Chaplinesque by Hart Crane

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Epilogue by Robert Lowell

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write   

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

Bodhisattva by Sarah Arvio

Bodhisattva 

The new news is I love you my nudist

the new news is I love you my buddhist

my naked body and budding pleasure

in the weather of your presence

Not whether your presence but how

Oh love a new nodule of neurosis

a posy of new roses proposing

a new era for us nobis pacem

Oh my bodhisattva of new roses

you’ve saved me from my no-love neurosis

You’ve saved my old body from the fatwa

Let’s lie down in a bed of roses

a pocketful that rings round the rosy 

If this is the end of the world my love 

let’s fall down in bed and die 

Let’s give a new nod to nothing 

Let’s give a rosebud to nothing at all 

How I love the new roses of nothing 

Oh my bodhisattva of nothing 

boding I hope no news but this 

For our bodies and souls I hope nothing 

but the weather of us in our peace 

Leda and the Swan by W. B. Yeats

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

 

Leda, After the Swan by Carl Phillips

Leda, After the Swan

Perhaps,

in the exaggerated grace

of his weight

settling,

the wings

raised, held in

strike-or-embrace

position,

I recognized

something more

than swan, I can't say.

There was just

this barely defined

shoulder, whose feathers

came away in my hands,

and the bit of world

left beyond it, coming down

to the heat-crippled field,

ravens the precise color of

sorrow in good light, neither

black nor blue, like fallen

stitches upon it,

and the hour forever,

it seemed, half-stepping

its way elsewhere--

then

everything, I

remember, began

happening more quickly. 

Weariness of Men by Frank Stanford

Weariness of Men

My grandmother said when she was young

The grass was so wild and high

You couldn’t see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out

Three barns,

Dark and blown down from the weather

Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark,

Cursing the beasts,

And how they would leave the bed

In the morning,

The dead grass of their eyes

Stacked against her.

       

Transformed Creatures by Liu Xia

Transformed Creatures

You have a strange pet — 

one eye is a cat’s, the other a sheep’s.

Yet, it won’t socialize with felines,

will attack any flock.

On moonlit nights,

it wanders on the roof.

When you’re alone

it will lie in your lap

preoccupied, slowly studying you

until — on its face — a challenge.

(Translated by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern)