December 2008
30 posts
3 tags
Endangered, Billy Collins
It is so quiet on the shore of this motionless lake
you can hear the slow recessional of extinct animals
as they leave through a door at the back of the world,
disappearing like the verbs of a dead language:
the last troop of kangaroos hopping out of the picture,
the ultimate paddling of ducks and pitying of turtledoves
and, his bell tolling in the distance, the final goat.
3 tags
Mending Wall, Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-sell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I...
4 tags
To Dorothy, Marvin Bell
You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
And a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
Of a windy night, it brushes the wall
And sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
The air wouldn’t...
3 tags
Unanswered, Rod McKuen
I put off writing
then to find
you’d put off living
in the interval.
I have no excuse.
My arm well oiled
and still working
could have written
half a page or more.
While we were living,
face to face,
I was willing once
to use you
as a sounding board.
You were my acoustic then.
You shame me now.
That I would let you letter go unanswered
is a loss to me
and not a lesson.
3 tags
New Directions, Rod McKuen
If I hold my hand
in front of me just so
it covers up the moon.
I can move
from block to block
clearheaded, unafraid.
If I haven’t charted out
the action in advance.
Premeditation
is the surest enemy I know.
Slow
I move my hand away
uncovering the moon. Slower still
Small thoughts widen
and stretch out in my head.
The moon draws nearer.
3 tags
legs, Charles Bukowski
she arrived in a taxi
completely intoxicated.
it was
after one of my long days as
a May Co. stock boy
and I sat there
exhausted and
sucking at
my beer and
looking at her
in her rumpled state
spread across the bed
skirt hiked high.
I sucked at my drink
then walked over
to the bed and lifted
her skirt higher:
such a sight
those glorious legs
uncovered and helpless.
she was a...
4 tags
Lovesong, Ted Hughes
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life...
2 tags
This Word Love, Raymond Carver
I will not go when she calls
even if she says I love you,
especially that,
even though she swears
and promises nothing
but love love.
The light in this room
covers every
thing equally;
even my arm throws no shadow,
it too is consumed with light.
But this word love —
this word grows dark, grows
heavy and shakes itself, begins
to eat, to shudder and convulse
its way through this...
3 tags
On the Use of Concrete Language, Diane Lockward
Don’t say love. Say switchblade.
-Peter Murphy
She remembers the click
and the snap of it
when he opened the blade,
and the black of his
eyes when he flipped it
through his fingers like
some kind of juggler,
and the heat of it,
yes, the heat of it.
She remembers the twinge
sharp as the blade held
to her throat, dragged down
her arm, teasing, circling
the breasts, down her...
3 tags
Making Love, Rebecca McClanahan
Why make? I used to wonder.
Is it something you have to keep on
making, like beds or dinner, stir it up
or smooth it down? Sex, I understood,
an easy creaking on the upholstered
springs of a man you meet in passing.
You have sex, you don’t have to make it,
it makes you - rise and fall and rise again,
each time, each man, new. But love?
It could be the name of a faraway
city, end of...
3 tags
One Art, Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring...
3 tags
Confirmation, Paul Laurence Dunbar
He was a poet who wrote clever verses,
And folks said he had a fine poetical taste;
But his father, a practical farmer, accused him
Of letting the strength of his arm go to waste.
He called on his sweetheart each Saturday evening,
As pretty a maiden as ever man faced,
And there he confirmed the old man’s accusation
By letting the strength of his arm go to waist.
3 tags
from Love Letter, Melissa Stein
I don’t know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I’m willing to lose even more — erasing
all this body’s known, relearning it with you.
3 tags
From a Discarded Image, Franz Wright
The world’s wordless beauty’s
intact and can never be other than
intact no matter what
harm we perpetually do
and have done
and will I can assure everyone
do,
forever,
as they say.
World’s wordless beauty, and the word’s
worldless liberty
The champagne shopping binge is over
The check is about to arrive
and nobody knows how much it will be
I know I don’t...
3 tags
Goodbye, Franz Wright
But I have overcome you
in myself,
I won’t behave
like you, so you
can’t hurt me now;
so you are not
going
to hurt me again
and I, I can’t
happen
to you.
2 tags
Accepting an Award, Franz Wright
A voice
neither cruel nor benevolent
said—this
was spring
in 1996—
look at him:
he can’t live and pretends
he is going to die…
One eye in tears and one that’s never going to cry.
And who could have foreseen
I’d outevil them all,
all my old
evil friends
put together?
You,
that’s who.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid
and her boyfriend...
2 tags
If All the Unplayed Pianos, Winfield Townley Scott
If all the unplayed pianos in America—
The antimacassared uprights in old ladies’ parlors
In the storehourses the ones that were rented for vaudeville
The ones where ill fame worsened and finally died
The ones too old for Sunday School helplessly dusty
The ones too damp at the beach and too dry in the mountains
The ones mothers used to play on winter...
3 tags
The Man in the Dead Machine, Donald Hall
High on a slope in New Guinea
the Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1943,
the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.
In the cockpit, the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, and webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover...
3 tags
Traveling Through the Dark, William Stafford
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson river road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By the glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the head, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers...
2 tags
Two Friends, David Ignatow
I have something to tell you.
I’m listening.
I’m dying.
I’m sorry to hear.
I’m growing old.
It’s terrible.
It is, I thought you should know.
Of course and I’m sorry. Keep in touch.
I will and you too.
And let me know what’s new.
Certainly, though it can’t be much.
And stay well.
And you too.
And go slow.
And you too.
2 tags
Fable, Merrill Moore
Does everyone have to die? Yes, everyone.
Isn’t there some way I can arrange
Not to die—cannot I take some strange
Prescription that my physician might know of? No. I think not, not for money or love;
Everyone has to die, yes, everyone.
Cannot my banker and his bank provide,
Like a trust fund, for me to live on inside
My warm bright house and not be put into
A casket in the...
2 tags
Visit to St. Elizabeths, Elizabeth Bishop
This is the house of Bedlam.
This is the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the time
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a wristwatch
telling the time
of the talkative man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the honored man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the roadstead all of board...
3 tags
Divorce, Jack Gilbert
Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.
Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
out at bright moonlight on concrete.
3 tags
When You Are Old, William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false and true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the...
3 tags
Nothing But You, S. B.
We spent fall comparing
guns and graffiti
and wearing diamonds around our necks.
I felt like you weren’t
supposed to become a man.
Not now.
Not at all.
I learned too soon
about the tainted bodies and faces
covering your wall
and that if you did
become a man
I would join the ranks of those girls
no matter how hard
I tried to stay
barefoot and dreaming.
You told me
that I...
6 tags
Duel, Jane Wong
I
A history slips through these elms,
presses our mouths together like books.
In October,
you showed me hoof marks,
cupped your ears and listened for gulls.
We are too far off, I told you
you who never listen
II
Wells deep and full of copper draw winter closer still.
III
You fell off your bicycle –
mouth of blood and rot.
Mothers ran, swore low and
kicked all the rust beetles in the...
3 tags
Untitled, Franz Wright
She undressed
looking into my eyes
like someone about to go swimming at dawn alone
quiet heart attack
Thirst is my water
Some say
the more you stray
the more you’re
saved,
I wouldn’t be surprised
Snow falling
on my bedclothes
Set the mind
before the mirror of eternity
and everything will work
4 tags
Suffering, Joe Weil
No one ever gets good at it,
and, if they should,
then something must up and die,
something
warm and familiar
that crawls to the
center line
of a life
and
gets hit.
Excellence
isn’t necessary.
One must respect
the professional martyr,
the asshole all
hot for it.
What I like about Christ is
he wanted to pass.
What I like about people
is the way they just
keep living,...
4 tags
Winter Poem, Frederick Morgan
We made love on winter afternoon
and when we woke, hours had turned and changed,
the moon was shining and the earth was new.
The city, with its lines and squares, was gone:
our room had placed itself on a small hill
surrounded by dark woods frosted in snow
and meadows where the flawless drifts lay deep.
No men there—some small animals all fur
stared gently at us with soft-shining...
4 tags
American Sonnet, Billy Collins
We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
and it is not fourteen lines
like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field
but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,
that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms
or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.
We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,
adding to the view a caption as conventional
as an Elizabethan...