Everybody Who Is Dead by Frank Stanford

Everybody Who Is Dead

When a man knows another man

Is looking for him

He doesn’t hide.

He doesn’t wait

To spend another night

With his wife

Or put his children to sleep.

He puts on a clean shirt and a dark suit

And goes to the barber shop

To let another man shave him.

He shuts his eyes

Remembers himself as a boy

Lying naked on a rock by the water.

Then he asks for the special lotion.

The old men line up by the chair

And the barber pours a little

In each of their hands.

Reasons by Thomas James

Reasons

For our own private reasons

We live in each other for an hour.

Stranger, I take your body and its seasons,

Aware the moon has gone a little sour

For us. The moon hangs up there like a stone

Shaken out of its proper setting.

We lie down in each other. We lie down alone

and watch the moon’s flawed marble getting

Out of hand. What are the dead doing tonight?

The padlocks of their tongues embrace the black,

Each syllable locked in place, tucked out of sight.

Even this moon could never pull them back,

Even if it held them in its arms

And weighed them down with stones,

Took them entirely on their own terms

And piled the orchard’s blossom on their bones.

I am aware of your body and its dangers.

I spread my cloak for you in leafy weather

Where other fugitives and other strangers

Will put their mouths together.

Unable to Write It by May Swenson

Unable to Write It

Tears do not make good ink.

Their message invisible,

no one reads this hurt.

I lie alone in dirt despair.

Alone beside one who does not feel

lightning strike and agony crackle.

I sink into black, the inkwell

wordless, filled with tears.

Broken Spoke by Mary Ruefle

Broken Spoke

You grow old.

You love everybody.

You forgive everyone.

You think: we are all leaves

dragged along by the wind.

Then comes a splendid spotted

yellow one—ah, distinction!

And in that moment

you are dragged under.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

This Conflict by Frank Stanford

This Conflict

A body with very few clothes

An old radio

Some apples

You get to eat

as many slices of bacon as you want

the morning of a home game

The way his sweater smells

It gets so hot it smokes

After awhile

just when Sam Cooke’s new song

comes on

Worms and a homely girl from Texas

who can read quicker than you

Good marks

and a lost crop

like a whole season

that passed without a letter

from my brother.

The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver

The Kingfisher

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave

like a blue flower, in his beak

he carries a silver leaf. I think this is

the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind

a little dying, how could there be a day in your

whole life

that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

There are more fish than there are leaves

on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher

wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the

water

remains water--hunger is the only story

he has ever heard in his life that he could

believe.

I don't say he's right. Neither

do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the

silver leaf

with its broken red river, and with a rough and

easy cry

I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body

if my life depended on it, he swings back

over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it

(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.