All Hallows by Louise Glück

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

Sleep in their blue yoke,

The fields having been

Picked clean, the sheaves

Bound evenly and piled at the roadside

Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

Of harvest or pestilence

And the wife leaning out the window

With her hand extended, as in payment,

And the seeds

Distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree. 

Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison by Nazim Hikmet

Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison

If instead of being hanged by the neck

            you’re thrown inside

            for not giving up hope

in the world, your country, and people,

            if you do ten or fifteen years

            apart from the time you have left,

you won’t say,

                        “Better I had swung from the end of a rope

                                                                        like a flag”—

you’ll put your foot down and live.

It may not be a pleasure exactly,

but it’s your solemn duty

            to live one more day

                                    to spite the enemy.

Part of you may live alone inside,

                        like a stone at the bottom of a well.

But the other part

            must be so caught up

            in the flurry of the world

              that you shiver there inside

      when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.

To wait for letters inside,

to sing sad songs,

or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling

                               is sweet but dangerous.

Look at your face from shave to shave,

forget your age,

watch out for lice

                        and for spring nights,

        and always remember

               to eat every last piece of bread—

also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.

And who knows,

the woman you love may stop loving you.

Don’t say it’s no big thing:

it’s like the snapping of a green branch

                                              to the man inside.

To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,

to think of seas and mountains is good.

Read and write without rest,

and I also advise weaving

and making mirrors.

I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass

         ten or fifteen years inside

                                        and more—

                you can,

                as long as the jewel

                on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!

(Tanslated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

 

Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse by Franz Wright

Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse

And not to feel bad about dying. 

Not to take it so personally—

it is only

the force we exert all our lives

to exclude death from our thoughts 

that confronts us, when it does arrive,

as the horror of being excluded— . . .

something like that, the Canadian wind

coming in off Lake Erie

rattling the windows, horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere

across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.

All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood by Morgan Parker

All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood

I am free with the following conditions.

Give it up gimme gimme.

Okay so I’m Black in America right and I walk into a bar.

I drink a lot of wine and kiss a Black man on his beard.

I do whatever I want because I could die any minute.

I don’t mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me.

I know my pussy is real good because they said so.

I say to my friend I am broke as a joke.

I am Starvin’ Like Marvin Gaye.

I’m so hungry I could get it on.

There’s far too many of me dying.

The present is not so different.

Everybody looks like everybody I worked with.

Everybody looks like everybody I’ve kissed.

Men champion men and animals.

Everybody thinks I’m going to die.

At the museum I tell the school group about Black art.

I tell them the word contemporary.

I have a nose ring I forget about.

I have a brother and he is also Black.

I am a little modern to the fault.

I say this painting is contemporary like you and me.

They ask me about slavery. They say Martin Luther King.

At school they learned that Black people happened.

The present is not so different.

I’m looking into their Black faces.

They do not understand that they exist.

I’m Black in America and I walk

into a bar and drink a lot of wine, kiss a white man on his beard.

There is no indictment.

I could die any minute of depression.

I just want to have sex most of the time.

I just want my student loans to disappear.

I just want to understand my savings account.

What is happening to my five dollar one cent.

I am free with the following conditions.

What is happening to my brother.

What if I do something wrong.

My blood is so hot and wet right now.

I know they want it.

I do everything right just incase.

I don’t want to give away my money but here I am.

It’s so stupid I have to say here I am.

They like to be on top.

I am being set up.

I am a tree and some fruits are good and some are bad.

Social Skills Training by Solmaz Sharif

Social Skills Training

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother. Studies show the mother we have in mind isn’t the mother that exists. Mine says: What the fuck are you crying for? Studies show the baby monkey will pick the fake monkey with fake fur over the furless wire monkey with milk, without contest. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway. I’m not sad. I’m not sad. Studies recommend regular expressions of gratitude and internal check-ins. Enough, the wire mother says. History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the fuck are you crying for, officer? the wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?

Neverland by Galway Kinnell

Neverland

Bending over her bed, I saw the smile

I must have seen when gaping up from the crib.

Knowing death will come, sensing its onset,

may be a fair price for consciousness.

But looking at my sister, I wished

she could have died by surprise,

without ever knowing about death.

Too late. Wendy said, “I am in three parts.

Here on the left is red. That is pain.

On the right is yellow. That is exhaustion.

The rest is white. I don’t know yet what white is.”

For most people, one day everything is all right.

The next, the limbic node catches fire. The day after,

the malleus in one ear starts missing the incus.

Then the arthritic opposable thumb no longer opposes

whoever last screwed the top onto the jam jar.

Then the coraco-humeral ligament frizzles apart,

the liver speckles, the kidneys dent,

two toes lose their souls. Of course,

before things get worse, a person could run for it.

I could take off right now, climb the pure forms

that surmount time and death, follow a line

down Avenue D, make a 90° turn right on 8th Street,

90° left on C, right on 7th, left on B, then cross

to Sixth Avenue, catch the A train

to Nassau, where the A pulls up beside the Z,

get off, hop on the Z, hurtle under the river

and rise on Euclid under the stars and taste,

with my sweetheart, in perfectly circular kisses,

the actual saliva of paradise.

Then, as if Wendy suddenly understood

this flaw in me, that I could die

still wanting what is not to be had here, drink

and drink and yet have most of my thirst

intact for the water table, she opened her eyes.

“I want you to know I’m not afraid of dying,”

she said. “I just wish it didn’t take so long.”

Seeing her appear so young and yet begin to die

all on her own, I wanted to whisk her off.

Quickly she said, “Let’s go home.” From outside

in the driveway came the gargling noise

of a starter motor, and a low steady rumbling, as if

my car had turned itself on and was warming up the engine.

She closed her eyes. She was entirely white,

as if freshly powdered with twice-bleached flour.

Color flashed only when she opened her eyes.

Snow will come down next winter, in the woods;

the fallen trees will have that flesh on their bones.

When the eye of the woods opens, a bluejay shuttles.

Outside, suddenly, all was quiet,

I realized my car had shut off its engine.

Now a spot of rosiness showed in each cheek:

blushes, perhaps, at a joy she had kept from us,

from somewhere in her life, perhaps two mouths,

hers and a beloved’s, near each other, like roses

sticking out of a bottle of invisible water.

She was losing the half-given, half-learned

art of speech, and it became for her a struggle

to find words, form them, position them,

quickly say them. After much effort she said,

“Now is when the point of the story changes.”

After that, one eye at a time, the left listened,

and drifted, the right focused, gleamed

meanings at me, drifted. Stalwart,

the halves of the brain, especially the right.

Now, as they ratchet the box that holds

her body into the earth, a voice calls

back across the region she passes through,

a far landscape I seem to see from above,

in prolonged, even notes that swell and diminish.

Now it sounds from beneath the farthest horizon,

and now it grows faint, and now I cannot hear it.

 

Poem with Accidental Memory by Adam Fitzgerald

Poem with Accidental Memory

That we go back to life one day, the next,

Some other century where we were alive,

When music spelled itself out to us, often

Incomplete, and nothing was more vague

Than the banality of  whom to love and lose

In line, the doppelgangers in rimless snow,

Or even now, in summer, at day, by night,

When something oblivious, replete, turns

Back at us in idolatrous quiet, so we see

Who in nullified particulars we really are

At a desk of our own making, filling in for

Someone else’s life sentence, blots drying

On a silk tie having no meaning but today’s,

When the loner puts his insomnia to rest.

 

Leaves by Derek Mahon

  

Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice

Have built their house

In a field below the wood

And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves

On their way to the river

Scratch like birds at the windows

Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife

Of dead leaves,

A stadium filled with an infinite

Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have led

Have found their own fulfillment.

Langston Blue by Jericho Brown

Langston Blue

“O Blood of the River of songs,

O songs of the River of Blood,”

        Let me lie down. Let my words 

Lie sound in the mouths of men

Repeating invocations pure

        And perfect as a moan 

That mounts in the mouth of Bessie Smith.

Blues for the angels kicked out       

Of heaven. Blues for the angels 

Who miss them still. Blues

For my people and what water

        They know. O weary drinkers 

Drinking from the bloody river,

Why go to heaven with Harlem

        So close? Why sing of rivers 

With fathers of our own to miss?

I remember mine and taste a stain

        Like blood coursing the body 

Of a man chased by a mob. I write

His running, his sweat: here,

        He climbs a poplar for the sky, 

But it is only sky. The river?

Follow me. You’ll see. We tried

        To fly and learned we couldn’t 

Swim. Dear singing river full

Of my blood, are we as loud under

        Water? Is it blood that binds 

Brothers? Or is it the Mississippi

Running through the fattest vein

        Of America? When I say home, 

I mean I wanted to write some

Lines. I wanted to hear the blues,

        But here I am swimming in the river 

Again. What flows through the fat

Veins of a drowned body? What

        America can a body call 

Home? When I say Congo, I mean

Blood. When I say Nile, I mean blood.

        When I say Euphrates, I mean, 

If only you knew what blood

We have in common. So much,

        In Louisiana, they call a man like me 

Red. And red was too dark

For my daddy. And my daddy was

        Too dark for America. He ran 

Like a man from my mother

And me. And my mother’s sobs

        Are the songs of Bessie Smith 

Who wears more feathers than Death.

O the death my people refuse

        To die. When I was 18, I wrote down 

The river though I couldn’t win

A race, climbed a tree that winter, then

        Fell, flat on my wet, red face. Line 

After line, I read all the time,

But “there was nothing I could do

        About race.”

       

Douche-Bag Ode by Sharon Olds

Douche-Bag Ode

When I hear the young refer to someone as a

douche bag, I want to say, You may have

never seen a douche bag. They were red

rubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’d

fill it and hang it high enough

so that gravity . . . I can’t go on,

I see my mother’s douche bag, my poor

douche-bag mom’s pathetic douche bag with its

clamps, and its aorta tubes,

dangling over the bathtub, awesomely

shameful, and which reminded me I

’d been some kind of catsup Halloween

costume in her, almost before I was

bipedal. And so to call someone a

saline sac—Let’s take some pity

on the creepiness of how women were treated

in the 1950s. It drove my mother

crazy, but she did the best she could—

she never turned and said, I could have got

rid of you, my little valentine,

but I gave you the warm, rose-colored lunch bag

of the placenta: I gave you my heart to eat.

And now I remember it, not my mother’s

but mine, like a dowry—lock the door, then,

hang it from the shower rod like food hung over

a bough, out of animal reach,

slide the perforated wand inside you then un-

clasp the clamp, and Lo!, you are

a night clearing, in which a fountain o

f Aphrodite leaps up, her brine

sea chanty, her sparkling douche-bag song.

On a Dirt Road Outside Oaxaca by Javier Zamora

On a Dirt Road Outside Oaxaca

The Mexican never said how long.

¿How long? Not long. ¿How much?

Not much. Never told us we’d hide in vans like matchsticks.

In our town, we’d never known Mexicans

besides the women and men in soap-operas,

so in our heads, we played the fence,

the San Ysidro McDonald’s, a quick run, a van, then, ¡Eureka!

Just like that.

Not long, not long at all. In Oaxaca,

a small brown lizard licks horchata from my hand—

we’re friends, we pick names for each other.

Hola Paula. Hola Javier, she says.

We play the fence, a quick run, the van ...

¿How long? Not long. On the dirt,

our knees tell truths to the cops’ front-sights and barrels.

¿How much? Not much.

We’d never known Mexicans besides Chente,

Chavela Vargas. We’re on the dirt

like dogs showing nipples

to offspring, it’s not spring,

and we’re going to where there is spring,

we say it’s gonna be alright,

it’s gonna be just fine—

my hands play with Paula.

 

Medusa by Louise Bogan

Medusa

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, 

Facing a sheer sky. 

Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike, 

Sun and reflection wheeled by. 

When the bare eyes were before me 

And the hissing hair, 

Held up at a window, seen through a door. 

The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead 

Formed in the air. 

This is a dead scene forever now. 

Nothing will ever stir. 

The end will never brighten it more than this, 

Nor the rain blur. 

The water will always fall, and will not fall, 

And the tipped bell make no sound. 

The grass will always be growing for hay 

Deep on the ground. 

And I shall stand here like a shadow 

Under the great balanced day, 

My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, 

And does not drift away.

 

Marching by Jim Harrison

Marching

At dawn I heard among bird calls

the billions of marching feet in the churn

and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet

still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,

and very old halting feet, the feet

of the very light and very heavy, all marching

but not together, criss-crossing at every angle

with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump

into each other, walking in the doors of houses

and out the back door forty years later, finally

knowing that time collapses on a single

plateau where they were all their lives,

knowing that time stops when the heart stops

as they walk off the earth into the night air.

 

There's a certain Slant of light, (320) by Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light, (320)

There's a certain Slant of light, 

Winter Afternoons – 

That oppresses, like the Heft 

Of Cathedral Tunes – 

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – 

We can find no scar, 

But internal difference – 

Where the Meanings, are – 

None may teach it – Any – 

'Tis the seal Despair – 

An imperial affliction 

Sent us of the Air – 

When it comes, the Landscape listens – 

Shadows – hold their breath – 

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance 

On the look of Death –

 

Yellow Afternoon by Wallace Stevens

Yellow Afternoon

It was in the earth only

That he was at the bottom of things

And of himself. There he could say

Of this I am, this is the patriarch,

This it is that answers when I ask,

This is the mute, the final sculpture

Around which silence lies on silence.

This reposes alike in springtime

And, arbored and bronzed, in autumn.

He said I had this that I could love,

As one loves visible and responsive peace,

As one loves one’s own being,

As one loves that which is the end

And must be loved, as one loves that

Of which one is a part as in a unity,

A unity that is the life one loves,

So that one lives all the lives that comprise it

As the life of the fatal unity of war.

Everything comes to him

From the middle of his field. The odor

Of earth penetrates more deeply than any word.

There he touches his being. There as he is

He is. The thought that he had found all this

Among men, in a woman—she caught his breath—

But he came back as one comes back from the sun

To lie on one’s bed in the dark, close to a face

Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks.

 

The Writer by Richard Wilbur

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story. 

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale. 

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage. 

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which 

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent. 

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash 

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

 We watched the sleek, wild, dark 

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top, 

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure, 

It lifted off from a chair-back, 

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world. 

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.

 

At the Grave of Zora Neale Hurston by Derrick Austin

At the Grave of Zora Neale Hurston

I kept my mad hound, Zora.

We wandered many miles,

pollen and dust staining us

the gold of ancient idols.

I got wet dog under my fingers.

He smells like me now, too,

you see he’s carried road kill

all the way here—raccoon,

then possum, hitched a fawn

five miles north, buried a fox

outside of town—it’s in the blood

of his teeth. He found me, too,

by the roadside. Followed me

ever since. That first night,

I saw myself as that hound

licking my own face clean.

That morning, a distant cousin

gave me his gun, told me

to kill it. I couldn’t shoot him.

Anything that loves you will

lay down for you or know enough

to fake it. I’m a coward in my life

unlike my work. I don’t know

which is worse. So many things

are conspiring to kill me, Zora.

Not only sickness and guns

but the tongues of those who

would sooner kiss me or call me

lover. Zora, it’s not my dying day.

 

Sacred and Profane Love by Richie Hofmann

Sacred and Profane Love

Our overnight train was outpacing

the countryside, the speed at which it moved flattening the grass,

                                                                                  while, in our sleeper car,

he jerked my shirt back up over my shoulders, and I bit

the white cotton.

The stiff blankets loosening, the shadows loosening.

Dawn outrunning the edges of the drawn shade.

Morning, the clothes flattened with our hands, the suitcase zipped.

A short walk to the stone house, to the oak trees, the stables

where the Lipizzaner stallions were kept,

where the riders pushed the horses to perfection in straightness,

                                                                                  contact, and impulsion,

and in their dark compartments, the young,

the celebrated, were changing from gray to white.

 

Encounter and Farewell by Patricia Spears Jones

Encounter and Farewell

It's all foreplay, really-this walk

through the French Quarter exploring souvenir shops,

each of them carefully deranged, as if dust were to settle

only at perfect intervals. Yes to the vetiver fan

that smells sweeter than sandalwood or cedar.

No to the mammy doll dinner bells.

No to the mammy dolls whose sewn smiles are as fixed

as the lives of too many poor Black women here:

motherhood at twelve, drugged, abandoned by fifteen,

dead by twenty (suicide, murder) so easily in Desire.

And yet, their voices sweeten the snaking air,

providing the transvestites their proper Muses,

all of whom have streets named for them in the Garden District.

A soft heat settles on Terpsichore,

just inside the gay bar where the owner's pink flamingos

complement silly songs on the rescued Rockola.

Who can dance to that Lorne Greene ballad, "Ringo"?

Dixie beer is the beer of choice; marijuana the cheapest drug.

Relaxation is key, since it's all a matter of waiting

for the right body to stumble toward you.

Lust perfumes parties in the projects, barstool chatter at the Hyatt,

lazy kissing on the median strip stretching down Tchoupitoulas.

If Professor Longhair were alive, he'd teach a lesson

in seamless motion: the perfect slide of a man's hand down a 

              woman's back;

a lesson you learned long ago before you met me. We are making love

as we did before in Austin and Manhattan.

But in this room on this costly bed our lovemaking

starts out the slowest grind, then, like this city's weather,

goes from hot to hotter, from moist to rainstorm wet.

You're tall, A., and where there should be tribal markings

there are scars-football, basketball, mid-sixties grind parties

where something always got out of hand. There's the perfect

amen. You're your own gospel.

And you bring good news to me-the way you enter me

Like grace, the way you say my name, a psalm.

No. That's not it. It's the engineer in you that

gets me. Your search for the secret line that goes

straight to the center of the earth. Deeper and deeper

you go until there's no earth left in me. And we

hum and moan a song as old as our selves gone back.

There are too many souvenirs in your eyes.

Gifts given too often, too hastily, never opened.

Outside a city sprawls its heat, seeks out every pore,

licks every moment of sweat as we shiver in this chilly room

taking each other's measure. We say good-bye again and again.

As if every kiss, every touch we make will shadow

All our celebrations.

And they do.

 

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed

and leave the yellow bark dust

on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek

you could never walk through markets

without the profession of my fingers

floating over you. The blind would

stumble certain of whom they approached

though you might bathe

under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh

at this smooth pasture

neighbour to your hair

or the crease

that cuts your back. This ankle.

You will be known among strangers

as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you

before marriage

never touch you

– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

I buried my hands

in saffron, disguised them

over smoking tar,

helped the honey gatherers …

When we swam once

I touched you in water

and our bodies remained free,

you could hold me and be blind of smell.

You climbed the bank and said

               this is how you touch other women

the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume

                         and knew

               what good is it

to be the lime burner’s daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in the act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

peeler’s wife. Smell me.