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Wednesday, April 20, 2016
In the Middle of This Century
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In the middle of this century we turned to each other
With half faces and full eyes
like an ancient Egyptian picture
And for a short while.
I stroked your hair
In the opposite direction to your journey,
We called to each other,
Like calling out the names of towns
Where nobody stops
Along the route.
Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
In the mingling of ourselves, you and I,
Lovely is the world.
The earth drinks men and their loves
Like wine,
To forget.
It can't.
And like the contours of the Judean hills,
We shall never find peace.
In the middle of this century we turned to each other,
I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me,
The leather straps for a long journey
Already tightening across my chest.
I spoke in praise of your mortal hips,
You spoke in praise of my passing face,
I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,
I touched your flesh, prophet of your end,
I touched your hand which has never slept,
I touched your mouth which may yet sing.
Dust from the desert covered the table
At which we did not eat
But with my finger I wrote on it
The letters of your name.
[love is more thicker than forget]
by e. e. cummings
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
Thursday, April 14, 2016
What I mean When I say Farmhouse
Geffrey Davis
Time’s going has ebbed the
moorings
to the memories that make this
city-kid
Part farm-boy. Until a smell close enough to
the sweet-musk of horse tunes my
ears back
To tree frogs blossoming after a
country rain.
I’m back among snakes like slugs
wedged
In ankle-high grass, back inside
that small
eternity spent searching for soft
ground, straining
Not to spill the water-logged heft
of a drowned
barn cat carried in the shallow
scoop of a shovel.
And my brother, large on the
stairs, crying.
each shift in the winds of remembering
renders me
immediate again, like ancient
valleys reignited
by more lightning. If only I could settle on
the porch of waiting and listening,
near the big maple bent by children and heat,
just before the sweeping threat of summer
thunderstorms. We have our places for
loneliness—that loaded
asking of the body.
my mother stands beside the kitchen window, her hands
no longer in constant
motion. And my father
walks along the tired fence, watching horses
and clouds roll down against the dying
light—
I know he wants to become one or the other.
I want to jar the tenderness of seasons,
to crawl deep into the moment. I’ve come
to write less fear into the boy running
through the half-dark. I’ve come for the boy.
What it Look Like
By
Terrance Hayes
Dear Ol' Dirty
Bastard: I too like it raw,
I don't especially
care for Duke Ellington
at a birthday party. I
care less and less
about the shapes of
shapes because forms
change and nothing is
more durable than feeling.
My uncle used the
money I gave him
to buy a few vials of
what looked like candy
after the party where
my grandma sang
in an outfit that was
obviously made
for a West African
king. My motto is
Never mistake what it
is for what it looks like.
My generosity, for
example, is mostly a form
of vanity. A bandanna
is a useful handkerchief,
but a handkerchief is
a useless-ass bandanna.
This only looks like a
footnote in my report
concerning the
party. Trill stands for what is
truly real though it may be hidden by the houses
just over the hills
between us, by the hands
on the bars between
us. That picture
of my grandmother with
my uncle
when he was a baby is
not trill. What it is
is the feeling felt
seeing garbagemen drift
along the predawn
avenues, a sloppy slow rain
taking its time to the
coast. Milquetoast
is not trill, nor is
bouillabaisse. Bakku-shan
is Japanese for a
woman who is beautiful
only when viewed from
behind. Like I was saying,
my motto is Never
mistake what it looks like
for what it is else you end up like that Negro
Othello. (Was Othello
a Negro?) Don't lie
about who you are
sometimes and then realize
the lie is true? You
are blind to your power, Brother
Bastard, like the king
who wanders his kingdom
searching for the
king. And that's okay.
No one will tell you
you are the king.
No one really wants a
king anyway.
Friday, February 05, 2016
Superbly Situated
By Robert Hershon
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things
i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed
and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed
how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you
part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses
just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them
but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that
can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat
we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve
A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention
BY YEHUDA AMICHAI
TRANSLATED BY ASSIA GUTMANN
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons.
All of them.
They dismantle us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers.
All of them.
A pity.
We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Love Worn
BY LITA HOOPER
In a tavern on the Southside of Chicago
a man sits with his wife. From their corner booth
each stares at strangers just beyond the other's shoulder,
nodding to the songs of their youth. Tonight they will not fight.
Thirty years of marriage sits between them
like a bomb. The woman shifts
then rubs her right wrist as the man recalls the day
when they sat on the porch of her parents' home.
Even then he could feel the absence of something
desired or planned. There was the smell
of a freshly tarred driveway, the slow heat,
him offering his future to folks he did not know.
And there was the blooming magnolia tree in the distance—
its oversized petals like those on the woman's dress,
making her belly even larger, her hands
disappearing into the folds.
When the last neighbor or friend leaves their booth
he stares at her hands, which are now closer to his,
remembers that there had always been some joy. Leaning
closer, he believes he can see their daughter in her eyes.
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Humanity I Love You by E.E. Cummings
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
Thursday, July 16, 2015
There is a Place within you
Where you have never been
Damaged or diminished
A Place where there dwells
Serenity,
Courage,
confidence,
Forgiveness and
The Endless
Adventure of
Imagination."
-John O'Donohue, Irish Poet Mystic bard
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Lord is Not a Word by Christian Wiman
Lord Is Not a Word
BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Lord is not a word.
Song is not a salve.
Suffer the child, who lived
on sunlight and solitude.
Savor the man, craving
earth like an aftertaste.
To discover in one's hand
two local stones the size
of a dead man's eyes
saves no one, but to fling them
with a grace you did not know
you knew, to bring them
skimming homing
over blue, is to discover
the river from which they came.
Mild merciful amnesia
through which I've moved
as through a blue atmosphere
of almost and was,
how is it now,
like ruins unearthed by ruin,
my childhood should rise?
Lord, suffer me to sing
these wounds by which I am made
and marred, savor this creature
whose aloneness you ease and are.
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