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A Girl Ago

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no Buttering. No making small contusions on the page But saying nothing no one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs. No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.                                                      Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky.    No Dove.                                                       There is no thou to speak of.

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As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

                                         1 As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows, Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,   Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide, Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.                                             2 As I wend to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift. O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth, Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can, Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.                                             3 You oceans both, I close with you, We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why, These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all. You friable shore with trails of debris, You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot, What is yours is mine my father. I too Paumanok, I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores, I too am but a trail of drift and debris, I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island. I throw myself upon your breast my father, I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me, I hold you so firm till you answer me something. Kiss me my father, Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love, Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.                                             4 Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,) Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother, Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me, Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you. I mean tenderly by you and all, I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine. Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy white, and bubbles, (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last, See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,) Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another, From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell, Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil, Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown, A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random, Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature, Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets, We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you, You up there walking or sitting, Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

- Walt Whitman

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Anne Sexton

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Wait Galway Kinnell - 1927-2014

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.br

But trust the hours. Haven’t they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become interesting.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands. The desolation

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness

carved out of such tiny beings as we are

asks to be filled; the need

for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.

Don’t go too early.

You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little and listen:

music of hair,

music of pain,

music of looms weaving our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Mariner Books, 1980). Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Extinction of Silence

That it was shy when alive goes without saying. We know it vanished at the sound of voices Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises, Though it could be approached by someone praying. We have no recordings of it, though of course In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers. But its song is lost. If it was related to A species of Quiet, or of another feather, No researcher can know. Not even whether A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou, Where legend has it some once common bird Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.

A. E. STALLINGS

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DREAM

EILEEN MYLES

Close to the door in my dream the small signs I saw a brown sign with wisdom on it I saw a brown one leaning with wisdom on it fringe of a mirror my mother leaning over a pond cupping water leaning against the moulding cardboard or wood which materials do you does your wisdom prefer which a- partment in a summer with someone I felt brave to have touched her love the screen door and the dogs and the cats always getting out. That was the fear two signs fading but recalling they had faded like words fade in stone because of the rain and the days and waking and the dream is leaving with every step leaning over the meat because I do not want you to have died in vain kissing the turkey and the neck of  my dog all animals am I. all dreams, all stone all message am I.

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Door in the Mountain

Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in

-- Jean Valentine

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Love Letter (Clouds)

for B. H.

I didn’t fall in love. I fell through it:

Came out the other side moments later, hands full of matter, waking up from the dream of a bullet tearing through the middle of my body.

I no longer understand anything for longer than a long moment, or the time it takes to receive the shot.

This kind of gravity is like falling through a cloud, forgetting it all, and then being told about it later. On the day you fell through a cloud . . .

It must be true. If it were not, then when did these strands of silver netting attach to my hair?

The problem was finding that you were real and not just a dream of clouds.

If you weren’t real, I would address this letter to one of two entities: myself, or everyone else. The effect would be equivalent.

The act of falling happens in time. That is, it takes long enough for the falling to shear away from the moments before and the moments after, long enough for one to have thought I am falling. I have been falling. I continue to fall.

Falling through a ring, in this case, would not mean falling through the center of the annulus—a planet floats there. Falling through the ring means falling through the spaces between the objects that together make the ring.

On the way through, clasp your fists around the universe:

Nothing but ice-gravel.

But open your hands when you reach the other side. Quickly, before it melts.  

What did I leave you?

Sarah Manguso

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RAIN LIGHT

All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning

W.S Merwin

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Of Color of Landscape of Tenuous Rope

i.      

I’ve pulled from my throat birdsong like tin- sheeted lullaby [its vicious cold        its hoax of wings] the rest of us forest folk       dark angels chafing rabbits- foot for luck     thrum-necked     wear the face of nothing       we’ve changed       the Zodiac & I have refused a little planet little sum for struggle & sailed ourselves summerlong & arbitrary as a moon grave across a vastness        [we’ve left the child- ren]      Named the place penni- less motherhood      Named the place country of mothers      Named the place anywhere but death by self- ii.           infliction is a god of many faces      many nothings     I’m afraid I’ll never be whole     I’m afraid the rope from the hardware store [screws for nails] will teach itself to knot      I’ve looked up noose I’ve learned to twine but these babies now halfway pruned through the clean bathwater of childhood I promised a god I would take to the ledge & show the pinstripes the pinkening strobe- lights maybe angels chiseled at creation into the rock [around my neck] the rock in the river I would never let them see        I would never let them

iii.

break & spend a whole life backing away from that slip— Let us fly & believe [in the wreck] their perfect hope- sealed bodies the only parachutes we need

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I Love You

Her eyes were mostly shut. She didn’t speak.

The sun’s slow exile crossed the wall above the bed. But once, when I bent to feed her a drop of morphine from the little plastic beak, her hand shot up and gripped my arm. She looked right at me. When she said the words, it sounded like she meant: Don’t leave me. From the very first, we love like this: our heads turning toward whatever mothers us, our mouths urgent for the taste of our name.

Jenny George

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Extreme Wisteria

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.                                                                              The hydrangea Of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo.                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable. Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in. Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not                                 Have been there. So few wild raspberries, they were countable,                                 Triaged out by hand. Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die. High editorial illusion of “Control.” Early childhood: measles,                                                                              Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home. Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of such.                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme. There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

Lucie Brock-Broido

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How Can It Be I Am No Longer I

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare

Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled

As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack. To be damaged is to endanger—taut as the stark

Throats of castrati in their choir, lymphless & fawning & pale. The miraculous conjoining

Where the beamless air harms our self & lung, Our three-chambered heart & sternum,

Where two made a monstrous Braid of other, ravishing.

To damage is an animal hunch & urge, thou fallen—the marvelous much

Is the piece of Pleiades the underworld calls The nightsky from their mud & rime. Perennials

Ghost the ground & underground the coffled Veins, an aneurism of the ice & spectacle.

I would not speak again. How flinching The world will seem—in the lynch

Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled For the deaths of the few loved left living I will

Always love. I was a flint To bliss & barbarous, a bristling

Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm, A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned.

A singe of salt-hay shrouds the orchard-skin, That I would be—lukewarm, mammalian, even then,

In winter when moss sheathes every thing alive & everything not or once alive.

That I would be—dryadic, gothic, fanatic against The vanishing; I will not speak to you again.

Lucie Brock-Broido

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Anaerobe

Touch swollen tonsils: gill slits. Inside eyelid: slimelight. Cheek: shark. Here foreknown I’ve dived down dawnless microbial snows, phosphor blue to blue- black, to black. I fend fish. I find the saffron curb of the sulfur vent, veering voiceless again into the segmented, swaying, white, toothed tube- worm, Time.

By Richard Kenney

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[love is more thicker than forget]

love is more thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail it is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea love is less always than to win less never than alive less bigger than the least begin less littler than forgive it is most sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky

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Various Portents

Various stars. Various kings. Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights. Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers, Much cold, much overbearing darkness.

Various long midwinter Glooms. Various Solitary and Terrible Stars. Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers. Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.

More than one North Star, more than one South Star. Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems, Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thicknesses of Dark, Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth.

Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens, All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes: Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk, Works of wonder and/or water, snowflakes, stars of frost . . .

Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes, Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness, Various 5,000-year-old moon maps, Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in braille.

Various gods making beautiful works in bronze, Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains, And all sorts of drystone stars put together without mortar. Many Wisemen remarking the irregular weather.

Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers, Watches of wisp of various glowing spindles, Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac, Seafarers tossing, tied to a star . . .

Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights. Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall. Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.

Alice Oswald

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Radiance versus Ordinary Light

Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it is violation—his own: he touches the bruises at each shoulder and, on his chest,                                                  the larger bruise, star-shaped, a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands, has tried—can't remember . . .                                                        That kind of rhythm to it, even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable, which is why we keep coming here, to find it, or that's what we say. We dive in and, as usual,                                                                      the swimming feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first slackens that much more quickly, if you don't look back. Regret,                                 like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time swimming a bit farther,                                           leaving the shore the way the water—in its own watered, of course, version of semaphore–keeps leaving the subject out, flashing Why should it matter now and Why,                                                                  why shouldn 't it, as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.

CARL PHILLIPS