We Can See It with Our Eyes Closed, Joy Harjo
You ask me what I am thinking when we make love
and our eyes are closed and the sun is climbing halfway
to the roof and the neighborhood dogs are all in love
with the spirit dog who makes the rounds and tortures them
with dreams of hills and running with the smell of heat
and then the train adds to the song of progress
making a web from city to city,
backdoor to backdoor and I know it is possible to
fly without the complications of metal and engineering
and all the payoffs, paybacks and terrible holes
in the earth and here we are in the territory of the wind,
surrounded by devils and thieves, forgotten by a trickster god
who has a wicked sense of humor
yet there is something quite compelling
about this skin we’re in, a solid planet of gases and water
doesn’t tell the whole story. I am intrigued by cloud
language and see you approaching as a red flower in a meadow
of yellow, or you are an apparition of rain just before or after
a famine of butterflies. We make an electrical reaction
like carbon dioxide, and did I remember to blow out
the candles lit for those who are dying and are leaving
or will leave this place? Grief is a land of wet tenderness. We are all
dying and will leave a trail like the plane jetting east in the direction
that becomes all directions, becomes all the millions of souls here together
looking for god or a little something to eat,
all of us blown away by the mystery of nothingness
as we shop in the streets for trinkets or bread.
We’ve been here before, thinking in skin and our pleasure
and pain feed the plants, make clouds. I see it with my eyes
closed. It’s so beautiful.
Birds, Indran Amirthanayagam
Birds that eat salt,
hand about cemeteries,
forage in abandoned lots,
civil war crows
fattened on carnage
from roadside bombs,
gorged vultures
loping from body
to body, picking
eyes clean
before clambering
up into trees
that have survived
hanging still
over the silent beach.
104: Tristia, Osip Madelstam
I have studied the science of good-byes,
the bare-headed laments of night.
The waiting lengthens as the oxen chew.
In the town the last hour of the watch.
And I have bowed to the knell of night in the rooster’s throat
when eyes red with crying picked up their burden
of sorrow and looked into the distance
and the crying of women and the Muses’ song became one.
Who can tell from the sound of the word ‘parting’
what kind of bereavements await us,
what the rooster promises with his loud surprise
when a light shows in the Acropolis,
dawn of a new life,
the ox still swinging his jaw in the outer passage,
or why the rooster, announcing the new life,
flaps his wings on the ramparts?
A thing I love is the action of spinning:
the shuttle fluttering back and forth, the hum of the spindle,
and look, like a swan’s down floating toward us,
Delia, the barefoot shepherdess, flying—
o indigence at the root of our lives,
how poor is the language of happiness!
Everything’s happened before and will happen again,
but still the moment of each meeting is sweet.
Amen. The little transparent figure
lies on the clean earthen plate
like a squirrel skin being stretched.
A girl bends to study the wax.
Who are we to guess at the hell of the Greeks?
Wax for women, bronze for men:
our lot falls to us in the field, fighting,
but to them death comes as they tell fortunes.
A Poem Without a Single Bird in It, Jack Spicer
What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
sent to Robert Blaser in Boston 12/2/56
Haikus, Jack Kerouac
The little sparrow
on my eave drainpipe
is looking around
The smoke of old
naval battles
is gone
Listen to the birds sing!
All the little birds
Will die!
Dusk—the bird
on the fence
A contemporary of mine
Untitled (29 May 02), Michael Palmer
So cut the rope, dusty ghost.
Time to leave, time to undream
the star chars and instruction books,
the smart cards and tootling teapots.
Remember that bogus Moscow map
they always handed out?
Remember the singer on stilts
in the mist by the Stone Bridge
raging against God and nakedness?
The plan sacred to Artemis,
a hairbrush abandoned beside it?
And the House of the Hanged Man
smelling of sage and mint?
Did you know, Capricorn is rising?
So pack up your favorite owls and goats
and barrel rolls, and let’s go.
Words, Miller Williams
Strip to the waist and have a seat. The doctor
will be in soon. He smiles and the nurse smiles.
He sits on the table, bumping his knees together,
scratching around is navel, counting the tiles.
We never talk, she says, and so you talk
and everything you speak of falls apart.
This is how we come to understand
what they mean by chambers of the heart.
Some words are said to start a conversation.
Some, after which there’s nothing more to say.
“Amen,” for instance. “I said I was sorry.”
“Tower, we’re going down. This is PSA.”
Songs from the House of Death, Or How to Make It Through to the End of a Relationship, Joy Harjo
for Donald Hall
1.
From the house of death there is rain.
From rain is flood and flowers.
And flowers emerge through the ruins
of those who left behind
stores of corn and dishes,
turquoise and bruises
from the passion
of fierce love.
2.
I run my tongue over the skeleton
jutting from my jaw. I taste
the grit of heartbreak.
3.
The procession of spirits
who walk out of their bodies
is ongoing. Just as the procession
of those who have loved us
will go about their business
of making a new house
with someone else who smells
like the dust of a strange country.
4.
The weight of rain is unbearable to the sky
eventually. Just as desire will
burn a hole through the sky
and fall to earth.
5.
I was surprised by the sweet embrace
of the perfume of desert flowers after the rain
though after all these seasons
I shouldn’t be surprised.
6.
All cities will be built and then destroyed.
We built too near the house of the gods of lightning,
too close to the edge of a century.
What could I expect,
my bittersweet.
7.
Even death who is the chief of everything
on this earth (all undertakings, all matters of human
form) will wash his hands, stop to rest under
the cottonwood before taking you from me
on the back of his horse.
8.
Nothing I can sing
will bring you back.
Not the songs of a hundred horses running
until they become wind
Not the personal song of the rain
who makes love to the earth.
9.
I will never forget you. Your nakedness
haunts me in the dawn when I cannot distinguish your
flushed brown skin from the burning horizon, or my hands.
The smell of chaos lingers in the clothes
you left behind. I hold you
there.
116, Osip Madelstam
Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone’s bees.
You can’t untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through this life without fear.
For us, all that’s left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.
Deep in the transparent night they’re still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.
But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.
shapeshifter poems, Lucille Clifton
1
the legend is whispered
in the woman’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them
2
who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl
3
if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
[cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty]
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up
4
the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world
