Uneasy Rider by Diane Wakoski

Uneasy Rider

 

Falling in love with a mustache

is like saying

you can fall in love with

the way a man polishes his shoes

                which,

                of course,

                is one of the things that turns on

                my tuned-up engine

 

                those trim buckled boots

 

                (I feel like an advertisement

                for men’s fashions

                when I think of your ankles)

 

Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face

 

and I find myself

 

a bad moralist,

 

a failing aesthetician,

 

a sad poet,

 

wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles

that make a man’s body have so much substance,

that makes a woman

lean and yearn in that direction

that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day

in your presence

the pool of wax under a burning candle

the foam from a waterfall

 

You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson

She is the rain,

waits in it for you,

finds blood spotting her legs

from the long ride.

 

Song for a Dark Girl by Langston Hughes

Song for a Dark Girl 

Way Down South in Dixie

       (Break the heart of me)

They hung my black young lover

       To a cross roads tree.

 

Way Down South in Dixie

       (Bruised body high in air)

I asked the white Lord Jesus

       What was the use of prayer.

 

Way Down South in Dixie

       (Break the heart of me)

Love is a naked shadow

       On a gnarled and naked tree.

Eavesdropping on Adam and Eve by Andrea Cohen

Eavesdropping on Adam and Eve

 

It didn’t get interesting

until after they’d left.

An extended vacation,

Adam called it. R&

D, Eve said. Whatever.

In Eden, they never

said so much as

pass the salt on

account of everything

tasting so great there.

They were strangers

until they left, when

Adam confessed, I

felt penned in there,

and Eve, forgetting how

naked they’d been,

said, I was always

waiting for the other

shoe to drop. Now

they’re both cobblers, now

they have so much

to talk about: whether

to spring for heat

or vaccines, whether

to call their interiors

climate or weather,

when the next ice age

might hit. Adam pours

himself another

hieroglyph and asks:

what does it all mean?

and Eve does what

she always does:

wraps herself, boa-

like, around him and holds

the camera an arm’s

length above for a

this is us moment

for the snake they

miss so much.

The Heaven of Animals by James Dickey

The Heaven of Animals

 

Here they are. The soft eyes open.   

If they have lived in a wood

It is a wood.

If they have lived on plains

It is grass rolling

Under their feet forever.

 

Having no souls, they have come,   

Anyway, beyond their knowing.   

Their instincts wholly bloom   

And they rise.

The soft eyes open.

 

To match them, the landscape flowers,   

Outdoing, desperately

Outdoing what is required:

The richest wood,

The deepest field.

 

For some of these,

It could not be the place

It is, without blood.

These hunt, as they have done,

But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

 

More deadly than they can believe.   

They stalk more silently,

And crouch on the limbs of trees,   

And their descent

Upon the bright backs of their prey

 

May take years

In a sovereign floating of joy.   

And those that are hunted   

Know this as their life,

Their reward: to walk

 

Under such trees in full knowledge   

Of what is in glory above them,   

And to feel no fear,

But acceptance, compliance.   

Fulfilling themselves without pain

 

At the cycle’s center,

They tremble, they walk   

Under the tree,

They fall, they are torn,   

They rise, they walk again.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [But there never was a black male hysteria] by Terrance Hayes

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin 

 

But there never was a black male hysteria

Breaking & entering wearing glee & sadness

And the light grazing my teeth with my lighter

To the night with the flame like a blade cutting

Me slack along the corridors with doors of offices

Orifices vomiting tears & fire with my two tongues

Loose & shooing under a high-top of language

In a layer of mischief so traumatized trauma

Delighted me beneath the tremendous

Stupendous horrendous undiscovered stars

Burning where I didn’t know how to live

My friends were all the wounded people

The black girls who held their own hands

Even the white boys who grew into assassins 

Vespers by Louise Glück

Vespers

 

In your extended absence, you permit me

use of earth, anticipating

some return on investment, principally

regarding the tomato plants.

I think I should not be encouraged to grow

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come

so often here, while other regions get

twelve weeks of summer. All this

belongs to you: on the other hand,

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart

broken by the blight, the black spots so quickly

multiplying in the rows. I doubt

you have a heart, in our understanding of

 that term. You who do not discriminate

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,

the red leaves of the maple falling

even in August, the early darkness: I am responsible

for these vines. 

Shelley by Galway Kinnell

Shelley

 

When I was twenty the one true

free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,

Shelley who wrote tracts advocating

atheism, free love, the emancipation

atheism, free love, the emancipation

of women, and the abolition of wealth and class,

a lively version of Plato’s Symposium,

lyrics on the bliss and brevity

of romantic love, and complex

poems on love’s difficulties, Shelley

who, I learned later—perhaps

almost too late—remarried Harriet,

then pregnant with their second child,

and a few months later ran off with Mary,

already pregnant with their first, bringing

along Mary’s stepsister Claire,

who very likely also became his lover,

 

and in this malaise à trois, which Shelley

said would be a “paradise of exiles,”

they made their life, along with the spectres

of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine,

and of Mary’s half-sister Fanny, who, fixated

on Shelley, killed herself, and with the spirits

of adored but neglected children

conceived almost incidentally

in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s

Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley

and sent out to foster parents, Mary’s

Clara, dead at one, her Willmouse, dead at three,

Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely

Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted” but then

left behind, dead at one and a half,

and Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,

whom Byron packed off to the convent

at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

 

and in those days, before I knew

any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,

who thought he was following radiant desire.