X by Jean Valentine

X

 

I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. —from an unnamed child's banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt

 

The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.

I remember looking at you, X, this way,

taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you

so. I know,

you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,

whether dead or whether living, real.  —Then Y

said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?

What is there for my eye

to read then?"

The lamb should not have given

his wool.

He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.

Playing with a stone

on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.

Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Explains His Place in the Family by Shane McCrae

Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Explains His Place in the Family

 

Dead Joseph died of falling off the porch

On the third floor and smacking his head hard

On the walk he was     as big as me     but he

Was five and I was seven so he wasn’t

 

As big as me inside     I didn’t see

It but I heard it and some screaming     but it

Wasn’t Joe     screaming but it was his nurse

Screaming and wailing he was surely dead

 

When Joe dead     Joseph hit the walk     it was quiet

Wasn’t but me and Joe’s nurse heard you might

Have heard     a gnat land on a tear     it was nothing

 

It sounded like a soldier scuffing

His boot     or like the handyman     with a soft last

Hammer tap tapping     a joint into place 

A Kite for Michael and Christopher by Seamus Heaney

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

 

All through that Sunday afternoon

A kite flew above Sunday,

a tightened drumhead, an armful of blow chaff.

 

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of the newspaper

along its six-foot tail.

 

But now it was far up like a small black lark

and now it dragged as if the bellied string

were a wet rope hauled upon

to life a shoal.

 

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe

yet the soul at anchor there,

the string that sags and ascends,

weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

 

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand here in front of me

and take the strain.

 

Telemachus’ Detachment by Louise Glück

Telemachus’ Detachment

 

When I was a child looking

at my parents’ lives, you know

what I thought? I thought

heartbreaking. Now I think

heartbreaking, but also

insane. Also

very funny.

The Leaving by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The Leaving

 

My father said I could not do it,

but all night I picked the peaches.

The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.

I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.

How many ladders to gather an orchard?

I had only one and a long patience with lit hands

and the looking of the stars which moved right through me

the way the water moved through the canals with a voice

that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering

and those who had gathered before me.

I put the peaches in the pond's cold water,

all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands

twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,

all night my back a straight road to the sky.

And then out of its own goodness, out

of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,

and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses

just after it has been rung, before the metal

begins to long again for the clapper's stroke.

The light came over the orchard.

The canals were silver and then were not.

and the pond was--I could see as I laid

the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes.

A Name by Ada Limón

A Name

 

When Eve walked among

the animals and named them—

nightingale, redshouldered hawk,

fiddler crab, fallow deer—

I wonder if she ever wanted

them to speak back, looked into

their wide wonderful eyes and

whispered, Name me, name me.

Lipstick, 1935 by James Merrill

Lipstick, 1935

 

At Aunt Pearl’s kiss the pointed head

Extruded glistening pale red

From the jet sheath where it was housed

Looked like our Labrador, aroused.