The Quiet World // Jeffrey McDaniel

in an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

when the phone rings, i put it
to my ear without saying hello.
in the restaurant i point
at chicken noodle soup. i am
adjusting well to the new way.

late at night, i call my long-
distance lover and proudly say:
i only used fifty-nine today.
i saved the rest for you.

when she doesn't respond, i know
she's used up all her words,
so i slowly whisper i love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
after that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Absence // Jeffrey McDaniel

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be

part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

Exile // Jeffrey McDaniel

Mathematicians still don't understand
the ball our hands made, or how

your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.

It isn't as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice

and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,

on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes

of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out

over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:

Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I'm that driver. All night
I've swallowed you in the bar.

Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried

raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I'd know

where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I'll never return to.

The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you

away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and

blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body

with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don't die in accidents

they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding.

The Foxhole Manifesto // Jeffrey McDaniel

"There are no atheists in foxholes."
            -- old Christian proverb

The first god I remember was a Santa Claus god, who you only
    turned to around Christmas time,
who you tried to butter up, and then got mad at if you didn't
   get what you wanted.
That didn't make sense. I knew if there was a god, he could see
   through us, like we were made
out of cellophane, like he could stare directly into our hearts,
   the way we look into an aquarium,
like he'd know what was floating around in there, like he might be
   the one feeding it.

Then there were those people who used god to threaten you,
   saying you better
be careful - god's watching, like god was a badass hillbilly
   sitting in some cloud
with a pair of binoculars, a cotton candy beard, a six pack,
   and a shot gun.

Then i saw people who had Jesus' name on their bumper sticker,
   like he was running for president.
And sometimes those people with Jesus on their bumper sticker
   would cut you off
on the freeway and give you the finger, which is very different
   from lending you a hand.

Then there were people on television, dressed in weird clothes
   and scary make-up, swearing
they had the secret to god, like god was a keyhole and their eyeball
   was pressed to it, and if I just
gave 'em some money they'd let me look, and then I could see god
   just hanging around in his boxer shorts,
and though I liked the idea of spying on god, I began to wonder
   if the world would be a healthier place
if the Romans had just put up with Jesus and let him die of old age.

And then there were the football players, kneeling down in front
   of everybody, thanking god,
like he was their best friend, but then they'd jump up and spike
   the ball, yell I'm number one,
and I'd be confused, because if you're number one, then
   what number is god?

Then I saw politicians trotting god out on a leash, like a racehorse
   they wanted to hop on
and ride to the finish line. But if they lost it would be god's fault,
   and god would be the donkey
they'd pin all their problems on, and that was very nice of god:
   to be both a race horse and a donkey.

And then there were those who said you better be good on Earth
   if you wanna get into heaven,
like heaven was the United States, and Earth was Mexico, and angels
   were border patrol. Like when you die
you sit in a parked car on the outskirts of heaven, the engine idling,
   your soul in the back seat in one of those kennels
used to carry small dogs on airplanes, as you listen to the radio to all
   the people you ever wronged testify against you.

And then there was the church, which was like this cafeteria, where
   they served god to you on these very
un-godlike plates, but I wanted my god pure, and not watered down
   by human beings, so I just had one of those
catastrophe gods - you know, the one you only turn to in an emergency,
   like god's the national guard you call in
to clean up the earthquake of your life. So I got drunk one night,
   drove home, passed out behind the wheel,
woke, going sixty straight at a brick wall, slammed the breaks, heart
   banging like a wrecking ball in my chest,
staring at death's face in the bricks, close enough to see we had
   the same cheekbones.

Now I have a god who's like a mechanic who can fix anything,
   so when I wanna chew somebody's head off
like a saltwater taffy, or amputate my DNA, or open my wrists
   like windows that have been painted shut,
I just put my soul into a box, like a busted computer, and haul it in.
   And he never asks to see my paperwork,
or says my warranty has expired. And I walk out feeling better.
   And I don't care if he doesn't exist.

The Archipelago of Kisses // Jeffrey McDaniel

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow
on trees, like in the old days. So where

does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card

in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.

The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips

taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of
tingles kiss.

The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad

sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss.

As you get older,
kisses become scarce. You'll be driving

home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you were younger,

you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door
just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love?

If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.

Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don't invite the kiss over

and answer the door in your underwear.
It'll get suspicious and stare at your toes. Don't

water the kiss with whisky. It'll turn bright pink and
explode into a thousand luscious splinters,

but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,

and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the
little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth. You must

nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights.
Notice how it illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest

and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,

then look up the first recorded kiss in an
encyclopedia: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection
of function and desire. The I do kiss.

The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when
I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,

like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your
bones.

The Obvious // Jeffrey McDaniel

We didn't deny the obvious,
but we didn't entirely accept it either.
I mean, we said hello to it each morning
in the foyer. We patted its little head
as it made a mess in the backyard,
but we never nurtured it.

Many nights the obvious showed up
at our bedroom door, in its pajamas,
unable to sleep, in need of a hug,
and we just stared at it like an Armenian,
or even worse-- hid beneath the covers
and pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.

The First Straw // Jeffrey McDaniel

I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,

but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.

I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers

from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal

pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue

ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror

over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted

in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep's clothing

and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord

around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u

and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels

and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I'd jump off the roof of your office building

just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish
we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see

what the other sees. But you're here, I'm there,
and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance

to mix feelings into cyllables and pour into the receiver,
hope they don't disassemble in that calculus of wire.

And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine
supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're

injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:

Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,

and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,

washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,

like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,

like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love

when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting

into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself

with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her

how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect the first straw; because no one

ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.

Oblivion Chicklets // Jeffrey McDaniel

A voice wants to know why I wasn’t there
the day the doctors splayed you out on the operating table,

You who carried me like a bouquet of splinters in your belly,
who let me suckle ambrosia from your coveted breast.

A voice wants to know how I can seal my heart up
like the lid of a submarine. The truth is I don't know

what's in there, and if I open that valve too quickly
the pressure might break me, might rip my ventricles

at the seams. When I saw you outside the methadone clinic,
half your teeth gone, I had to turn, couldn't watch

the family tree being hacked into more firewood.
Yes, I want to crush and snort the knuckles

of the doctor who prescribed you the oblivion chiclets,
but you're the one playing Paul Bunyan, swinging

the pill bottle like a plastic ax, and my tongue
is not a lavender ambulance rushing toward you. I know

reality is a mosh pit that keeps spitting you out, that beauty
seeps from your face like sugar from a punctured sack.

I know death is on the staircase, but you were a ghost
all along, an apparition with a wineglass

floating through my childhood. I know you were born
in a Polish neighborhood with an aluminum spoon

in your mouth, that booze runs through us the way
politicians run through promises. I know about the more

in morphine, what it's like to wake and feel like a chalk
outline of yourself. I know about days passing

so quickly that they don't even wave, let alone stop
and say hello. I know it’s been one of those months,

one of those lifetimes, when you dream of a laundromat,
a place to unscrew your skull and toss your dirty

thoughts into a machine, come back an hour later,
your impulses all folded and clean. If I could, I'd have a scientist

shrink me down and inject me into your bloodstream,
and I'd go with a wash brush and suds bucket,

scrub the opium out each one of your cells. I used to think
I was tough because I could hold a machine gun

of whisky to my cranium and take bullet after bullet
to the brain. I used to think the greatest display of strength

was lifting a hunk of metal in the air, but now I know
it's far more difficult to put something down.

Having It Out With Melancholy by Jane Kenyon

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.

A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard

1  FROM THE NURSERY


When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.


And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad -- even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along a spindle on my crib.


You taught me to exist without gratitude. 
You ruined my manners toward God:
"We're here simply to wait for death; 
the pleasures of earth are overrated."


I only appeared to belong to my mother, 
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts 
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. 
I was already yours -- the anti-urge, 
the mutilator of souls.



           2  BOTTLES


Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 
The coated ones smell sweet or have 
no smell; the powdery ones smell 
like the chemistry lab at school 
that made me hold my breath.



3  SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND


You wouldn't be so depressed
if you really believed in God.



           4  OFTEN


Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep's 
frail wicker coracle.



5  ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT


Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.


I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors -- those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few


moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.


Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear 
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.



       6  IN AND OUT


The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter 
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing 
saves my life -- in and out, in 
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 



           7  PARDON


A piece of burned meat 
wears my clothes, speaks 
in my voice, dispatches obligations 
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying 
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.


We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night 
I feel as if I had drunk six cups 
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder 
and bitterness of someone pardoned 
for a crime she did not commit 
I come back to marriage and friends, 
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back 
to my desk, books, and chair.



           8  CREDO


Pharmaceutical wonders are at work 
but I believe only in this moment 
of well-being. Unholy ghost, 
you are certain to come again.


Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet 
on the coffee table, lean back, 
and turn me into someone who can't 
take the trouble to speak; someone 
who can't sleep, or who does nothing 
but sleep; can't read, or call 
for an appointment for help.


There is nothing I can do 
against your coming. 
When I awake, I am still with thee.



  9  WOOD THRUSH


High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome


by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

The Thing Is // Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

To Be of Use // Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Piano // Patrick Phillips

Touched by your goodness, I am like
that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby
that someone had smashed and somehow
heaved through an open window.

And you might think by this I mean I'm broken
or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don't
know exactly what I am, any more
than the wreckage in the alley knows
it's a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves.

Maybe I'm all that's left of what I was.
But touching me, I know, you are the good
breeze blowing across its rusted strings.

What would you call that feeling when the wood,
even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?

A Cure for Dead Dogs // Craig Morgan Teicher

As if time were a cure. As if all things
pass, this too shall pass were a cure
for time, the time it takes, time enough,

a little more time. As if waking
with a taste in your mouth
were a cure for childhood, a sweaty

sweaty dream, a monster, an
angel in the closet, under the bed
were a cure for a ghost. As if

a thing lost or forgotten, discarded,
fled, written down and revised, revisited
were a cure for dead dogs, dogs

put to sleep, put down, put out of mind,
put that way were a cure for the facts.

As if this were a cure for that.

As if what happened, events as told, as tell
about the teller were a cure for
what ails, what finally ends, what time

has taken its toll on. As if what can be
hoped for, what works, what heals
were a cure. As if a cure were needed.

Awake // Dorianne Laux

Quarter to Six

and the house swept with the colors of dusk,
I set the table with plates and lace. In these minutes
left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep
and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say
if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes,
this man I've learned to live with, afraid
of what he doesn't know about me. That I've finished
a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself
for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish
as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me. Missy,

this is what's become of the wedding you swore you'd come to
wearing black. That was back in 1970 as we sat on the bleached
floor of the sanitarium sharing a cigarette you'd won
in a game of pool. You said even school was better
than this ward, where they placed the old men
in their draped pants, the housewives screaming in loud
flowered shifts as they clung to the doors that lined the halls.
When we ate our dinner of fish and boiled potatoes,
it was you who nudged me under the table
as the thin man in striped pajamas climbed
the chair beside me in his bare feet, his pink-tinged urine
making soup of my leftovers. With my eyes locked on yours,
I watched you keep eating. So I lifted my fork
to my open mouth, jello quivering green
against the tines, and while I trusted you and chewed
on nothing, he leapt into the arms of the night nurse
and bit open the side of her face. You had been there

longer, knew the ropes, how to take the sugar-coated pill
and slip it into the side pocket in your mouth, pretend
to swallow it down in drowsy gulps while
the white-frocked nurse eyed the clockface above our heads.
You tapped messages into the wall while I wept, struggling
to remember the code, snuck in after bedcount,
with cigarettes, blew the blue smoke through the barred windows.
We traded stories, our military fathers:
yours locking you in a closet for the days it took
to chew ribbons of flesh from your fingers, a coat
pulled over your head; mine, who worked
his ringed fingers inside me while the house
slept, my face pressed into the pillow, my fists
knotted into the sheets. Some nights

I can't eat. The dining room fills
with their chatter, my hand stuffed with the glint
of a fork and the safety of butter knives
quiet at the sides of our plates. If I could write you now,
I'd tell you I wonder how long I can go on with this careful
pouring of the wine from the bottle, straining to catch it
in the fragile glass. Tearing open my bread, I see

the scar, stiches laced up to the root of your arm, the flesh messy
where you grabbed at it with the broken glass of an ashtray.
That was the third time. And later you laughed
when they twisted you into the white strapped jacket
demanding you vomit the pills. I imagined you
in the harsh light of a bare bulb where you took
the needle without flinching, retched
when the ipecac hit you, your body shelved over
the toilet and no one to hold your hair
from your face. I don't know

where your hands are now, the fingers that filled my mouth
those nights you tongued me open in the broken light
that fell through chicken-wired windows. The intern
found us and wretched us apart, the half-moon of your breast
exposed as you spit on him. "Now you're going to get it,"
he hissed through his teeth and you screamed "Get what?"
As if there was anything anyone could give you.
If I could write you now, I'd tell you

I still see your face, bone-white as my china
above the black velvet cape you wore to my wedding
twelve years ago, the hem of your black crepe skirt
brushing up the dirty rice swirls
as you swept down the reception line to kiss me.
"Now you’re going to get it," you whispered,
cupping my cheek in your hand.

The Moment by Margaret Atwood

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

fingernails; nostrils; shoelaces // bukowski

the gas line is leaking, the bird is gone from the
cage, the skyline is dotted with vultures;
Benny finally got off the stuff and Betty now has a job
as a waitress; and
the chimney sweep was quite delicate as he
giggled up through the
soot.
I walked miles through the city and recognized
nothing as a giant claw ate at my
stomach while the inside of my head felt
airy as if I was about to go
mad.
it's not so much that nothing means
anything but more that it keeps meaning
nothing,
there's no release, just gurus and self-
appointed gods and hucksters.
the more people say, the less there is
to say.
even the best books are dry sawdust.
I watch the boxing matches and take copious
notes on futility.
then the gate springs open again
and there are the beautiful silks
and powerful horses riding
agains the sky.
such sadness: everything trying to
break through into
blossom.
every day should be a miracle instead
of a machination.
in my hand rests the last bluebird.
the shades roar like lions and the walls
rattle, dance around my
head.
then her eyes look at me, love breaks my
bones and I
laugh.

Wait // Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
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 lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And 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 while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

What Was // Kim Addonizio

The streets fill with cabs and limos,
with the happy laughter of the very drunk;
the benches in Washington Square Park,
briefly occupied by lovers, have been reclaimed

by men who stretch out coughing under the Chronicle.
We're sitting on the cold slab
of a cathedral step, and to keep myself
from kissing you I stare at the cartoony

blue neon face of a moose, set over the eponymous
restaurant, and decide on self-pity
as the best solution to this knot
of complicated feelings. So much, my love,

for love; our years together recede,
taillights in the fog that's settled in. I breathe
your familiar smell - Tuscany Per Uomo,
Camel Lights, the sweet reek of alcohol - and keep

from looking at your face, knowing
I'm still a sucker for beauty. Nearby, a man decants
a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way
through a tune meant to be melancholy. Soon

I'll drive home alone, weeping and raging,
the radio twisted high as I can stand it -
or else I'll lean toward you, and tell you
any lie I think will bring you back.

And if you're reading this, it's been years
since then, and everything's too late
the way it always is in songs like this,
the way it always is.

Growing Up // William Stafford

One of my wings beat faster,
I couldn't help it-
the one away from the light.

It hurt to be told all the time
how I loved that terrible flame.

here's to opening and upward // e.e. cummings

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

Antilamentation // Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.

Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.

Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.

Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.

You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.

You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax.

Don't bother remembering any of it.

Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Song // Allen Ginsberg

The weight of the world
 is love.
Under the burden
 of solitude,
under the burden
 of dissatisfaction

 the weight,
the weight we carry
 is love.

Who can deny?
 In dreams
it touches
 the body,
in thought
 constructs
a miracle,
 in imagination
anguishes 
 till born
in human--

looks out of the heart
 burning with purity--
for the burden of life 
 is love,

but we carry the weight
 wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
 at last,
must rest in the arms
 of love.

No rest
 without love,
no sleep
 without dreams
of love--
 be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
 or machines,
the final wish
 is love
--cannot be bitter,
 cannot deny,
cannot withhold
 if denied:

the weight is too heavy

 --must give
for no return
 as thought
is given 
 in solitude
in all the excellence
 of its excess.

The warm bodies
 shine together
in the darkness,
 the hand moves
to the center
 of the flesh,
the skin trembles
 in happiness
and the soul comes
 joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
 that's what
I wanted,
 I always wanted,
I always wanted,
 to return
to the body
 where I was born.

Water // Mary Oliver

What is the vitality and necessity
of clean water?
Ask the man who is ill, and who is lifting
his lips to the cup.

Ask the forest.

Sweetness // Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet...

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care

where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

The Will To // Charles Olson

all living things

transpire: love alone

transforms

desire

the measure

of the black chrysanthemum,

that nothing

is anything

but itself, is

too much: I alone

live in the sun.

How to outrage

creation

After Experience Taught Me ... // W. D. Snodgrass

After experience taught me that all the ordinary

Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;

         I’m going to show you something very

         Ugly: someday, it might save your life.

Seeing that none of the things I feared contain

In themselves anything either good or bad

         What if you get caught without a knife;

         Nothing—even a loop of piano wire;

Excepting only in the effect they had

Upon my mind, I resolved to inquire

         Take the first two fingers of this hand;

         Fork them out—kind of a “V for Victory”—

Whether there might be something whose discovery

Would grant me supreme, unending happiness.

         And jam them into the eyes of your enemy.

         You have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press

No virtue can be thought to have priority

Over this endeavor to preserve one’s being.

         Both fingers down around the cheekbone

         And setting your foot high into the chest

No man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed,

To live rightly, without simultaneously

         You must call up every strength you own

         And you can rip off the whole facial mask.

Wishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask

First, in other words, to actually exist.

                           And you, whiner, who wastes your time

                              Dawdling over the remorseless earth,

                           What evil, what unspeakable crime

                              Have you made your life worth?

Bird-Understander // Craig Arnold

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport

so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird

trapped in the terminal      all the people

ignoring it       because they do not know

what do with it       except to leave it alone

until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside

and set it free or       (failing that)

call a bird-understander

to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird

and feel for the bird       and write

to tell me how language feels

impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander

better than I could ever be

who make so many noises

and call them song

These are your own words

your way of noticing

and saying plainly

of not turning away

from hurt

you have offered them

to me       I am only

giving them back

if only I could show you

how very useless

they are not

The Truth the Dead Know // Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

All of Me // Mark Roper

So all of me, why not take all of me -
the one with so many certificates,
the failure, the one who can't cope,
the boy who never grew up,
the boy who grew up too early;

strong silent one, son-but-not-father,
one who believes, one who'd like to,
one who can't, one who'd never say,
he who never shows his feelings,
he who wears his heart on his sleeve;

man who cannot cry, inner child,
buffoon, kind man, the good boy,
only-as-good-as-his-next-joke boy,
the guy who at certain moments,
that other guy and all the rest;

him who lets it all flow over him,
him crippled by disappointment,
the liar, the cheat, stranger on the CV.
Mr. Polite, Mr. Charm, Mr. Bitter, Mr. Vague,
and all the others you'll say I've left out;

the one who likes you one who doesn't,
one who'll touch you the one who won't,
one who'll get carried away, one who'll watch,
the judge, the jury, the one on trial,
the innocent victim, the guilty as charged,

o all of me why not take all of me

Asking for Directions // Linda Gregg

We could have been mistaken for a married couple
riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
that last time we were together. I remember
looking out the window and praising the beauty
of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
with its back turned to us, the small neglected
stations of our history. I slept across your
chest and stomach without asking permission
because they were the last hours. There was
a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt
it deliberately. I woke early and asked you
to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
and I said we only had one hour and you came.
We didn't say much after that. In the station,
you took your things and handed me the vest,
then left as we had planned. So you would have
ten minutes to meet your family and leave.
I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
through the dirty window standing outside looking
up at me. We looked at each other without any
expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.
That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.

A Renewal // James Merrill

Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.

You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.

Maybe Very Happy // Jack Gilbert

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
"It's all right," he had to keep
saying, "I really won't mind."
Until the friend finally gave in.
"She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot."

By Small And Small: Midnight To Four A.M. // Jack Gilbert

For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.

In Blackwater Woods // Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

After working sixty hours again for what reason // Bob Hicock

The best job I had was moving a stone

from one side of the road to the other.

This required a permit which required

a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.

Yet because I hadn’t finished the job

I had no salary, and to pay the bribe

I took a job moving the stone

the other way. Because the official

wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit

for the second job. When I pointed out

that the work would be best completed

if I did nothing, he complimented   

my brain and wrote a letter

to my employer suggesting promotion

on stationery bearing the wings

of a raptor spread in flight

over a mountain smaller than the bird.

My boss, fearing my intelligence,

paid me to sleep on the sofa

and take lunch with the official

who required a bribe to keep anything

from being done. When I told my parents,

they wrote my brother to come home

from university to be slapped

on the back of the head. Dutifully,

he arrived and bowed to receive

his instruction, at which point

sense entered his body and he asked

what I could do by way of a job.

I pointed out there were stones

everywhere trying not to move,

all it took was a little gumption

to be the man who didn’t move them.

It was harder to explain the intricacies

of not obtaining a permit to not

do this. Just yesterday he got up

at dawn and shaved, as if the lack

of hair on his face has anything

to do with the appearance of food

on an empty table.

Secrecy // Margaret Atwood

Secrecy flows through you,
a different kind of blood.
It's as if you've eaten it
like a bad candy,
taken it into your mouth,
let it melt sweetly on your tongue,
then allowed it to slide down to your throat
like the reverse of uttering,
a word dissolved
into its glottals and sibilants,
a slow intake of breath -

and now it's in you, secrecy.
Ancient and vicious, luscious
as dark velvet.
It blooms in you
a poppy made of ink.

You can think of nothing else.
Once you have it, you want more.
what power it gives you!
Power of knowing without being known,
power of the stone door,
power of the iron veil,
power of the crushed fingers,
power of the drowned bones
crying out from the bottom of the well.

For Jenn // Andrea Gibson

At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon
and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.
I fought with my knuckles white as stars,
and left bruises the shape of Salem.
There are things we know by heart,
and things we don't.

At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.
I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,
but I could never make dying beautiful.
The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myself
veins are kite strings you can only cut free.
I suppose I love this life,

in spite of my clenched fist.

I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,
and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,
and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.

But my lungs remember
the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly
and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.
And I knew life would tremble
like the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,
like a prayer on a dying man's lips,
like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…
just take me just take me

Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,
the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.
We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,
but you still have to call it a birthday.
You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess
and hope she knows you can hit a baseball
further than any boy in the whole third grade

and I've been running for home
through the windpipe of a man who sings
while his hands playing washboard with a spoon
on a street corner in New Orleans
where every boarded up window is still painted with the words
We're Coming Back
like a promise to the ocean
that we will always keep moving towards the music,
the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.

Beauty, catch me on your tongue.
Thunder, clap us open.
The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.
Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona dessert,
then wake us washing the feet of pregnant women
who climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.
I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.
I know the heartbeat of his mother.

Don't cover your ears, Love.
Don't cover your ears, Life.
There is a boy writing poems in Central Park
and as he writes he moves
and his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,
and there are men playing chess in the December cold
who can't tell if the breath rising from the board
is their opponents or their own,
and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subway
swearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,
and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun
with strip malls and traffic and vendors
and one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it.

Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.
I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But every ocean has a shoreline
and every shoreline has a tide
that is constantly returning
to wake the songbirds in our hands,
to wake the music in our bones,
to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river
that has to run through the center of our hearts
to find its way home.

Invictus // William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.