poetpls

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Time Traveler - Patrick Cotter

Now is before he was born. Days of air shaken by bees, crow song probing eaves and quays. Maker of the future a perfect terra-cotta tense, a tense which sings. The absence of push in his education was unpresaged by the door’s lack of wired Sesame. He waits and waits for egress. The door needs only his touch. Its only desire is to swing. He waits for it to open itself, as the cloud opens for the melting press of the sun. He is ready to rot where he leans, leaving a breeze-blown blemish long after he has arrived. Long before he has come into being.

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With Hands Wide Open - Josephine Saunders

City of statues in cages, I've never belonged to you, but I can walk your pavements garmented in ice, look up at your tall buildings which reach the invaluable moon. I can speak your language, though, perhaps, not fluently like you.

As time goes on I've grown bored. I no longer watch for your signs, both visible and audible. In the past few years I have learned little new.

You, holding a moth in your hand, long ago I learned how fortunate you are. But, should you hold a moth in each hand, you would not be so lucky. Best, if that were true, to hide one hand behind your back. Thus you might fool us.

As for me, my hands are wide open, there is nothing in them; not even Nothing.

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Second Helpings - John Brehm

I wear my heart on my sleeve, or rather both sleeves, since it's usually broken.

Sometimes when I join my hands to pray, the jagged edges briefly touch,

like a plate that fell and cracked apart from being asked to hold too much.

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Dreams - Wisława Szymborska

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft, mocking magnets, graphs, and maps— in a split second the dream piles before us mountains as stony as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains with perfect infrastructures. Without engineers, contractors, workers, bulldozers, diggers, or supplies— raging highways, instant bridges, thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen— crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft, without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers— on the path a sudden house just like a toy, and in it vast halls that echo with our steps and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision— a specific watch, an entire fly, on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers, a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats, conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists— can fly unfledged, we light dark tunnels with our eyes, we wax eloquent in unknown tongues, talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom, the choices of our heart, our tastes, we’re swept away by amorous yearnings for— and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books, the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses— if anything fits, it’s accidental, and for one reason only, that in our dreamings, in their shadowings and gleamings, in their multiplings, inconceivablings, in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

(translated by Clare Cavanagh)

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Water and Time Divide The World Too Much - Donagh MacDonagh

Water and time divide the world too much

So that we shiver under the winter's whip

Sunless and dazed who can command no ship

To bear us to the south; and time is such

That hands however strong can never rip

Its potent web binding us in today.

Time has divided us from all dead lovers,

All beauty that once had power and life that hovers

Now only in portrait of one mood. The gay

Or melancholy face is gone; paint covers

Canvas, conserving past with greater ease

Than we can hope for. Watcher from Saturn's ring

Might see that ignoble quarrel of a king

At cross-roads, and find no drama in what he sees,

Knowing, as we, the present of everything.

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So Long - John Brehm

To break this day free from all the others

to stand at the morning end of it and

push off from the shore sail beyond

the reach of all my failures calling after me

“You can’t just Leave us here�� shaking their firsts

crowding into the water clamoring “We

made you who you are” to feel their voices

growing small underneath the surf

the wide un- knowable ocean all before me.

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The Lights Going on in the Rooms Strung out Back through the Years - Anselm Hollo

the way

the blue room

(remembered)

lights up

as you turn to

   be held

and to hold me

your

   beholder

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Step Up - John Brehm

You’ll never know unless you try, yes, but if you never try you’ll never

never fail, and that’s what my heart tells itself, inching

back from the platform’s edge, sensing someone might yank

the water from the pool like a rug. The heart remembers: blissful

moment of soaring, sky-blue rush of weightlessness, somersaulting

backflip into a jackknife handstand in midair—and then the eyes

seeing too late the water gone, the undeniable concrete there.  

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This - Ralph Angel

Today, my love,

leaves are thrashing the wind

just as pedestrians are erecting again the buildings

              of this drab

forbidding city,

and our lives, as I lose track of them,

are the lives of others derailing in time and

getting things done.

Impossible to make sense of any one face

or mouth, though

each distance

is clear, and you are miles

from here.

Let your pure

space crowd my heart,

that we might stay a while longer amid the flying

debris.

This moment,

I swear it,

isn’t going anywhere.

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The Widening Sky - Edward Hirsch

I am so small walking on the beach

at night under the widening sky.

The wet sand quickens beneath my feet

and the waves thunder against the shore.

I am moving away from the boardwalk

with its colorful streamers of people

and the hotels with their blinking lights.

The wind sighs for hundreds of miles.

I am disappearing so far into the dark

I have vanished from sight.

I am a tiny seashell

that has secretly drifted ashore

and carries the sound of the ocean

surging through its body.

I am so small now no one can see me.

How can I be filled with such a vast love?

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Advice from the Lights - Stephanie Burt

If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them,

which would be so much worse

than letting them disappoint you.

To the extent that you gain

a perch that means other people look up to you,

to just that extent you can never

tell them how you feel.

You can warble, or

follow a siren, or a Shenandoah

vireo, into the shade, or take

advice from the lights: be

a child, or be like a child.

You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

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Having a Coke with You - Frank O'Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz,      Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier      St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for      yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and      statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything      as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front      of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in      the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s      in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together      the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care      of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that      used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when      the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider      as carefully as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you      about it

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After the Beginning, Before the End - Deborah Brown

My life is in this story of love that leaves me between this and that. How can I know what is on the other side of this story until I walk toward the edge? A preposition locates you in time or space. Someone locates himself on the moon, claims the moon opens his eyes to something like hope. The limbs of the birch grow like parallel lines along the roof and like someone's moon, they are infused with whatever I wish— collision, extremity, boredom, endlessness. It is after the beginning, before the end, and despite what I read, hear and see, it is after so much and before the rest of it.

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Light-years - Hester Knibbe

It’s a beautiful world, you said, with these trees, marshes, deserts, grasses, rivers and seas and so on. And the moon is really something in its circuits of relative radiance. Include the wingèd M, voluptuous Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus U and N and the wanderer P, in short the whole solar family, complete with its Milky Way, and count up all the other systems with dots and spots and in that endless emptiness what you’ve got is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful universe, you said, just take a good look through the desert’s dark glasses for instance or on your back in seas of grass, take a good look at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there somewhere, together.

(trans. Jacquelyn Pope)

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Love Letter (Clouds) - Sarah Manguso

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?

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Claustrophilia - Alice Fulton

It's just me throwing myself at you, romance as usual, us times us, not lust but moxibustion, a substance burning close to the body as possible without risk of immolation. Nearness without contact causes numbness. Analgesia. Pins and needles. As the snugness of the surgeon's glove causes hand fatigue. At least this procedure requires no swag or goody bags, stuff bestowed upon the stars at their luxe functions. There's no dress code, though leg irons are always appropriate. And if anyone says what the hell are you wearing in Esperanto —Kion diable vi portas?— tell them anguish is the universal language. Stars turn to trainwrecks and my heart goes out admirers gush. Ground to a velvet! But never mind the downside, mon semblable, mon crush. Love is just the retaliation of light. It is so profligate, you know, so rich with rush.

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Simple - Brian Patten

When I think of her sparkling face And of her body that rocked this way and that, When I think of her laughter, Her jubilance that filled me, It’s a wonder I'm not gone mad. She is away and I cannot do what I want. Other faces pale when I get close. She is away and I cannot breathe her in. The space her leaving has created I have attempted to fill With bodies that numbed upon touching, Among them I expected her opposite, And found only forgeries. Her wholeness I know to be a fiction of my making, Still I cannot dismiss the longing for her; It is a craving for sensation new flesh Cannot wholly calm or cancel, It is perhaps for more than her. At night above the parks the stars are swarming. The streets are thick with nostalgia; I move through senseless routine and insensitive chatter As if her going did not matter. She is away and I cannot breathe her in. I am ill simply through wanting her.