*here at noon.md (1.8kB)

A Brief for the Defense

- Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

A Close Call

- Jack Gilbert

Dusk and the sea is thus and so. The cat
from two fields away crossing through the grapes.
It is so quiet I can hear the air
in the canebrake. The blond wheat darkens.
The glaze is gone from the bay and the heat lets go.
They have not lit the lamp at the other farm yet
and all at once I feel lonely. What a surprise.
But the air stills, the heat comes back
and I think I am all right again.

Barcarolle

- James Longenbach

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived lightly in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done?

Barking

- Jim Harrison

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

Bearing no flowers

- Fukuda Chiyo-ni, tr. Daniel C. Buchanan

Bearing no flowers,
I am free to toss madly
like the willow tree.

Block

- Linda Pastan

I place one word slowly
in front of the other, 
like learning to walk again
after an illness.
But the blank page
with its hospital corners
tempts me. 
I want to lie down
in its whiteness
and let myself drift
all the way back 
to silence. 

Cabbage

- Jim Harrison

If only I had the genius of a cabbage
or even an onion to grow myself
in their laminae from the holy core
that bespeaks the final shape. Nothing
is outside of us in this overinterpreted world.
Bruises are the mouths of our perceptions.
The gods who have died are able to come
to life again. It's their secret that they wish
to share if anyone knows that they exist.
Belief is a mood that weighs nothing on anyone's
scale but nevertheless exists. The moose
down the road wears the black cloak of a god
and the dead bird lifts from a bed of moss
in a shape totally unknown to us.
It's after midnight in Montana.
I test the thickness of the universe, its resilience
to carry us further than any of us wish to go.
We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,
which ends up as it will so utterly far from home

Choices

- Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,   
an unseen nest
where a mountain   
would be.

Each Thing Measured by the Same Sun

- Linda Gregg

Nothing to tell. Nothing to desire.
A silence that is not unhappy.
Who will guess I am not
backing away? I am pleased
every morning because the stones
are cold, then warm in the sun.
Sometimes wet. One, two, three days
in a row. Easy to say yes and no.
Realizing this power delicately.
Remembering the cow dying on the ground,
smelling dirt, seeing a mountain
in the distance one foot away.
Making a world in the mind.
The spirit still connected to the body.
Eyes open, uncovered to the bone.

Elegy for My Sadness

- Chen Chen

Maybe the centipede in the cellar

knows with its many disgusting legs

why I am sad. No one else does.

I want to be a sweetheart in every moment,

full of goats & xylophones, as charming

as a hill with a small village on it.

I want to be a village full of sweethearts,

as you are, every second of the day,

cooking me soups & drawing me pictures

& holding me, my inexplicable & elephant sadness,

with your infinite arms.

But isn’t it true, you are not

always why I am happy. & I promise

it is true, you are almost never why,

why I am sad. You are just

in the same room with me & my unsweet,

uncharming, completely

uninteresting sadness. I wish it could

unbelong itself from me, unstick

from my face. Who invented the word

“ennui”? A sad Frenchman?

A centipede? They should’ve never

been born. They should’ve seen me

in Paris, a sad teenage

exchange student. I was so sad

& so teenaged, one day my host sister

gripped my hand hard & even harder

said, SOIS HEUREUX.

BE HAPPY. & miraculously,

I wasn’t sad anymore.

All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister.

See, I was angry in Paris, which is clearly

not allowed. One can be sad in Paris (I was)

& one can be in love in Paris (I was not),

but angry? Angry in Paris?

Now, I am in love—with you!—though sometimes

terribly sad for no good reason, & not so much

angry as guilty when you say to me,

Don’t cry, don’t be sad, as if my sadness

could sink this room, this apartment, this

whole city not Paris. But does my sadness

always need to be your sadness?

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness

because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it

by kissing you again & again while neither of us

can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes

miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss

I think every single dead person

in every part of the world must crave

with violent impossibility.

filmed at noon.mp4 (333kB)

go to the limits of your longing

- Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Goodtime Jesus

- James Tate

Jesus got up one day a little later than
usual.  He had been dreaming so deep
there was nothing left in his head. What
was it? A nightmare, dead bodies
walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't
afraid of that. It was a beautiful day.
How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I
do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I
love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

Gratitude

- Patrick Dundon

Today I think I am healed. I do not want
what I do not have. Even the lover who sleeps
across town—one of my hairs trapped behind his ear—
feels near to me. Sure, my mother did not hold me enough,
too tempted by the specter of satiety only alcohol can bring.
But I do not resent her. Even she is wild and shining
in the palace of memory, my mind’s glass castle.
Last night I woke from a dream of a terrible storm
to the sounds of a terrible storm: wind rattling the windows,
knocking branches against the roof. No one was there
to hold me, and I was happy. A little curtain of satisfaction
fell over my face while I lay there, wanting nothing.
Jonathan asks me to send him a poem about gratitude.
At first, nothing comes to mind. All poems, I think,
are about lack: language’s inability to capture the real.
So I send him a poem about contentment:
gratitude’s simpler sibling, the privileged child
who can rest on their laurels without self-knowledge.
To thank takes work. You must risk foolishness to do it.
In the morning, the storm had passed, only a few
sporadic clouds releasing the last of their burden,
punctuated by sun, steam lifting off the concrete.
Was I thankful for this, or was my emptiness
merely glossed over, inoculated, fed?
I opened the curtains as wide as they would go,
inviting all the possible light. Jonathan thanked me
for the poem. We both knew it was not what he wanted.
In the end, the speaker sees birds rising up
from gnarled trees and thinks, as they fly off,
I need to go there too. When really, the birds
should exist without the complication of need.
I tell Jonathan I will find a new poem, one
without desire, or, better yet, without birds at all.

Grief

- Victoria Chang

Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It
died trying to reunite with other lesser
deaths. Each morning I lay out my
children’s clothing to cover their grief.
The grief remains but is changed by
what it is covered with. A picture of
oblivion is not the same as oblivion.
My grief is not the same as my pain. My
mother was a mathematician so I tried
to calculate my grief. My father was an
engineer so I tried to build a box around
my grief, along with a small wooden
bed that grief could lie down on. The
texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing
me to speak about nothing. If you cut
out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,
no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it
with a blue frame, place it faceup on
the floor of an empty museum with an
open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

Grief 2

- Richard Brostoff

Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea
the water disappears into itself,
hauling an ocean in.

Vortex, how you repeat
a single gesture,
come round to find only

yourself, a cup full of questions,
perhaps some curl of wisdom,
a bit of flung salt.

You hold an absence
at your center,
as if it were a life.

Hat Angel

- Michael Burkard

What could she say? Little money,
little chance for work, a drunk for
a husband she no longer lover,
and now she leaves her winter hat
on the train. Trains feel vast.
Devon's room—not so vast. But it
doesn't move, so she's sitting
there before he comes home smashed
and angry, or maybe he will just
fall down. She reads a few pages
of a book half-backwards. A
hopeless attempt to snap to, to
have something in this life pull
her out of this, like the moon,
the moon's a puller. Like the train:
the train's a puller of forgetfulness
and power and destination far into
the reaches of the forests. What
could she say? Oh she can talk to
herself, but now she's got to get
out, and words won't do this. Al-
most as it words make you stay more.
She doesn't even have a hat to reach
for so can she make the door? Oh
prayer for the hat to be a puller
for her even as it circles the city
or enters someone else's flat, hat
have an arm to keep her from his fist,
moon and train, moon and train, moon
and train: pull her, pull her, pull her.

How to Be Perfect

- Ron Padgett

          Everything is perfect, dear friend.
                       —KEROUAC

Get some sleep.

Don't give advice.

Take care of your teeth and gums.

Don't be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don't be afraid, for

instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone

you love will suddenly drop dead.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute for 20 straight minutes

four or five times a week doing anything you enjoy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room

before you save the world. Then save the world.

Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression

of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.

Make eye contact with a tree.

Be skeptical about all opinions, but try to see some value in each of

them.

Dress in a way that pleases both you and those around you.

Do not speak quickly.

Learn something every day. (Dzien dobre!)

Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.

Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't

forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length

and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball

collection.

Be loyal.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Design your activities so that they show a pleasing balance

and variety.

Be kind to old people, even when they are obnoxious. When you

become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at

them when they call you Grandpa. They are your grandchildren!

Live with an animal.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

If you need help, ask for it.

Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural.

If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off.

Plan your day so you never have to rush.

Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if you

have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want.

Do not waste money you could be giving to those who need it.

Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far

more defective than you imagined.

When you borrow something, return it in an even better condition.

As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal

ones.

Look at that bird over there.

After dinner, wash the dishes.

Calm down.

Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have

expressed a desire to kill you.

Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want to.

Meditate on the spiritual. Then go a little further, if you feel like it.

What is out (in) there?

Sing, every once in a while.

Be on time, but if you are late do not give a detailed and lengthy

excuse.

Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory.

Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't.

Walk upstairs.

Do not practice cannibalism.

Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do

anything to make it impossible.

Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week.

Keep your windows clean.

Extirpate all traces of personal ambitiousness.

Don't use the word extirpate too often.

Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not possible, go

to another one.

If you feel tired, rest.

Grow something.

Do not wander through train stations muttering, "We're all going to

die!"

Count among your true friends people of various stations of life.

Appreciate simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of chewing, the

pleasure of warm water running down your back, the pleasure of a

cool breeze, the pleasure of falling asleep.

Do not exclaim, "Isn't technology wonderful!"

Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day.

Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel even

older. Which is depressing.

Do one thing at a time.

If you burn your finger, put it in cold water immediately. If you bang

your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for twenty

minutes. You will be surprised by the curative powers of coldness and

gravity.

Learn how to whistle at earsplitting volume.

Be calm in a crisis. The more critical the situation, the calmer you

should be.

Enjoy sex, but don't become obsessed with it. Except for brief periods

in your adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age.

Contemplate everything's opposite.

If you're struck with the fear that you've swum out too far in the

ocean, turn around and go back to the lifeboat.

Keep your childish self alive.

Answer letters promptly. Use attractive stamps, like the one with a

tornado on it.

Cry every once in a while, but only when alone. Then appreciate

how much better you feel. Don't be embarrassed about feeling better.

Do not inhale smoke.

Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the

street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped

in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.

Be good.

Walk down different streets.

Backwards.

Remember beauty, which exists, and truth, which does not. Notice

that the idea of truth is just as powerful as the idea of beauty.

Stay out of jail.

In later life, become a mystic.

Use Colgate toothpaste in the new Tartar Control formula.

Visit friends and acquaintances in the hospital. When you feel it is

time to leave, do so.

Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others.

Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time.

Read and reread great books.

Dig a hole with a shovel.

In winter, before you go to bed, humidify your bedroom.

Know that the only perfect things are a 300 game in bowling and a

27-batter, 27-out game in baseball.

Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to drink,

say, "Water, please."

Ask "Where is the loo?" but not "Where can I urinate?"

Be kind to physical objects.

Beginning at age forty, get a complete "physical" every few years

from a doctor you trust and feel comfortable with.

Don't read the newspaper more than once a year.

Learn how to say "hello," "thank you," and "chopsticks"

in Mandarin.

Belch and fart, but quietly.

Be especially cordial to foreigners.

See shadow puppet plays and imagine that you are one of the

characters. Or all of them.

Take out the trash.

Love life.

Use exact change.

When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window.

I Guess By Now I Thought I’d Be Done With Shame

- Franny Choi

    but I opened my coat to prove a point
    and kept coming home with colds.
    I thought I was done stuffing fists
    in my mouth to mute the sound.
    Done lying about what trails my throat
    had charted. I practiced looking tall
    men in the eye, spoke loudly,
    pronounced every ‘R.’
    I chopped wood at midnight.
    I left the shower and kept
    singing. I sang about my body
    like I was proud. I was proud.
    I was – My legs churned the poolwater.
    I clamped silicone and didn’t cry.
    Learned the names of oils. Asked
    for another finger. I cried. Swore
    to drown before saying sorry.
    I sang about my death
    like I was over it. Ground
    my face into the soil, like I was ready
    to shave it off. I stopped shaving.
    Told a joke in the voice of a stupid
    girl. I waved a flag of my own bones.
    I threw my sordid liver at a man –
    think fast – then acted surprised,
    again, when he caught it in his teeth.
    Not everyone who speaks this way
    is lying. Somewhere,
    there is a version of me that isn’t neck-
    deep in her invented filth.
    Somewhere a woman is walking
    barefoot through the woods,
    trailing white linen, walking without
    a dog snapping at her heels.
    Both of us are singing.
    Both of us are bragging
    in the past tense.
    One of us is still here.
    That much, I guess,
    at least, is true.

I’ve known grief

- Gregory Orr

I’ve known grief. I don’t
Take it lightly. Know how
It gnaws your bones hollow
So you’re afraid to stand up,
Afraid the lightest wind will
Knock you over, blow you away.

But maybe the wind is supposed
To blow right through you.
Maybe you’re a tree in winter
And your poem translates
That cold wind into song.
     
I want to go back
To the beginning.
We all do.
                I think:
Hurt won’t be there.

But I’m wrong.
Where the water
Bubbles up
At the spring:
Isn’t that a wound?

LITTLE TRAVELER

- Michael Burkard

Let me bend 
to repair your shoe 
and the huge hallway 
within. From another point 
in my being I come to you 
and not as a straight line
                    either.

LOST

- DAVID WAGONER

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you. 

Love

- Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass (translator)

Love means to learn to look at yourself 
The way one looks at distant things 
For you are only one thing among many. 
And whoever sees that way heals his heart, 
Without knowing it, from various ills-- 
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. 

Then he wants to use himself and things 
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness. 
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves: 
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

Missed Time

- Ha Jin

My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning —
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.

Moments

- Mary Oliver

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.

Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?

There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.

Night Bird

- Danusha Laméris

Hear me: sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter,
by which I mean not the days we have left,
but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth
and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see
a therapist who mentioned that, at play,
he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain.
Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.
Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.

Nights in the Neighborhood

- Linda Gregg

I carry joy as a choir sings,
but quietly as the dark
carols. To keep the wind away
so the hidden ones will come
out into the street and add
themselves to this array of
stars, constellations and moon.
I notice the ones in pain
shine more than the others.
It’s so they can be found,
I think. Found and harbored.

OUR REAL WORK

- Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Peckin

- Shel Silverstein

The saddest thing I ever did see
Was a woodpecker peckin' at a plastic tree.
He looks at me, and "Friend," says he,
"Things ain't as sweet as they used to be."

Porcupine Meditation

- Margaret Atwood

I used to have tricks, dodges, a whole sackful.
I could outfox anyone,
double back, cover my tracks,
walk backwards, the works.
I left it somewhere, that knack
of running, that good luck.

Now I have only
one trick left: head down, spikes out,
brain tucked in.
I can roll up:
thistle as animal, a flower of quills,
that’s about it.

I lie in the grass and watch the sunlight pleating
the skin on the backs of my hands
as if I were a toad, squashed and drying.

I don’t even wade through spring water
to cover my scent.
I can’t be bothered.

I squat and stink, thinking:
peace and quiet are worth something.
Here I am, dogs,
nose me over,
go away sneezing, snouts full of barbs
hooking their way to your brain.
Now you’ve got some
of my pain. Much good may it do you.

PRAYER

- Michael Burkard

My dog 
who disappeared, 
may you sleep soundly 
in the form of this 
cat I found, have 
taken in to heal, 
address as being in 
league with you and 
your form, until all 
or much is mended.

Scientific Method

- James Tadd Adcox

Picture the ocean. No.
Picture the entire thing,
all at once.
You are not doing it.
It’s okay.
One day something terrible will happen,
and I will not be prepared.

Special Problems in Vocabulary

- Tony Hoagland

There is no single particular noun
for the way a friendship,
stretched over time, grows thin,
then one day snaps with a popping sound.

No verb for accidentally
breaking a thing
while trying to get it open
—a marriage, for example.

No particular phrase for
losing a book
in the middle of reading it,
and therefore never learning the end.

There is no expression, in English, at least,
for avoiding the sight
of your own body in the mirror,
for disliking the touch

of the afternoon sun,
for walking into the flatlands and dust
that stretch out before you
after your adventures are done.

No adjective for gradually speaking less and less,
because you have stopped being able
to say the one thing that would
break your life loose from its grip.

Certainly no name that one can imagine
for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window,
in spade-shaped leaves

spinning on their stems,
working themselves into
a pale-green, vegetable blur.

No word for waking up one morning
and looking around,
because the mysterious spirit

that drives all things
seems to have returned,
and is on your side again.

Still Life with Sky, Coffee, Tulips, Anna Karenina, and God

- Shannon Pratson

Grocery store tulips. Empty coffee cup
in the sink. Morning sky smeared
pink, like the inside
of a salmon.

I have been lonely in so many cities
and now I am lonely in absence
of the city, the crowd at the Met
that made me small and whole
as a seed.

How do other people pray?

summer sky.mp4 (373kB)

Tea

- Leila Chatti

Five times a day, I make tea. I do this
because I like the warmth in my hands, like the feeling
of self-directed kindness. I’m not used to it—
warmth and kindness, both—so I create my own
when I can. It’s easy. You just pour
water into a kettle and turn the knob and listen
for the scream. I do this
five times a day. Sometimes, when I’m pleased,
I let out a little sound. A poet noticed this
and it made me feel I might one day
properly be loved. Because no one is here
to love me, I make tea for myself
and leave the radio playing. I must
remind myself I am here, and do so
by noticing myself: my feet are cold
inside my socks, they touch the ground, my stomach
churns, my heart stutters, in my hands I hold
a warmth I make. I come from
a people who pray five times a day
and make tea. I admire the way they do
both. How they drop to the ground
wherever they are. Drop
pine nuts and mint sprigs in a glass.
I think to care for the self
is a kind of prayer. It is a gesture
of devotion toward what is not always beloved
or believed. I do not always believe
in myself, or love myself, I am sure
there are times I am bad or gone
or lying. In another’s mouth, tea often means gossip,
but sometimes means truth. Despite
the trope, in my experience my people do not lie
for pleasure, or when they should,
even when it might be a gesture
of kindness. But they are kind. If you were
to visit, a woman would bring you
a tray of tea. At any time of day.
My people love tea so much
it was once considered a sickness. Their colonizers
tried, as with any joy, to snuff it out. They feared a love
so strong one might sell or kill their other
loves for leaves and sugar. Teaism
sounds like a kind of faith
I’d buy into, a god I wouldn’t fear. I think now I truly believe
I wouldn’t kill anyone for love,
not even myself—most days
I can barely get out of bed. So I make tea.
I stand at the window while I wait.
My feet are cold and the radio plays its little sounds.
I do the small thing I know how to do
to care for myself. I am trying to notice joy,
which means survive. I do this all day, and then the next.

The Hurting Kind

- Ada Limón

Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort 
of horse he had growing up. He said, 

Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it 
rubbed the bones in the ribs all wrong. 

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper 
from a long line of weepers. 

I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

The plum you're going to eat next summer

- Gayle Brandeis

The plum you’re going to eat next summer
doesn’t exist yet; its potential
lives inside a tree you’ll never see
in an orchard you’ll never see, will be touched
by a certain number of water droplets
before it reaches you, by certain angles
of light, by a finite amount of bugs
and dust motes and hands
you’ll never know. The plum you are
going to eat next summer will gather
sugar, gather mass, will harden
at its center so it can soften toward
your mouth. The plum
you’re going to eat next
summer doesn’t know
you exist. The plum you are
going to eat next summer
is growing just for you.

The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

- Mary Oliver

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
that we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

The song goes

- Dunya Mikhail, trans. Elizabeth Winslow

The song goes:
If the earth were square
we could curl up and hide in its corners
but the earth is round
so we must face it.

The Untrustworthy Speaker

- Louise Glück

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.

I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted.

It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they’re wasted —

I never see myself,
standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand.
That’s why I can’t account
for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless,
we’re the cripples, the liars;
we’re the ones who should be factored out
in the interest of truth.

When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas
red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
to the older daughter, block her out:
when a living thing is hurt like that,
in its deepest workings,
all function is altered.

That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
is also a wound to the mind.

The world comes into the poem

- Gregory Orr

The world comes into the poem,
The poem comes into the world.
Reciprocity-it all comes down
To that.

As with lovers:
When it’s right you can’t say
Who is kissing whom.

Think of Others

- Mahmoud Darwish

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food). 

As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).

As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).

As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).

As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).

As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).

As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).

Time to shut up

- Gregory Orr

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.

To The Spider In the Crevice:Behind The Toilet Door

- Janet Sutherland

i have left you four flies
three are in the freezer next to the joint of beef
the other is wrapped in christmas paper
tied with a pink ribbon
beside the ironing table in the hall
should you need to contact me
in an emergency
the number’s in the book
by the telephone.

p.s. i love you

tree

- jane hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Untitled

- James Baldwin

Lord,
      when you send the rain
      think about it, please,
      a little?
Do
      not get carried away
      by the sound of falling water,
      the marvelous light
      on the falling water.
  I
      am beneath that water.
      It falls with great force
      and the light
Blinds
      me to the light.

Untitled 2

- Franz Wright

Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child

We Should Be Well Prepared

- Mary Oliver

The way the plovers cry goodbye.
The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill with open eye.
The way the leaves fall, and then there’s the long wait.
The way someone says we must never meet again.
The way mold spots the cake,
The way sourness overtakes the cream.
The way the river water rushes by, never to return.
The way the days go by, never to return.
The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.