Public Toilets in Regent’s Park by Richard Scott

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The Death of a Soldier by Wallace Stevens

The Death of a Soldier

Life contracts and death is expected,

As in a season of autumn.

The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,

Imposing his separation,

Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,

As in a season of autumn,

When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,

The clouds go, nevertheless,

In their direction.

 

Crossing into Canaan by D. A. Powell

Crossing into Canaan

Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me—Daniel 10:18

febrile body I woke into: nightsweats, stink of the toil of living: 

where hands could not bear to approach me, the young man fingered 

lay upon me, was himself a cool sponge, drew my perspiration to his lips 

ice-chips he held in his teeth, he pushed small bergs into my mouth 

caressed the skeletal arms I’ve hidden in long sleeves 

kissed neck and chest, belly rotten with pudgy organs, thick-set flesh 

he pressed against me, cock on cock and tongue against tongue 

saw his reflection in my marshy eyes and did not flinch such weakness 

held, sustained by this capable stroke, boatswain of my crossing 

I take the death I’m moored to, announced as a measureless promontory 

and bob in the river like a bloated corpse, blue lips, vacant gaze 

I let the water fill my lungs until they rip their festive piñatas 

because the one who comes to gather me, capricious angel 

has a voice that affirms me rising when this fever abates 

 

Daystar by Rita Dove

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking: 

but she saw diapers steaming on the line,

a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage 

to sit out the children’s naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch: 

the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,

a floating maple leaf. Other days 

she stared until she was assured 

when she closed her eyes
she’d see only her vivid own blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared 

pouting from the top of the stairs.

And just what was mother doing 

out back with the field mice? Why, 

building a palace. Later

that night when Thomas rolled over and 

lurched into her, she would open her eyes 

and think of the place that was hers 

for an hour — where 

she was nothing, 

pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

 

Epidermal Macabre by Theodore Roethke

Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes

The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --

The flying fabric stitched on bone,

The vesture of the skeleton,

The garment neither fur nor hair,

The cloak of evil and despair,

The veil long violated by

Caresses of the hand and eye.

Yet such is my unseemliness:

I hate my epidermal dress,

The savage blood's obscenity,

The rags of my anatomy,

And willingly would I dispense

With false accouterments of sense,

To sleep immodestly, a most

Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

 

Southern Gothic by Rickey Laurentiis

Southern Gothic 

About the dead having available to them

all breeds of knowledge,

some pure, others wicked, especially what is

future, and the history that remains 

once the waters recede, revealing the land 

that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land 

that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived 

as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived, 

simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said 

they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences 

silences: sometimes a boy will slip 

from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,

sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.

 

February by Jim Harrison

February

Warm enough here in Patagonia AZ to read

the new Mandelstam outside in my underpants

which is to say he was never warm enough

except in summer and he was without paper to write

and his belly was mostly empty most of the time

like that Mexican girl I picked up on a mountain road

the other day who couldn’t stop weeping. She had slept

out two nights in a sweater in below-freezing weather.

She had been headed to Los Angeles but the coyote

took her money and abandoned her in the wilderness.

Her shoes were in pieces and her feet bleeding.

I took her to town and bought her food. She got a ride

to Nogales. She told us in Spanish that she just wanted

to go home and sleep in her own bed. That’s what Mandelstam

wanted with mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. Everyone

wants this. Mandelstam said, “To be alone is to be alive.”

“Lost and looked in the sky’s asylum eye.” “What of

her nights?” Maybe she was watched by some of the fifty

or so birds I have in the yard now. When they want to

they just fly away. I gave them my yard and lots of food.

They smile strange bird smiles. She couldn’t fly away.

Neither can I though I’ve tried a lot lately to migrate

to the Camargue on my own wings. When they are married,

Mandelstam and the Mexican girl, in heaven they’ll tell

long stories of the horrors of life on earth ending each session

by chanting his beautiful poems that we did not deserve.