Clay out of Silence by C. K. Williams

Clay out of Silence

 

chances are we will sink quietly back

into oblivion without a ripple

we will go back into the face

down through the mortars as though it hadn’t happened

 

earth: I’ll remember you

you were the mother you made pain

I’ll grind my thorax against you for the last time

and put my hand on you again to comfort you

 

sky: could we forget?

we were the same as you were

we couldn’t wait to get back sleeping

we’d have done anything to be sleeping

 

and trees angels for being thrust up here

and stones for cracking in my bare hands

because you foreknew

there was no vengeance for being here

 

when we were flesh we were eaten

when we were metal we were burned back

there was no death anywhere but now

when we were men when we became it

 

 

From Which I Flew by Tyree Daye

From Which I Flew 

Only together holding their hands in silence can I see what a field has done

to my mother, aunts and uncles.

 

The land around my grandmother's

old tin roof has changed,

I doubt she'd recognize it from above.

How many blackbirds does it take

to lift a house? I'll bring my living,

you wake your dead.

 

We have nowhere to go, but we're leaving anyhow,

by many ways. When they ask    why

you want to fly, Blackbird? Say

 

I want to leave the south

because it killed the first man I loved

and so much more killing.

Say my son's name,

 

his death was the first thing to break me in

and fly me through town.

 

If grief has a body it wears his Dodgers cap

and still walks to the corner store to buy lottery tickets

and Budweiser 40s.

 

I don't like what I have to be here to be.

 

All the blackbirds with nowhere to go

keep leaving.

I Stop Writing the Poem by Tess Gallagher

 I Stop Writing the Poem

 

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives

or who dies, I'm still a woman.

I'll always have plenty to do.

I bring the arms of his shirt

together. Nothing can stop

our tenderness. I'll get back

to the poem. I'll get back to being

a woman. But for now

there's a shirt, a giant shirt

in my hands, and somewhere a small girl

standing next to her mother

watching to see how it's done.

 

In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden

 In Memory of W. B. Yeats

 

I

 

He disappeared in the dead of winter. 

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, 

And snow disfigured the public statues; 

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

O all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day. 

 

Far from his illness,

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems. 

 

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumors;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed. He became his admirers. 

 

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities.

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;

To find his happiness in another kind of wood,

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience:

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living. 

 

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow,

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, 

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, 

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, 

A few thousand will think of this day, 

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. 

He was silly like us: His gift survived it all. 

 

O all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

 

Earth, receive an honored guest; 

William Yeats is laid to rest: 

Let the Irish vessel lie 

Emptied of its poetry. 

 

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent, 

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique, 

 

Worships language and forgives 

Everyone by whom it lives, 

Pardons cowardice, conceit, 

Lays its honors at their feet. 

 

Time that with this strange excuse 

Pardoned Kipling and his views, 

And will pardon Paul Claudel, 

Pardons him for writing well. 

 

In the nightmare of the dark 

All the dogs of Europe bark, 

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate. 

 

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face, 

And the seas of pity lie 

Locked and frozen in each eye. 

 

Follow, poet, follow right 

To the bottom of the night, 

With your unconstraining voice 

Still persuade us to rejoice. 

 

With the farming of a verse 

Make a vineyard of the curse, 

Sing of human unsuccess 

In a rapture of distress. 

 

In the deserts of the heart 

Let the healing fountains start, 

In the prison of his days 

Teach the free man how to praise.

So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph

So Where Are We?

So where were we? The fiery

avalanche headed right at us—falling,

 

flailing bodies in mid-air—

the neighborhood under thick gray powder—

 

on every screen. I don’t know

where you are, I don’t know what

 

I’m going to do, I heard a man say;

the man who had spoken was myself.

 

What year? Which Southwest Asian war?

Smoke from infants’ brains

 

on fire from the phosphorus hours

after they’re killed, killers

 

reveling in the horror. The more obscene

the better it works. The point

 

at which a hundred thousand massacred

is only a detail. Asset and credit bubbles

 

about to burst. Too much consciousness

of too much at once, a tangle of tenses

 

and parallel thoughts, a series of feelings

overlapping a sudden sensation

 

felt and known, those chains of small facts

repeated endlessly, in the depths

 

of silent time. So where are we?

My ear turns, like an animal’s. I listen.

 

Like it or not, a digital you is out there.

Half of that city’s buildings aren’t there.

 

Who was there when something was, and a witness

to it? The rich boy general conducts the Pakistani

 

heroin trade on a satellite phone from his cave.

On the top floor of the Federal Reserve

 

in an office looking out onto Liberty

at the South Tower’s onetime space,

 

the Secretary of the Treasury concedes

they got killed in terms of perceptions.

 

Ten blocks away is the Church of the Transfiguration,

in the back is a Byzantine Madonna—

 

there is a God, a God who fits the drama

in a very particular sense. What you said—

 

the memory of a memory of a remembered

memory, the color of a memory, violet and black.

The lunar eclipse on the winter solstice,

the moon a red and black and copper hue.

 

The streets, the harbor, the light, the sky.

The blue and cloudless intense and blue morning sky.

Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2) by Joshua Bennett

 Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2)

 

       ^{with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks}

Months into the plague now,

I am disallowed

entry even into the waiting

room with Mom, escorted outside

instead by men armed

with guns & bottles

of hand sanitizer, their entire

countenance its own American

metaphor. So the first time

I see you in full force,

I am pacing maniacally

up & down the block outside,

Facetiming the radiologist

& your mother too,

her arm angled like a cellist’s

to help me see.

We are dazzled by the sight

of each bone in your feet,

the pulsing black archipelago

of your heart, your fists in front

of your face like mine when I

was only just born, ten times as big

as you are now. Your great-grandmother

calls me Tyson the moment she sees

this pose. Prefigures a boy

built for conflict, her barbarous

and metal little man. She leaves

the world only months after we learn

you are entering into it. And her mind

the year before that. In the dementia’s final

days, she envisions herself as a girl

of seventeen, running through fields

of strawberries, unfettered as a king

-fisher. I watch your stance and imagine

her laughter echoing back across the ages,

you, her youngest descendant born into

freedom, our littlest burden-lifter, world

-beater, avant-garde percussionist

swinging darkness into song.

Anti-Pastoral by Vievee Francis

 Anti-Pastoral

 

i

How often have I spoken of the thistle,

the honeysuckle, the blistering bee?

How often have I asked how? I’ve grown tired

of my questions. And you’ve grown tired

of the limits of my language. I hate this measure

of memory, the constant return to the creek, the field,

the sundering South. I want release from the pasture

of my youth, from its cows and cobs in the mouth.

Forgive me my tiresome nostalgia. Forget it.

Let me forge a fissure between what was and is.

I have no accent. You would not know where I was from

if I didn’t keep reminding you. Look at my city

shoes crunching through the new snow

on the sidewalk. Not a blade of grass anywhere.

 

ii

Which is not to say, Praise the urban, privilege the shadow

of the alley over the shade beneath a tree, or the average sky-

scraper over a clearing.

 

ii

Not in a surfeit of emotion, but in its thoughtful

consideration, later, when natural rage, through meditation,

may be pulled as milk through an udder, into a purer stream

—this is how Wordsworth would have it,

not red-eyed and trembling, but clearheaded,

the tempest assuaged. Can you believe that?

Easy to say from some green-lined walking trail,

but this is a city, and here is an old woman

on the curb, broken as easily as a wafer she might have

had with her iced tea later this evening. Here is a reason

to prefer whiskey over a cow’s poor offering. Whiskey,

essential as water, worthy of pain and erasure.

And she is one of many, so I drink to her and her and her—