The Moon And The Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath

The Moon And The Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary 

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. 

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God 

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility 

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place. 

Separated from my house by a row of headstones. 

I simply cannot see where there is to get to. 

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, 

White as a knuckle and terribly upset. 

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet 

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. 

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky -- 

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection 

At the end, they soberly bong out their names. 

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape. 

The eyes lift after it and find the moon. 

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. 

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. 

How I would like to believe in tenderness - 

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, 

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes. 

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering 

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars 

Inside the church, the saints will all be blue, 

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, 

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. 

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. 

And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

 

The Museum by Yves Bonnefoy

The Museum

A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.

A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost understand!

I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.

In each painting, I think, it's as if  God were giving up on finishing the world.

(Translated by Mary Ann Caws)

 

The Rain by Robert Creeley

The Rain

All night the sound had   

come back again, 

and again falls 

this quiet, persistent rain. 

What am I to myself 

that must be remembered,   

insisted upon 

so often? Is it 

that never the ease,   

even the hardness,   

of rain falling 

will have for me 

something other than this,   

something not so insistent— 

am I to be locked in this 

final uneasiness. 

Love, if you love me,   

lie next to me. 

Be for me, like rain,   

the getting out 

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- 

lust of intentional indifference. 

Be wet 

with a decent happiness.

 

At Burt Lake by Tom Andrews

At Burt Lake

To disappear into the right words

and to be their meanings. . .

October dusk.

Pink scraps of clouds, a plum-colored sky.

The sycamore tree spills a few leaves.

The cold focuses like a lens. . .

Now night falls, its hair

caught in the lake's eye.

Such clarity of things. Already

I've said too much. . .

Lord,

language must happen to you

the way this black pane of water,

chipped and blistered with stars,

happens to me.

 

Let Me Handle My Business, Damn by Morgan Parker

Let Me Handle My Business, Damn

Took me awhile to learn the good words

make the rain on my window grown

and sexy now I’m in the tub holding down

that on-sale Bordeaux pretending

to be well adjusted I am on that real

jazz shit sometimes I run the streets

sometimes they run me I’m the body

of the queen of my hood filled up

with bad wine bad drugs mu shu pork

sick beats what more can I say to you

I open my stylish legs I get my swagger

back let men with gold teeth bow to my tits

and the blisters on my feet I become electric

I’m a patch of grass the stringy roots

you call home or sister if you want

I could scratch your eyes make hip-hop die again

I’m on that grown woman shit before I break

the bottle’s neck I pour a little out: I am fallen

 

The Greatest Colors for the Emptiest Parts of the World by Carl Phillips

The Greatest Colors for the Emptiest Parts of the World

Sure, I used to say his name like a truth that, just

by saying it aloud, I could make more true, which

makes no more sense than having called it sorrow,

when it was only the rain making the branches hang

more heavily, so that some of them, sometimes,

even touched the ground … I see that now. I can

see how easy it is to confuse estrangement with

what comes before that, what’s really just another

form of being lost, having meant to spell out—

wordlessly, handlessly—I’m falling, not Sir,

I fell. As for emptiness spilling where no one

ever wanted it to, and becoming compassion, as

for how that happens— What if all we do is all we

can do? what if longing, annihilation, regret are all this

life’s ever going to be, a little music thrown across and

under it, ghost song from a cricket box when the last

crickets have again gone silent, now, or be still forever,

as the gathering crowd, ungathering, slowly backs away?

 

Pleasures by Denise Levertov

Pleasures

I like to find   

what's not found   

at once, but lies

within something of another nature,   

in repose, distinct.   

Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid   

which I pull out and lay

blade by blade on the draining board—

       tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce   

       the heart, but fragile, substance

       belying design.               Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh   

rose-amber, and the seed:

the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed   

like a brazilnut, but large,

large enough to fill

the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows

within the coarser leaf folded round,

and the butteryellow glow

in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory   

opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

  

 

 

Mother of the Groom by Seamus Heaney

Mother of the Groom

What she remembers

Is his glistening back

In the bath, his small boots

In the ring of boots at her feet.

Hands in her voided lap,

She hears a daughter welcomed.

It's as if he kicked when lifted

And slipped her soapy hold.

Once soap would ease off

The wedding ring

That's bedded forever now

In her clapping hand.

A Violence by Nicole Sealey

A Violence

You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays

fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window.

They sound like children you might have had.

Had you wanted children. Had you a maternal bone,

you would wrench it from your belly and fling it

from your fire escape. As if it were the stubborn

shard now lodged in your wrist. No, you would hide it.

Yes, you would hide it inside a barren nesting doll

you’ve had since you were a child. Its smile

reminds you of your father, who does not smile.

Nor does he believe you are his. “You look just like

your mother,” he says, “who looks just like a fire

of suspicious origin.” A body, I’ve read, can sustain

its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.

It’s the mind. It’s the mind that cannot.

The Broad Bean Sermon by Les Murray

The Broad Bean Sermon

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade

without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,

recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

Upright with water like men, square in stem-section

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,

kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest

snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions:

spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage.

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find

plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later

you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight

appear more than you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, freshy-sided,

thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,

beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers

in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice

that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or

do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality

like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string

and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,

the portly, the stiff, anf those lolling in pointed green slippers ...

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness

– it is your health – you vow to pick them all

even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

Ash by Tracy K. Smith

Ash

Strange house we must keep and fill.

House that eats and pleads and kills.

House on legs. House on fire. House infested

With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house.

House of trick and suck and shrug.

Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house.

House whose rooms are pooled with blood.

House with hands. House of guilt. House

That other houses built. House of lies

And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone.

House like an engine that churns and stalls.

House with skin and hair for walls.

House the seasons singe and douse.

House that believes it is not a house.

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies by June Jordan

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies

1

I will no longer lightly walk behind

a one of you who fear me:

                                     Be afraid.

I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits

and facial tics

I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore

and this is dedicated in particular

to those who hear my footsteps

or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery

cart

then turn around

see me

and hurry on

away from this impressive terror I must be:

I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon

surrounded by my comrades singing

terrible revenge in merciless

accelerating

rhythms

But

I have watched a blind man studying his face.

I have set the table in the evening and sat down

to eat the news.

Regularly

I have gone to sleep.

There is no one to forgive me.

The dead do not give a damn.

I live like a lover

who drops her dime into the phone

just as the subway shakes into the station

wasting her message

canceling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late

and always after the fact that could save or 

condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2

How many of my brothers and my sisters

will they kill

before I teach myself

retaliation?

Shall we pick a number? 

South Africa for instance:

do we agree that more than ten thousand

in less than a year but that less than

five thousand slaughtered in more than six

months will

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3

And if I 

if I ever let you slide

who should be extirpated from my universe

who should be cauterized from earth

completely

(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the

terrorist degree)

then let my body fail my soul

in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 

if I ever let love go

because the hatred and the whisperings

become a phantom dictate I o-

bey in lieu of impulse and realities

(the blossoming flamingos of my

wild mimosa trees)

then let love freeze me

out.

I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.

 

What He Thought by Heather McHugh

What He Thought

We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the Mayor, mulled a couple

matters over. The Italian literati seemed

bewildered by the language of America: they asked us

what does “flat drink” mean? and the mysterious

“cheap date” (no explanation lessened

this one’s mystery). Among Italian writers we 

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,

the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib. And there was one

administrator (The Conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone

narrated sights and histories

the hired van hauled us past.

Of all he was most politic—

and least poetic-- so

it seemed. Our last few days in Rome 

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom

he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t

read Italian either, so I put the book

back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans 

were due to leave

tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant,

and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,

sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked 

“What’s poetry?

Is it the fruits and vegetables

and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori 

or the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn’t have to think-- “The truth

is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest

to say. What followed taught me something

about difficulty,  

for our underestimated host spoke out

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: 

The statue represents

Giordano Bruno, brought

to be burned in the public square

because of his offence against authority, which was to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government

but rather is poured in waves, through

all things: all things

move. “If God is not the soul itself,

he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world.” Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die 

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man

was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask

in which he could not speak. 

That is how they burned him.

That is how he died, 

without a word,

in front of everyone. And poetry-- 

(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry 

is what he thought, but did not say.

 

Meaning by Czesław Miłosz

Meaning

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

The true meaning, ready to be decoded.

What never added up will add Up,

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

And if there is no lining to the world?

If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,

But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day

Make no sense following each other?

And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

Even if that is so, there will remain

A word wakened by lips that perish,

A tireless messenger who runs and runs

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,

And calls out, protests, screams.

 

On Flowers. On Negative Evolution by Alan Dugan

On Flowers. On Negative Evolution

When the front-end loader ran over my wife’s Montauk daisies

I wanted to tell the driver, Butch—a nice kid—but couldn’t:

“No flowers, no us. Flowers are basic to human life.

That’s why we think they’re beautiful. No flowers, no seeds;

no seeds, no greenery; no greenery, no oxygen: we

couldn’t even breathe without them. Also: no greens,

no grasses; no grasses, no herbivorous animals;

no animals, no beefsteaks. There wouldn’t be anything

to eat except fish, and no way to breathe unless

we went back to the ocean and redeveloped gills.

There the seaweeds would make oxygen by flowering underwater,

the way it used to be in the old days, and you

would be running over them in your submarine. This is why

flowers are thought beautiful, and this is why it’s important

not to destroy too many of them carelessly, and why you could

have been more careful with my wife’s god-damned daisies.”

The Geranium by Theodore Roethke

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled,

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,

Or a wizened aster in late September,

I brought her back in again

For a new routine--

Vitamins, water, and whatever

Sustenance seemed sensible

At the time: she'd lived

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,

Her shriveled petals falling

On the faded carpet, the stale

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--

The dumb dames shrieking half the night

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,

Me breathing booze at her,

She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--

And that was scary--

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,

I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,

I was that lonely.

Vulnerability Study by Solmaz Sharif

Vulnerability Study

your face turning from mine

to keep from cumming

8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl

baba holding his pants

up at the checkpoint

a newlywed securing her updo

with grenade pins

a wall cleared of nails

for the ghosts to walk through

When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed Next to Me and Falls Asleep by Morgan Parker

When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed Next to Me and Falls Asleep

I think of my father

vodka-laughing: Aw shit,

when Daddy said go pick out a switch

from the lemon tree we knew

that switch better be good.

My father was a drunk altar boy.

My father was a Southern boy.

My father is a good man.

When you grow up in the South, you know

the difference between a good switch and a bad one.

Pick what hurts best. The difference between drinking

to disappear and drinking to remember.

Be polite. Be gentle. Be a vessel. Be ashamed.

As a child, I begged to be whooped.

I pinched myself with my nails when I was wrong.

I tried to pull out my eyelashes. I said, Punish me

I said for I have sinned I am disgusting.

Here is the order in which we studied the Bible

in second grade: 1: Genesis, or, God is a man

and he owns you. You were bad. Put on some

got-damn clothes. 2: Exodus, or, you would still

be a slave if it were not for men. Also, magic.

Magic or, never question a man’s truth.

3: Job, or, suffer, suffer because it is holy.

During the classes on Revelation, I think

I drifted to sleep. I think I dreamed

trumpets when I touched my hot parts

then touched the cold steel of my desk.

I knew what it meant to be wrong and woman.

When I walk into the world and know

I am a black girl, I understand

I am a costume. I know the rules.

I like the pain because it makes me.

I deserve the pain. I deserve you

looking at me, moaning, looking away.

Son of a bitch. My rent is due.

No one kissed my tits and read the Bible.

Good and evil. Pleasure and empty

curtain grid of dawn light.

I call this honor. I call this birthright.

Homage to a Government by Philip Larkin

Homage to a Government

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

 

alternate names for black boys by Danez Smith

alternate names for black boys

1.   smoke above the burning bush

2.   archnemesis of summer night

3.   first son of soil

4.   coal awaiting spark & wind

5.   guilty until proven dead

6.   oil heavy starlight

7.   monster until proven ghost

8.   gone

9.   phoenix who forgets to un-ash

10. going, going, gone

11. gods of shovels & black veils

12. what once passed for kindling

13. fireworks at dawn

14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

15. (I thought to leave this blank

       but who am I to name us nothing?)

16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint

17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

 

Dayley Island by Frederick Seidel

Dayley Island

Gulls spiral high above 

The porch tiles and my gulf-green, 

Cliff-hanging lawn, with their 

Out-of-breath wail, as 

Dawn catches the silver ball 

Set in the dried up bird bath 

To scare the gulls. My slippers 

Exhale lamé.

I was egged on by old age—

To sell that house, 

Winterize this house, 

Give up my practice... that 

You, Pauli, gave up 

At Belzec, our son at Belsen, 

And one at Maidenek, 

Our last at Maidenek.

Below the cliff, the shallows 

Tear apart, beating 

Themselves white and black, 

While the sea’s smooth other edge 

Towers, reddening, 

Over the surfacing sun. 

I rise early, always, 

Earlier each day...

Holding on. 

But it’s the island that’s locked in 

By the sea—a case 

Of vaginismus, Pauli—

Except for the one bridge 

To the next island. I’m free—

Dayley’s first once Jewish, 

Non-practicing analyst:

Old, but she has no helper; 

Station-wagon, but 

She’s not a tourist; poor for 

An island Venus or matron. 

The man who sells me fish 

Says he fought my Nazis, 

The captured ones talked 

Just like me—I’m somebody.

Last week—March-cold 

In the middle of August, 

Snow-blue, high, thin skies—

I drove the hour to Brunswick 

To drop my suits at

Maine’s Only Chinese Laundry, 

A down-easter’s, 

With a Negro presser.

The man was just then off

For Hagard to shoot rabbits

For the reward,

Three miles off Dayley’s east shore.

Years before,

A mainlander

Had loosed two white rabbits

There; now it was theirs.

Frail, pink-veined, pale ears,

And pink as perfect gums,

Pink eyes, rose noses, as if

Diseased—I’d been there.

The lead-gray Yankee owner,

After the shotgun blast,

Strode forward, gathered the bunch,

And one by one, grabbed each

By its hind legs while it sobbed,

And swinging it against

The bare lawn, slapped it dead,

And swung it to the shrubs.

I left the cleaners wanting

So to tell you. The sun’s

Well up now. Our blue carpet’s

Fading evergreen, Pauli.

   

 

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews by Amy Clampitt

The Sun Underfoot  Among the Sundews

An ingenuity too astonishing 

to be quite fortuitous is 

this bog full of sundews, sphagnum- 

lined and shaped like a teacup. 

                                                        A step 

down and you’re into it; a 

wilderness swallows you up: 

ankle-, then knee-, then midriff- 

to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted 

understory, an overhead 

spruce-tamarack horizon hinting 

you’ll never get out of here. 

                                            But the sun 

among the sundews, down there, 

is so bright, an underfoot 

webwork of carnivorous rubies, 

a star-swarm thick as the gnats 

they’re set to catch, delectable 

double-faced cockleburs, each 

hair-tip a sticky mirror 

afire with sunlight, a million 

of them and again a million, 

each mirror a trap set to 

unhand unbelieving, 

                                      that either 

a First Cause said once, “Let there 

be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve 

made their way here unaided 

other than by that backhand, round- 

about refusal to assume responsibility 

known as Natural Selection. 

                                                    But the sun 

underfoot is so dazzling 

down there among the sundews, 

there is so much light 

in the cup that, looking, 

you start to fall upward.