Pig by Henri Cole

Pig

Poor patient pig—trying to keep his balance, 

that’s all, upright on a flatbed ahead of me,

somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio,

enjoying the wind, maybe, against the tufts of hair

on the tops of his ears, like a Stoic at the foot

of the gallows, or, with my eyes heavy and glazed 

from caffeine and driving, like a soul disembarking, 

its flesh probably bacon now tipping into split-

pea soup, or, more painful to me, like a man 

in his middle years struggling to remain

vital and honest while we’re all just floating 

around accidental-like on a breeze. 

What funny thoughts slide into the head, 

alone on the interstate with no place to be.

Measure for Measure by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Measure for Measure

Alone in Woody Creek, Colorado,

I fell asleep reading “Measure for Measure,”

Right at the part where the Duke delivers

His Old Testament decision of haste

Paying for haste, and leisure answering

Leisure, like quitting like, and (wait for it)

Measure for measure. I saw it performed

Once, in Stratford; I was maybe twenty.

I only remembered the “measure still

For measure” part, until now. It stuck

With me. But the rest of it was wiped clean

From my memory, all of Stratford, too.

Still, the way the actor leaned on that half

Line, “measure still for measure,” as though it

Were the measure of his self, measure still

For measure, all these years, I remembered

Being the heart of the play, its great gist;

But I forgot it was a death sentence.

Whether Angelo deserved such a fate,

Or Isabella’s ability to

Rise above the mire doesn’t matter:

Death, not beauty, woke me.

                  My neck aches.

All of Shakespeare feels like lead on my chest,

Not for death, let’s face it, death awaits us,

Usually with less prescient language,

But death measures us with a noun’s contempt

For our imagination, being death

But not dying, making do, like when I

Turn from the Bard, look outside and behold

A herd of a hundred elk, surviving

The snow as they know how––being elk.

An hour ago they were in the hills,

But now they graze a mere five feet away,

Their world othered by these austere windows;

The massive seven-pointer, chin held high

To prevent his thick neck from crashing down,

Hoofs the snow and starts toward me, but then turns

To compass the valley between his horns.

 

Poem (As the Cat) by William Carlos Williams

Poem (As the Cat)

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

 

September by Deborah Landau

September

Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one

running in the yard pulse pulse the absence.

Leave them not to the empty yards.

They resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes

one was angry sometimes someone called her "wife"

someone's hair receding.

An uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness

and oh what to do with it.

(How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.)

It had been some time since richness intangible

and then they made a whole coat of it.

Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale.

A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along.

Borderless and open the days go on—

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Amiri Baraka

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way

The ground opens up and envelopes me

Each time I go out to walk the dog.

Or the broad edged silly music the wind

Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars,

And each night I get the same number.

And when they will not come to be counted,

I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night, I tiptoed up

To my daughter's room and heard her

Talking to someone, and when I opened

The door, there was no one there...

Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

 

Practicing by Marie Howe

Practicing

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d

shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

just before we’d made ourselves stop.

Late Ripeness by Czesław Miłosz

Late Ripeness

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, 

I felt a door opening in me and I entered 

the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing, 

like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas 

assigned to my brush came closer, 

ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people, 

grief and pity joined us. 

We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division 

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part 

of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago— 

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror 

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel 

staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us, 

waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, 

as are all men and women living at the same time, 

whether they are aware of it or not.

(Translated by Robert Hass)