I Woke Up by Jameson Fitzpatrick

I Woke Up

and it was political.

I made coffee and the coffee was political.

I took a shower and the water was.

I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top

and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake

silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses

and later, on the train, that was political,

when I studied every handsome man in the car.

Who I thought was handsome was political.

I went to work at the university and everything was

very obviously political, the department and the institution.

All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political,

where I threw them when I was through.

I was blond and it was political.

So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.”

I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was.

That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America

was political, and it was political when America killed another person,

who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation.

I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness

like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy

who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political.

My mother read to me almost every night

and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political.

That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something.

Someone called me faggot and it was political.

I called myself a faggot and it was political.

How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was

was political. I thought I could become a writer

and it was political that I could imagine it.

I thought I was not a political poet and still

my imagination was political.

It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

i am running into a new year by Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year

i am running into a new year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that i catch in my hair

like strong fingers like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what i said to myself

about myself

when i was sixteen and

twenty-six and thirty-six

even thirty-six but

i am running into a new year

and i beg what i love and

i leave to forgive me

Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in 

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Your Night Is of Lilac by Mahmoud Darwish

Your Night Is of Lilac

The night sits wherever you are. Your night

is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes

from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass

and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow—

a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams

equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller

in your lilac night, I am he who was one day

me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed

the heart’s rank between two grades: neither

the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies

a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you

is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night

is the covenant of night, crawling in my body

anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery

that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer

I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night

staring at itself safe and assured in its

endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror

and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors

who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry

on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others,

and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry

moon in the remoteness of speech ...

(Translated by Fady Joudah)

 

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe by Sharon Olds

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

The ambulance men touched her cold

body, lifted it, heavy as iron,

onto the stretcher, tried to close the

mouth, closed the eyes, tied the

arms to the sides, moved a caught

strand of hair, as if it mattered,

saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by

gravity, under the sheet

carried her, as if it were she,

down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out

afterwards, as they always did,

for a drink or two, but they could not meet

each other's eyes.

Their lives took

a turn -- one had nightmares, strange

pains, impotence, depression. One did not

like his work, his wife looked

different, his kids. Even death

seemed different to him -- a place where she

would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night

in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a

woman breathing, just an ordinary

woman

breathing.

 

Last Ink by Michael Ondaatje

Last Ink

In certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies

half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer's cart go by

the way someone in your life will talk out love and grief

then leave your company laughing.

In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates

where you met the plum blossom and moon by chance

—the dusk light, the cloud pattern,

recorded always in your heart

and the rest of the world—chaos,

circling your winter boat.

Night of the Plum and Moon.

Years later you shared it

on a scroll or nudged

the ink onto stone

to hold the vista of a life.

A condensary of time in the mountains

—your rain-swollen gate, a summer

scarce with human meeting.

Just bells from another village.

The memory of a woman walking down stairs.

-

Life on an ancient leaf

or a crowded 5th-century seal

this mirror-world of art

—lying on it as if a bed.

When you first saw her,

the night of moon and plum,

you could speak of this to no one.

You cut your desire

against a river stone.

You caught yourself

in a cicada-wing rubbing,

lightly inked.

The indelible darker self.

A seal, the Masters said,

must contain bowing and leaping,

"and that which hides in waters."

Yellow, drunk with ink,

the scroll unrolls to the west

a river journey, each story

an owl in the dark, its child-howl

unreachable now

—that father and daughter,

that lover walking naked down blue stairs

each step jarring the humming from her mouth.

I want to die on your chest but not yet,

she wrote, sometime in the 13 th century

of our love

before the yellow age of paper

before her story became a song,

lost in imprecise reproductions

until caught in jade,

whose spectrum could hold the black greens

the chalk-blue of her eyes in daylight.

-

Our altering love, our moonless faith.

Last ink in the pen.

My body on this hard bed.

The moment in the heart

where I roam restless, searching

for the thin border of the fence

to break through or leap.

Leaping and bowing.