Instinct, Joy Harjo
In the dark I travel by instinct,
through the rubble of nightmares,
groaning of monsters toward the crack of light
along your body’s horizon.
I roll over to my side, take you in my nostrils
test your for shape, intention and food
as nations fall apart.
Small winds tattoo my cheek.
Soon they will bring mist,
a small rain to clean the world
send rainbows to dress us,
for the ceremony
to rid us of the enemy mind.
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.
Ever Want to Crawl, Nikki Giovanni
ever want to crawl
in someone’s arms
white out the world
in someone’s arms
and feel the world
of someone’s arms
it’s so hot in hell
if i don’t sweat
i’ll melt
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
-2, Richard Brautigan
Everybody wants to go to bed
with everybody else, they’re
lined up for blacks, so I’ll
go to bed with you. They won’t
miss us.
Love Story, Ed Ochester
I climbed the stairs
to your apartment and
met your old lover and
his friend on the way
out laughing.
I brought you a book
of poems that I love;
you have cooked
a simplified coq con vin.
The evening I decided to love you
you told me you loved me.
Passion declared.
Steak burned.
There is no future for us.
You have discovered the secret
that will bind me to you for life.
I returned.
You laughed.
When I answer my telephone
you are crying.
When I lived with you,
you spend your evenings
memorizing irregular
German verbs; now
that I spend my nights
investigating bamboo taxonomy,
you write that
I have ruined your life.
Love and How It Becomes Important in Our Day to Day Lives, Miller Williams
The man who tells you which is the whiter wash,
the woman who talks about her paper towels,
the woman whose coffee holds her home together,
the man who smells the air in his neighbor’s house,
the man who sings a song about his socks,
the woman who tells how well her napkin fits,
the ma who sells the four-way slicer-dicer,
the woman who crosses tape between her tits,
and scores besides trample my yard, a mob
demanding to be let in, like Sodomites
yelling to get at my guests but I have no guests.
I crawl across the floor and cut the lights.
“We know you’re in there,” they say. “Open the door.”
“Who are you?” I say. “What do you want with me?”
“What does it matter?” they say. “You’ll let us in.
Everyone lets us in. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
The chest against the door begins to give.
I settle against a wall. A window breaks.
I cradle a gun in the crook of my elbow.
I hear the porch collapse. The whole house shakes.
Then comes my wife as if to wake me up,
a case of ammunition in her arms.
She settles herself against the wall beside me.
“The towns are gone,” she says. “They’re taking the farms.”
Love in the Cathedral, Miller Williams
“…except you ravish me.”
In the beginning I couldn’t speak to you.
Not because the words wouldn’t come;
it was because they might. Not words like love,
blooming where they fall; words like come here.
When once you turned to look straight at me
out of a crowd, I thought I must have let
the sounds inside my head come out, like “let
us all go home.” I wouldn’t say to you
the wet, small words that moved inside of me.
I have thought that faith and patience would come
to no good end, that you would say, “See here!”
and never say, “Well yes, I think I’d love
to follow you home; to tell the truth, I’d love
to have some wine, then talk awhile, then let
you pleasure me.” Expelled to suffer here,
John Milton wrote of us. I look at you
and in my mind your awful kinsmen come
around every corner, looking for me.
You once talking about the weather with me
and that was something, but it was not love,
did not resemble love. Love ought to come
in recognizable clothes. One day I let
my plain and earthy self talk to you
most gently, saying plainly, “Please come here,”
but everything went wrong, a bah-bah here,
a bah-bah there. You have bumped into me
by accident, I have bumped into you
on purpose on the street where talk of love
was inappropriate, then I have let
my heart hide in the cold and watched you come
laughing and blind. No matter what may come,
give me this: that all this time I stood here
ignored to death and loved you while you let
every chance go; say your glances at me
suggested almost anything but love;
say I know you cry in bed, poor you.
Believe in love. You know that I am here
to let you loose. Here is my flesh for you
who ay abide with me till kingdom come.
122, Osip Madelstam
Let me be in your service
like the others
mumbling predictions,
moth dry with jealousy.
Parched tongue
thirsting, not ever for a word—
for me the dry air is empty
again without you.
I’m not jealous any more
but I want you.
I carry myself like a victim
to the hangman.
I will not call you
either joy or love.
All my own blood is gone.
Something strange paces there now.
Another moment
and I will tell you:
it’s not joy but torture
you give me.
I’m drawn to you
as to a crime—
to your ragged mouth,
to the soft bitten cherry.
Come back to me,
I’m frightened without you.
Never had you such power
over me as now.
Everything I desire
appears to me.
I’m now jealous any more.
I’m calling you.
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.
