For Two Jameses, Nikki Giovanni
(Ballantine and Snow)
In iron cells
we all start
as a speck
nobody notices us
but some may hope
we’re there
some count days and wait
we grow
in a cell that spreads
like a summer cold
to other people
they notice and laugh
some are happy
some wish to stop
our movement
we kick and move
are stubborn and demanding
completely inside
the system
they put us in a cell
to make us behave
never realizing it’s from cells
we have escaped
and we will be born
from their iron cells
new people with a new cry
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
The Story of Our Lives, Mark Strand
1
We are reading the story of our lives
which takes place in a room.
The room looks out on a street.
There is no one there,
no sound of anything.
The trees are heavy with leaves,
the parked cars never more.
We keep turning pages,
hoping for something,
something like mercy or change,
a black line that would bind us
or keep us apart.
The way it is, it would seem
the book of our lives is empty.
The furniture in the room is never shifted,
and the rugs become darker each time
our shadows pass over them.
It is almost as if the room were the world.
We sit beside each other on the couch,
reading about the couch.
We say it is ideal.
It is ideal.
2
We are reading the story of our lives
as though we were in it,
as though we had written it.
This comes up again and again.
In one of the chapters
I lean back and push the book aside
because the book says
it is what I am doing.
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book,
beyond my life into another life.
I put the pen down.
The book says: He put the pen down
and turned and watched her reading
the part about herself falling in love.
The book is more accurate than we can imagine.
I lean back and watch you read
about the man across the street.
They built a house there,
and one day a man walking out of it.
You fell in love with him
because you knew that he would never visit you,
would never know you were waiting.
Night after night you would say
that he was like me.
I lean back and watch you grow older without me.
Sunlight falls on your silver hair.
The rugs, the furniture,
seem almost imaginary now.
She continued to read.
She seemed to consider his absence
of no special importance,
as someone on a perfect day will consider
the weather a failure
because it did not change his mind.
You narrow your eyes.
You have the impulse to close the book
which described my resistance:
how when I lean back I imagine
my life without you, imagine moving
into another life, another book.
It described your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
The book describes much more than it should.
It wants to divide us.
3
This morning I woke and believed
there was no more to our lives
than the story of our lives.
When you disagreed, I pointed
to the place in the book where you disagreed.
You fell back to sleep and I began to read
those mysterious parts you used to guess at
while they were being written
and lose interest in after they became
part of the story.
In one of them cold dresses of moonlight
are draped over the chairs in a man’s room.
He dreams of a woman whose dresses are lost,
who sits in a garden and waits.
She believes that love is a sacrifice.
The part describes her death
and she is never named,
which is one of the things
you could not stand about her.
A little later we learn
that the dreaming man lives
in the new house across the street.
This morning after you fell back to sleep
I began to turn pages early in the book:
it was like dreaming of childhood,
so much seemed to vanish,
so much seemed to come to life again.
I did not know what to do.
The book said: In those moments it was his book.
A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.
He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,
anxious in his own kingdom.
4
Before you woke
I read another part that described your absence
and told how you sleep to reverse
the progress of your life.
I was touched by my own loneliness as I read,
knowing that what I feel is often the crude
and unsuccessful form of a story
that may never be told.
I read and was moved by a desire to offer myself
to the house of your sleep.
He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,
to see her in the refuse, the discarded
plots of old dreams, the costumes and masks
of unattainable states.
It was as if he were drawn
irresistibly to failure.
It was hard to keep reading.
I was tired and wanted to give up.
The book seemed aware of this.
It hinted at changing the subject.
I waited for you to wake not knowing
how long I waited,
and it seemed that I was no longer reading.
I heard the wind passing
like a stream of sighs
and I heard the shiver of leaves
in the trees outside the window.
It would be in the book.
Everything would be there.
I looked at your face
and I read the eyes, the nose, the mouth…
5
If only there were a perfect moment in the book;
if only we could live in that moment,
we could begin the book again
as if we had not written it,
as if we were not in it.
But the dark approaches
to any page are too numerous
and the escapes are too narrow.
We read through the day.
Each page turning is like a candle
moving through the mind.
Each moment is like a hopeless cause.
If only we could stop reading.
He never wanted to read another book
and she kept staring into the street.
The cars were still there,
the deep shade of the trees covered them.
The shades were drawn in the new house.
Maybe the man who lived there„
the man she loved, was reading
the story of another life.
She imagined a bare parlor,
a cold fireplace, a man sitting
writing a letter to a woman
who has sacrificed her life for love.
If there were a perfect moment in the book,
it would be the last.
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.
6
The day goes on.
We study what we remember.
We look into the mirror across the room.
We cannot bear to be alone.
The book goes on.
They became silent and did not know how to begin
the dialogue which was necessary.
It was words that created divisions in the first place,
that created loneliness.
They waited.
They would turn the pages, hoping
something would happen.
They would patch up their lives in secret:
each defeat forgiven because it could not be tested,
each pain rewarded because it was unreal.
They did nothing.
7
The book will not survive.
We are the living proof of that.
It is dark outside, in the room it is darker.
I hear your breathing.
You are asking me if I am tired,
if I want to keep reading.
Yes, I am tired.
Yes, I want to keep reading.
I say yes to everything.
You cannot hear me.
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were copies, the tired phantoms
of something they had been before.
The attitudes they took were jaded.
They stared into the book
ad were horrified by their innocence,
their reluctance to give up.
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were determined to accept the truth.
Whatever it was they would accept it.
The book would have to be read.
They are the book and they are
nothing else.
Lines for Winter, Mark Strand
for Ros Krauss
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
Among His Effects We Found a Photograph, Ed Ochester
My mother us beautiful as a flapper.
She is so in love
that she has been gazing
secretly at my father
for forty years.
He’s in uniform,
with puttees and swagger stick,
a tiny cork mustache
bobbing above a shore line of teeth.
They are “poor but happy.”
In his hand is a lost book
he had memorized,
with a thousand clear answers
to everything.
The War Zone, Joy Harjo
Yesterday in the flare of smoke and temper—
we were brilliant warriors weary
from battling each other—
the illuminations of family ghosts
bright red in the storm.
The century is swept toward an inevitable end—
as summer trees sway beneath thunderclouds,
the wind flattening our faces—
Our teeth make refuge for our tongues,
skins pulled tight in the vertigo of fear
under unbearable
pressure.
We go on.
Lauderdale, Laura Newbern
At dusk, the grandmother sits alone
in the light of the long pale pool and speaks
to the frog who is waiting
by the electric gate of the clubhouse.
It will be all right, she says, leaning out
from her chair. Her voice
is churning, and old, and wet
with advice. Her newly red hair
purples under the bug light. It will be
all right, she said, again, and again
the sky rolls in and out on its journey
across the peninsula, rattling the palms.
Aubade, Louise Glück
The world was very large. Then
the world was small. O
very small, small enough
to fit in a brain.
It had no color, it was all
interior space: nothing
got in or out. But time
seeped in anyway, that
was the tragic dimension.
I took time very seriously in those years,
if I remember accurately.
A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patters light makes.
In its emptiness the world
was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the center.
And at the center of the self,
grief I thought I couldn’t survive.
A room with a bed, a table. Flashes
of light on the naked surfaces.
I had two desires: desire
to be safe and desire to feel. As though
the world were making
a decision against white
because it disdained potential
and wanted in its place substance:
panels
of golf where the light struck.
In the window, reddish
leaves of the copper beech tree.
Out of the stasis, facts, objects
blurred or knitted together: somewhere
time stirring, time
crying to be touched, to be
palpable,
the polished wood
shimmering with distinctions—
and then I was once more
a child in the presence of riches
and I didn’t know what the riches were made of.
A Coney Island of the Mind (21), Lawrence Ferlinghetti
She loved to look at flowers
smell fruit
And the leaves had the look of loving
But halfass drunken sailors
staggered thru her sleep
scattering semen
over the virgin landscape
At a certain age
her heart put about
searching the lost shores
And heard the green birds singing
from the other side of silence
