Rain Towards Morning by Elizabeth Bishop

Rain Towards Morning

The great light cage has broken up in the air, 

freeing, I think, about a million birds 

whose wild ascending shadows will not be back, 

and all the wires come falling down. 

No cage, no frightening birds; the rain 

is brightening now. The face is pale 

that tried the puzzle of their prison 

and solved it with an unexpected kiss, 

whose freckled unsuspected hands alit. 

Remember by Christina Rossetti

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Three Cranes by Richie Hofmann

Three Cranes

1.

Wading low through marsh and grass,

quick and cautious, the crane, too,

knows this: there is a freedom

in submitting to another. Cranes mate

for life.  With necks outstretched,

they take flight, a double-arrow’s stab

of silver, released and then gone.

I have searched for nourishment

in you, like a long black beak

in the earth.  How was I to know

what I would find there?  Every night,

we shrieked our presence to each other,

desire or grief lacquering us onto our lives

like birds on a paneled screen.

 

2.

All winter long, the men built

another bridge, stacking slabs of metal

and concrete near the barrier island

where we lived.  I was worried we had fallen

from each other.  Silent on the beach,

we watched machines hoisted on and off

the earth. Standing one-legged in the marsh:

a crane, all steel and orange light,

binding the horizon. 

What will become of us? I almost said.

Gulls wove in and out of the cables,

shrieking up and down within its stacks,

in unison, I noticed, with our breath.

It almost looked like a living thing. 

 

3.

Lying on my stomach, reading

Crane’s letters again, I felt a hand

behind me.  Orange light pressed

the window.  The hand that touched

my shoulder was yours (“I know now

there is such a thing as indestructibility”).

Your confessor, I listened for your breath

(“the cables enclosing us and pulling

us upward”), but felt only the ceiling fan,

and traffic, somewhere, chafing against

a wet street.  Then, your lips on my neck

(“I think the sea has thrown itself upon me

and been answered”) before closing the book 

and turning my body under yours. 

Milk by Edward Hirsch

Milk

My mother wouldn't be cowed into nursing

and decided that formula was healthier

than the liquid from her breasts.

And so I never sucked a single drop

from the source, a river dried up.

It was always bottled for me.

But one night in my mid-thirties

in a mirrored room off Highway 59

a woman who had a baby daughter

turned to me with an enigmatic smile

and cupped my face in her chapped hands

and tipped her nipple into my mouth.

This happened a long time ago in another city

and it is wrong to tell about it.

It was infantile to bring it up in therapy.

And yet it is one of those moments—

misplaced, involuntary—that swim up

out of the past without a conscience:

She lifts my face and I taste it—

the sudden spurting nectar,

the incurable sweetness that is life.

Suppose your Father was a Redbird by Pattiann Rogers

Suppose your Father was a Redbird

Suppose his body was the meticulous layering

Of graduated down which you studied early,

Rows of feathers increasing in size to the hard-splayed

Wine-gloss tips of his outer edges.

Suppose, before you could speak, you watched

The slow spread of his wing over and over,

The appearance of that invisible appendage,

The unfolding transformation of his body to the airborne.

Then today you might be the only one able to see

The breast of a single red bloom

Five miles away across an open field.

The modification of your eye might have enabled you

To spot a red moth hanging on an oak branch

In the exact center of the Aurorean Forest.

And you could define for us, "hearing red in the air,"

As you predict the day pollen from the poppy

Will blow in from the valley.

Naturally you would picture your faith arranged

In filamented principles moving from pink

To crimson at the final quill. And the red tremble

Of your dream you might explain as the shimmer

Of his back lost over the sea at dawn.

Your sudden visions you might interpret as the uncreasing

Of heaven, the bones of the sky spread,

The conceptualized wing of the mind untangling.

Imagine the intensity of your revelation

The night the entire body of a star turns red

And you watch it as it rushes in flames

Across the black, down into the hills.

If your father was a redbird,

Then you would be obligated to try to understand

What it is you recognize in the sun

As you study it again this evening

Pulling itself and the sky in dark red

Over the edge of the earth.

Don’t Write History As Poetry by Mahmoud Darwish

Don’t Write History As Poetry

Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is

The historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
Chills when he names his victims and doesn’t listen
To the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
Of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
Intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
Has no compassion so that we can long for our
Beginning, and no intention so that we can know what’s ahead
And what’s behind . . . and it has no rest stops by
The railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
Toward what time has done to us over there, and what
We’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is neither logical nor intuitive that we can break
What is left of our myth about happy times,
Nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
Of judgment day. It is in us and outside us . . . and a mad
Repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us . . . Perhaps
History wasn’t born as we desired, because
The Human Being never existed?
Philosophers and artists passed through there . . .
And the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
Then passed through there . . . and the poor believed
In sayings about paradise and waited there . . .
And gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
And passed through there. And history has no
Time for contemplation, history has no mirror
And no bare face. It is unreal reality
Or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it.

Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!

(Translated by Fady Joudah)

 

 

Correctives by Don Paterson

Correctives

The shudder in my son’s left hand

he cures with one touch from his right,

two fingertips laid feather-light

to still his pen. He understands

the whole man must be his own brother

for no man is himself alone;

though some of us have never known

the one hand’s kindness to the other.

Publication Date by Franz Wright

Publication Date

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kind-hearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the
     others are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico Garcia Lorca
risen from the dead–
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry. 

What Matters by May Swenson

What Matters

It may be that it doesn’t matter

who or what or why you love.

(Maybe it matters when, and for how long.)

Of course, what matters is how strong.

Maybe the forbidden, the unbelievable,

or what doesn’t respond—

what grabs all and gives nothing—

what is ghoul or ghost,

what proves you a fool,

shrinks you, shortens your life,

if you love it, it doesn’t matter.

Only the love matters—

the stubbornness, or the helplessness.

At a certain chemical instant

in early youth, love’s trigger is cocked.

Whatever moves into focus

behind the cross hairs, magnifies,

is marked for target, injected with

magic shot. But the target doesn’t matter.

Ashes of Life by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ashes of Life

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;

Eat I must, and sleep I will,—and would that night were here!

But ah!—to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!

Would that it were day again!—with twilight near!

Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do;

This or that or what you will is all the same to me;

But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through,—

There's little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me,—and the neighbors knock and borrow,

And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—

And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.

There’s this little street and this little house.

 

Let’s Meet in a Restaurant by Marge Piercy

Let’s Meet in a Restaurant

Is food the enemy?

Giving a dinner party has become

an ordeal. I lie awake the night

before figuring how to produce

a feast that is vegan, gluten free,

macrobiotic, avoiding all acidic

fruit and tomatoes, wine, all nuts,

low carb and still edible

Are beetles okay for vegans?

Probably not. Forget chocolate

ants or fried grasshoppers.

Now my brains are cooked.

Finally seven o’clock arrives

and I produce the perfect meal.

At each plate for supper, a bowl

of cleanly washed pebbles. Enjoy!

Blue by Philip Levine

Blue

Dawn. I was just walking

back across the tracks

toward the loading docks

when I saw a kid climb

out of a boxcar, his blue

jacket trailing like a skirt,

and make for the fence. He’d

hoisted a wet wooden flat

of fresh fish on his right

shoulder, and he tottered

back and forth like someone

with one leg shorter than

the other. I took my glasses

off and wiped them on the tails

of my dirty shirt, and all

I could see where the smudges

of the men wakening one

at a time and reaching for

both the sky and the earth.

My brother in law, Joseph,

the railroad cop, who talked

all day and night of beer

and pussy, Joseph in his suit

shouting out my name, Pheel!

Pheel! waiving a blue bandana

and pointing behind me to

where the kid cleared the fence

and the weak March sun

had topped the car barns,

to a pale, watery sky, wisps

of dirty smoke, and the day.

To My Heart, on Sunday by Wisława Szymborska

To My Heart, on Sunday

Thank you, my heart:

you don’t dawdle, you keep going

with no flattery or reward,

just from inborn diligence.

You get seventy credits a minute.

Each of your systoles

shoves a little boat

to open sea

to sail around the world.

Thank you, my heart:

time after time

you pluck me, separate even in sleep,

out of the whole.

You make sure I don’t dream my dreams

up to that final flight,

no wings required.

Thank you, my heart:

I woke up again

and even though it’s Sunday,

the day of rest,

the usual preholiday rush

continues underneath my ribs.

(Translated by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

First Morning by Garth Greenwell

First Morning

I woke up to piss, and then to wake

the kids it was my charge to wake. 

In the little bowl of the field of our camp

the dozens of tents rose weirdly up

in the lingering low fog like stationary sails,

like ships in opening ice. The sun’s

slit eye ghosted distant from the east;

the made world glanced at the unmade.

Awake before me, in nothing but shorts, 

towel slung slack across his neck, 

the small boy danced an awkward sideways

dance across the just unfrozen ground,

his bare feet locked in fog, his skin—

musculature lithe beneath it sliding

liquid and adult—bristling with cold, 

white gleaming lunar in the morning air.

Behind me, a body turned in its tent, 

then another, then from inside the tarps

the waking voices of adolescent boys.

I imagined them cycling the intimate air

moist with sleep, and their breathing skin 

bare, and some of them hard, and some

sweating incommunicable dreams—

Turning from them, and from my own response,

I wandered toward woods that stretched

the previous night impenetrably far,

now a band of trees just three or four deep—

and at the back of it a makeshift fence,

three lines of wire stapled into bark, 

ridiculous, forceless, yet gathered there

six cows stood worshipful and blank.

Coming to them quietly I watched 

their pastoral loveliness melt away 

to uninflectable abjection: legs and stomachs slick

with excrement; nostrils caked with mucus

and flies, flaring at my scent; their own scent,

stinging and sweet at once, stomach-

churningly strong; and piercing each ear, 

sole adornment, an orange plastic disc

counting them out for slaughter. Until some fine

invisible line between us snapped

they let me close; then, disturbed, leaned

sudden as a body back. I took

a small red apple from my jacket and reached 

my arm out over the fence and stood,

the waxed skin gleaming dully in my hand, 

unclear emblem of something generous

and empty and good. The closest one, 

the least afraid, slowly stretched its neck 

to sniff my hand, then pulled back its lips

and took the fruit in its teeth, alien eyes locked 

humanly ahead. What did I stand there

wanting? The slack jaws worked

the white flesh referenceless, grinding 

a momentary sweetness out.

London by Tishani Doshi

London

Waking beside a broad and empty face

I lie to him about what moves me

And it is nothing to do with wooden farmhouses,

Cathedrals, or damp grass.

It is nothing to do with what brought me to him,

Or the perpetual blue sky I’ve given up

To be here, in Rathbone Place,

His bed of white, ragged spaces.

That lifeless life, the thick body he carries around

Under his skin – What have these to do

With our meeting in the middle of listless winter

Full of drink and desperateness?

I pick up my uncleanliness, six black pieces

Of clothing and slip into the morning.

London at 7am is grey, unmoving –

A city in slow recovery.

It is only ache after all that takes us anywhere –

So I return to a borrowed room, 

A collection of things of mine, resembling

Nothing and stubbornly strange to me.

All night there has been such clattering and heaving.

The wind outside is full of noise and raging.

But it is quiet here, by myself, alone

With ideas of love and not much else.

Flamingo Watching by Kay Ryan

Flamingo Watching

Wherever the flamingo goes,

she brings a city’s worth

of furbelows. She seems

unnatural by nature—

too vivid and peculiar

a structure to be pretty,

and flexible to the point

of oddity. Perched on

those legs, anything she does

seems like an act. Descending

on her egg or draping her head

along her back, she’s

too exact and sinuous

to convince an audience

she’s serious. The natural elect,

they think, would be less pink,

less able to relax their necks,

less flamboyant in general.

They privately expect that it’s some

poorly jointed bland grey animal

with mitts for hands

whom God protects.

In Memory Of My Mother by Patrick Kavanagh

In Memory Of My Mother

I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily

Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday -
You meet me and you say:
'Don't forget to see about the cattle - '
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life -
And I see us meeting at the end of a town

On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.

O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us  - eternally.

The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

    Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   

    For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and   

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped   

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass   

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth   

Until the next town, new and nondescript,   

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

    The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys   

The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls   

I took for porters larking with the mails,   

And went on reading. Once we started, though,   

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

    Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   

More promptly out next time, more curiously,   

And saw it all again in different terms:   

The fathers with broad belts under their suits   

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;   

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.   

    Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define   

Just what it saw departing: children frowned   

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

    The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast   

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say

    I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   

And someone running up to bowl—and none   

Thought of the others they would never meet   

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   

    Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   

Travelling coincidence; and what it held   

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

New Hotel by Adam Zagajewski

New Hotel

Krakow

In February the poplars are even slimmer

than in summer, frozen through. My family

spread across the earth, beneath the earth,

in different countries, poems, paintings.

Noon, I’m on Na Groblach Square.

I sometimes came to see my aunt

and uncle here (partly out of duty).

They’d stopped complaining about their fate,

the system, but their faces looked like

an empty secondhand bookshop.

Now someone else lives in that apartment,

strange people, the scent of a strange life.

A new hotel was built nearby,

bright rooms, breakfasts doubtless comme il faut,

juices, coffee, toast, glass, concrete,

amnesia—and suddenly, I don’t know why,

a moment of penetrating joy.

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

Homosexuality by Henri Cole

Homosexuality

First I saw the round bill, like a bud;

then the sooty crested head, with avernal eyes

flickering, distressed, then the peculiar

long neck wrapping and unwrapping itself,

like pity or love, when I removed the stovepipe

cover of the bedroom chimney to free

what was there and a duck crashed into the room

(I am here in this fallen state), hitting her face,

bending her throat back (my love, my inborn

turbid wanting, at large all night), backing away,

gnawing at her own wing linings (the poison of my life,

the beast, the wolf), leaping out the window,

which I held open (now clear, sane, serene),

before climbing back naked into bed with you.

Shipfitters by Allen Grossman

Shipfitters 

It's a matter of concern to me that Leonardo's

Angels—who are so beautiful—are inadequately

provided with wings by the curious master.

Surely Leonardo knew they couldn't arrive here

to pray, or point, or weep, or at the end

save themselves from fire, by the means depicted.

 

It's also a matter of concern to me that Midge Berger,

wife of Ben Berger who owned the Mpls. Lakers,

played a good game of golf despite a tic

over her left eye (which raised her handicap),

and that Ben, a short man, liked to be photographed

next to George Mikan (7'2"), whom he hired for the purpose.

 

Midge was best friend of Beatrice, my mother.

Both girls are dead now. But it's still a matter of

concern to me that Ben and Midge went to China

in 1951 and that Midge carried back in her lap

(28 hours, PANAM) a model river boat, a "junk,"

as a present for Beatrice, empress of Mpls.

 

and its streams. The boat was made by learned felons

in Nanking prison on the Yangste, all dead,

but in their time they knew how to make a boat.

They would have been loftsmen, welders, riveters,

anglesmiths, flange turners, and the like. Look how

the hull, the spars, the sails, etc. are clearly right!

 

They were competent men. They knew how boats work.

I said to myself: "That will be my death-ship,

when it comes time."—And now wind rises.

The tide is at flood. The great green sails set

downstream, toward the harbor busy with trade.

The winds shift offshore.—Friends. Be thou assured!

 

 

Nineteen Thirty-Eight by Charles Simić

Nineteen Thirty-Eight

That was the year the Nazis marched into Vienna, 

Superman made his debut in Action Comics, 

Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries, 

The first Dairy Queen opened in Kankakee, Ill., 

As I lay in my crib peeing in my diapers. 

“You must have been a beautiful baby,” Bing Crosby sang. 

A pilot the newspapers called Wrong Way Corrigan 

Took off from New York heading for California 

And landed instead in Ireland, as I watched my mother 

Take a breast out of her blue robe and come closer. 

There was a hurricane that September causing a movie theater 

At Westhampton Beach to be lifted out to sea. 

People worried the world was about to end. 

A fish believed to have been extinct for seventy million years 

Came up in a fishing net off the coast of South Africa. 

I lay in my crib as the days got shorter and colder, 

And the first heavy snow fell in the night. 

Making everything very quiet in my room. 

I believe I heard myself cry for a long, long time.