Anna Bachtle, Ed Ochester
Of course she’s happy
in the kitchen
whose stone and metal
have been worn out by her flesh.
She’s smoothed the clean linen
for fifty years;
in fall she laughs like a slice of moon
as she peels warm apples
into the battered colander in the sink.
The heavy cloth, the scent of fruit,
are comfortable things.
She is no appendix to her daughter’s world.
Unless you escape in time,
she reviews forever the ancient pennants
on boats vanished from the river,
her first man’s name,
the umbrella trees she saw one time in Kingston.
Seemingly content with chores,
with trees beyond the window
spinning familiar cycles,
she unfurls the wash like banners.
Surely her work is useful.
She earns her keep.
She tells her daughter’s world as it runs
straight tracks toward its future,
“I am useful,
I am still here.”
Emergence, Joy Harjo
It’s midsummer night. The light is skinny;
a think skirt of desire skims the earth.
Dogs bark at the musk of other dogs
and the urge to go wild.
I am lingering at the edge
of a broken heart, striking relentlessly
against the flint of hard will.
It’s coming apart.
And everyone knows it.
So do squash erupting in flowers
the color of the sun.
So does the momentum of grace
gathering allies
in the partying mob.
The heart knows everything.
I remember when there was no urge
to cut the land or each other into pieces,
when we knew how to think
in beautiful.
There is no world like the one surfacing.
I can smell it as I pace in my square room,
the neighbor’s television
entering my house by waves of sound.
Makes me think about buying
a new car, another kind of cigarette
when I don’t need another car
and I don’t smoke cigarettes.
A human mind is small when thinking
of small things.
It is large when embracing the maker
of walking, thinking and flying.
If I can locate the sense beyond desire,
I will not eat or drink
until I stager into the earth
with grief.
I will locate the point of dawning
and awaken
with the longest day in the world.
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 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.
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.”
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.
Haikus, Scott Montgomery
evening lecture
a shadow hangs
from the pointing finger
her silence at dinner
sediment
hanging in the wine
crying
she moves deeper
into the mirror
with the last lamp
stripping
her shadow off
15%, Richard Brautigan
She tries to get things out of men
that she can’t get because she’s not
15% prettier.
Letter to an Old Love, Tennessee Williams
I sold you playthings, very little more
Though greater things for less I might have given:
You only took such small things from my store
As a cup of wine or a penny’s worth of ribbon!
I sold you silky trinkets to amuse
You for an idle summer’s hour or two:
upon my higher shelves were things to use
More earnestly, but these escaped your view.
Or if you noticed them you gave no sign,
And I somehow lacked courage to display
Such precious things. You drank the cup of wine
And tucked the bit of silken goods away
And nonchalantly went on graceful feet
To spend you gold across the shallow street.
