Winter by Ruth Stone

Winter

The ten o’clock train to New York,

coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.

Steam wheezes between the couplings.

Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room

imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.

Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife.

Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.

It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.

Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.

It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.

I think about the subjugation of women and horses;

brutal exposure; weather that forces, that strips.

In our time we met in ornate stations

arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.

I remember you running beside the train waving good-bye.

I can produce a facsimile of you standing

behind a column of polished oak to surprise me.

Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?

Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks:

mounds of rusting wire, grotesque pop art of dead motors,

senile warehouses. The train passes a station;

fresh people standing on the platform,

their faces expecting something.

I feel their entire histories ravish me.

Temple of Poseidon, Sounion by Aria Aber

Temple of Poseidon, Sounion

 

My father drives the boat back to the cape.

The wind is cold as we hike up the cliff

to the wilderness around the temple.

My father comes here every year, and sometimes

he invites me. He captures all on film: leafless fig trees,

then the marble column engraved with Byron’s name.

Graffiti from 1810! he exclaims, as if it is the first time.

Elegant, he says. How can something destroyed be so elegant?

My father is the descendant of a nomadic tribe.

First his ancestor settled, then he became Muslim.

Being oppressed is our type of fun, he told me when

I was a child, and then: Never ask me about that again.

Now I’m an adult, restraining the impulse

to elegize what is still alive. And yet this is what

I will remember him as, I decide: the black camera steadying his hands,

the exacting way the lens detains the distant isles,

and what the frame omits, the other country, that other light.

We eat baked cod with pickled onions and speak about politics

in a formal way, as if none of it concerns our lives.

There are things I never tell him, and things he cannot

ask me, careful not to disturb the air around us.

Here, the sun takes hours to set. We study the raw marble

of the ruins, then turn our faces toward a reddish sky.

No, let me be precise: the light over the Aegean Sea turns tawny,

then apricot, then the color of apricots burning very slowly.

The Lights Are On Everywhere by Charles Simić

The Lights Are On Everywhere

 

The Emperor must not be told night is coming.

His armies are chasing shadows,

Arresting whippoorwills and hermit thrushes

And setting towns and villages on fire.

 

In the capital, they go around confiscating

Clocks and watches, burning heretics,

And painting the sunrise over the rooftops

While the people wish each other good morning.

 

The rooster brought in chains is crowing,

The flowers in the garden have been made to stay open,

And still dark stains appear on palace floors

Which no amount of scrubbing can wipe away.

Theory of Memory by Louise Glück

Theory of Memory

 

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

Stranger by John Glenday

Stranger

 

Today, I am a new man,

a stranger in the town that bore me.

 

How simple it is to become a ghost —

just one word, one gesture, and we slip

 

through the fretwork of other people’s lives

as easily as water through a stone.

 

Just for today, if I were to pass myself in the street

I wouldn’t even raise my hat, or say hello.

The Old Professor’s Book by Ishion Hutchinson

The Old Professor’s Book

Evening blooms in heat a braying of bells 

from August Town; my mind fizzles 

over “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” its sporadic arc 

welding and breaking the question, how to 

align poetry with truth. A stalled elevation, 

returning in my old professor’s blight 

marginalia, his book, offered abruptly, 

taken, stowed away, now posthumously examined: 

fragile pencil webbings of flickered exclamations, 

impatient the way he paced the blackboard, 

erased a word (“meteors”), hurled glances 

somewhere far off, beyond me, himself

a boy-comet, weeping to his duty. 

Once I strayed to the tubular steel chair 

chained in a corner, glistening sweat 

on one leg, our eyes wounded appraisal 

met there and he cracked the air, charged 

me pick up Browning’s chorus. I couldn’t. 

He died. His pupil flowered later into 

the voltage of self-alienating poetry, 

away from that moribund grammarian’s 

blind reluctance. Still, as moving iron 

will fuse and repel, by his book, I am 

the unspared prodigal of his abuse.

When You Lie by Paul Celan

When You Lie

 

When you lie

in the Bed of lost Flag-Cloth,

with blue-black Syllables, in Snow-Eyelash-Shadow,

the Crane through Thought-

showers,

comes gliding, steely-

you open for him.

His beak ticks the Hour for you

at every Mouth – at every

bell-stroke, with red-hot Rope, a Silent-

Millennium,

Un-Pulse and Pulse

mint each other to death,

the Dollars, the Cents,

rain hard through your Pores,

in

Second-Shapes

you fly there and bar

the Doors Yesterday and Tomorrow – phosphorescent,

Forever-Teeth,

buds the one, and buds the

other breast,

towards the Grasping, under

the Thrusts –: so thick,

so deeply

strewn

the starry

Crane-

Seed. 

(translated by Michael Hamburger) 

Washing the Elephant by Barbara Ras

Washing the Elephant

Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash

the elephant, begging the body to do it

with soap and water, a ladder, hands,

in tree-shade big enough for the vast savannahs

of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,

the cratered full moon's light fueling

the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, "Of course you'll recognize

your parents in heaven," instead of

"Being one with God will make your mother and father

pointless." That was back when I was young enough

to love them absolutely though still fear for their place

in heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full

of something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,

to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies

about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them

as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkercheif of coins

to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,

Land O'Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.

Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading

through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants

made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel

and down 34th Street to the Garden.

So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking

after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined

for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken

pathos. 

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,

the few real loves-of-your-life and how much of the rest—

the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,

unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things

like Popsicles unthinkingly.

And though dailiness may have no place

for the ones that have etched themselves in the laugh lines

and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder

to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life

will appear in a dream, arriving

with the weight and certitude of an elephant,

and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash

the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories

that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean. 

Wake Up by Adam Zagajewski

Wake Up

 

Wake up, my soul.

I don’t know where you are,

where you’re hiding,

but wake up, please,

we’re still together,

the road is still before us,

a bright strip of dawn

will be our star.

 

(translated by Clare Cavanagh)

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart by Ada Limón

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen

years ago now, the L train came clanking by

where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart

on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day

(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).

Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one

(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?

Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?

A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce

churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept

repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say

this made you want to live? No hand to hold

still here it was: someone giving someone comfort

and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

I Cannot Live With You by Emily Dickinson

I Cannot Live With You

 

I cannot live with You –

It would be Life –

And Life is over there –

Behind the Shelf

 

The Sexton keeps the Key to –

Putting up

Our Life – His Porcelain –

Like a Cup –

 

Discarded of the Housewife –

Quaint – or Broke –

A newer Sevres pleases –

Old Ones crack –

 

I could not die – with You –

For One must wait

To shut the Other’s Gaze down –

You – could not –

 

And I – could I stand by

And see You – freeze –

Without my Right of Frost –

Death's privilege?

 

Nor could I rise – with You –

Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’ –

That New Grace

 

Glow plain – and foreign

On my homesick Eye –

Except that You than He

Shone closer by –

 

They’d judge Us – How –

For You – served Heaven – You know,

Or sought to –

I could not –

 

Because You saturated Sight –

And I had no more Eyes

For sordid excellence

As Paradise

 

And were You lost, I would be –

Though My Name

Rang loudest

On the Heavenly fame –

 

And were You – saved –

And I – condemned to be

Where You were not –

That self – were Hell to Me –

 

So We must meet apart –

You there – I – here –

With just the Door ajar

That Oceans are – and Prayer –

And that White Sustenance –

Despair –

Columbine by Javier Zamora

Columbine

 

I’d never seen one like it: the flower

with its many orange cups. Dad drove me to Yosemite

the second month in this country.

He didn’t know the name of it. I didn’t know the name of it,

only that I loved the cups & that

they reminded me of the hibiscus

outside the glassless window I’d left months ago.

I hadn’t started school yet. There were many things I didn’t know,

English

the most important. Didn’t have friends.

Entire days spent inside the apartment

memorizing words, reading bilingual picture books,

comparing couch to the picture, to the couch

in my parents’ living room. In the news,

earlier, much earlier, before I arrived in June: headlines

I could not read. Could not understand. Parents

shared a fear I’d never known. Though

I’d seen guns on the way up here. Though

there had been war; I did not know the way to school yet.

The names of highways that would show me blooms.

 

Persimmons by Li-Young Lee

Persimmons

 

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker

slapped the back of my head

and made me stand in the corner

for not knowing the difference

between persimmon and precision.

How to choose

 

persimmons. This is precision.

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.

Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one

will be fragrant. How to eat:

put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

Chew the skin, suck it,

and swallow. Now, eat

the meat of the fruit,

so sweet,

all of it, to the heart.

 

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.

In the yard, dewy and shivering

with crickets, we lie naked,

face-up, face-down.

I teach her Chinese.

Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.

Naked:   I’ve forgotten.

Ni, wo:   you and me.

I part her legs,

remember to tell her

she is beautiful as the moon.

 

Other words

that got me into trouble were

fight and fright, wren and yarn.

Fight was what I did when I was frightened,

Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.

Wrens are small, plain birds,

yarn is what one knits with.

Wrens are soft as yarn.

My mother made birds out of yarn.

I loved to watch her tie the stuff;

a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

 

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class

and cut it up

so everyone could taste

a Chinese apple. Knowing

it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat

but watched the other faces.

 

My mother said every persimmon has a sun

inside, something golden, glowing,

warm as my face.

 

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,

forgotten and not yet ripe.

I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,

where each morning a cardinal

sang, The sun, the sun.

 

Finally understanding

he was going blind,

my father sat up all one night

waiting for a song, a ghost.

I gave him the persimmons,

swelled, heavy as sadness,

and sweet as love.

 

This year, in the muddy lighting

of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking

for something I lost.

My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,

black cane between his knees,

hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He’s so happy that I’ve come home.

I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.

All gone, he answers.

 

Under some blankets, I find a box.

Inside the box I find three scrolls.

I sit beside him and untie

three paintings by my father:

Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.

Two cats preening.

Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

 

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,

asks, Which is this?

 

This is persimmons, Father.

 

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,

the strength, the tense

precision in the wrist.

I painted them hundreds of times

eyes closed. These I painted blind.

Some things never leave a person:

scent of the hair of one you love,

the texture of persimmons,

in your palm, the ripe weight.

Let the Last Thing Be Song by Hannah Fries

Let the Last Thing Be Song

 

i.

 

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia. 

Behind locked doors 

glow the unmarred pieces— 

musical notes humming 

in a jumble, only 

waiting to be 

arranged.

 

ii.

 

What is left in one 

who does not remember? 

Love and music.

 

Not a name but the fullness. 

Not the sequence of events 

but order of rhythm and pitch,

 

a piece of time in which to exist.

 

iii.

 

A tone traveling through space has no referent, 

and yet we infer, and yet it 

finds its way between our cells 

and shakes us.

 

Aren’t we all still quivering 

like tuning forks 

with the shock of being, 

the shock of being seen?

 

iv.

 

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold. 

Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe, 

with its loosening warp 

and weft, still 

unspool its symphony?

 

Sing to me — please — 

and I will sing for you as all unravels, 

as time continues past the final beat 

of the stutter inside your chest.

 

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,

with the black hole’s 

fathomless B-flat.