transformed by consciousness of the cosmos below, the thronged dead, their buoyant deep dust beneath soft stone on which I sat all weightless now in the pew- the bells of noon had the ploosh sound of iron anchors cast over into water. I stepped out onto the dazzled piazza, near blind to the chic ragazza as she passed to the wharf's corner, where she'd eat and read her glossy review. Her personhood weighted me too, and thus I made my sudden decision to turn, rise, go south to the snowy mountain along the ancient mule paths, avoiding the heavy trucks, clutched lovers, cars so close I could almost touch them on the wire-thin limestone roads banked high with rock, where escape seemed all but hopeless. I wanted to rise above all, withdraw from millennia's mulched refuse underneath me, innocent as it was, innocent as the Virgin whose icons at every bridge across the torrente were littered with candle, flower, coin- earthy leavings and spillings of quick and dead alike, moving along these tracks like the bent illiterate contadino of whom I asked directions, who courtly and gravely gestured: "At every fork, choose one that climbs, if you must." To him there clung sweet dung, dirt, dust, as to others I passed, whom passing, I commended to God, a Dio. At which they would bow in respect, it seemed, but seemed bemused, as if the expression I used signalled not greeting but intention. Did I think I was climbing a Dio? Did they smile because it was odd to encounter someone like me over Brogno? Or at the superstition that the higher powers are something one has to seek in a higher order? But they returned to their labors. Enough had passed on these mountain paths that another oddness could pass. Somewhere within my heart I thanked them, for only a troubled abstraction could have been my answer if they had asked me where I was going. And what was this humming, far past the final boulder-built hovel? There on the summit, in the absence of wind, the tall tower, the unfleshed skull and bones on the chilling sign -Pericolo di morte! And something seen or seeming seen, an immanence, an aura. I thought beyond to our time's angelic throngs: What deadly secrets in satellites soaring? What particles abroad? What spectres of light that is more than light? Brogno far below, its inn and bar, and I up there, and what radio waves winging by and bearing what lethal abstraction from what capital, what lecture hall, what briefing room? Clamorous heartbeat, its clap within like thunder. Without, the Angel. I felt the heart must burst or draw me down to cottage and shack, to human traffic, where souls move close to ground.