The Triumph of the Infinite by Mark Strand

The Triumph of the Infinite

I got up in the night and went to the end of the hall. Over the door in large letters it said, “This is the next life. Please come in.” I opened the door. Across the room a bearded man in a pale green suit turned to me and said, “Better get ready, we’re taking the long way.” “Now I’ll wake up,” I thought, but I was wrong. We began our journey over golden tundra and patches of ice. Then there was nothing for miles around, and all I could hear was my heart pumping and pumping so hard I thought I would die all over again. 

Fox by Alice Oswald

Fox

 

I heard a cough

as if a thief was there

outside my sleep

a sharp intake of air

 

a fox in her fox-fur

stepping across

the grass in her black gloves

barked at my house

 

just so abrupt and odd

the way she went

hungrily asking

in the heart's thick accent

 

in such serious sleepless

trespass she came

a woman with a man's voice

but no name

 

as if to say: it's midnight

and my life

is laid beneath my children

like gold leaf

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World by Alice Notley

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World

The Goddess who created this passing world

Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction

Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled

Cars & the variously shod feet were born

And the past & future & I born too

Light as airmail paper away she flew

To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley

Or both but instantly

Clarified, composed, forever was I

Meant by her to recognize a painting

As beautiful or a movie stunning

And to adore the finitude of words

And understand as surfaces my dreams

Know the eye the organ of affection

And depths to be inflections

Of her voice & wrist & smile

Children of Light by Robert Lowell

Children of Light

 

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones

And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones;

Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,

Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night,

They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light;

And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock

The riotous glass houses built on rock,

And candles gutter by an empty altar,

And light is where the landless blood of Cain

Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

Thirteen Ways of Looking by Ama Codjoe

Thirteen Ways of Looking

     after David Hammons’s Close Your Eyes and See Black

1. Smear your forearms with something like shea butter or sunscreen and lean over a bright piece of paperboard, facedown. Hover there, then print your body onto to the paper below. See how your forearms, printed there, make the top half of a diamond?

2. There is no clear narrative. What is clear, scanning the artwork from top to bottom, are details of a naked, muscular torso: two nipples, a hairy chest in the shape of a heart, the elastic band and wrinkled beginnings of a pair of trousers—and strikingly, within the torso, the portrait of a face—cupped by two hands.

3. Close your eyes and see black.

4. What is the texture and mood of your blackness? What seeking, sweetness, or sorrows does it hold?

5. Then the bottom edge of the frame.

6. In Close Your Eyes and See Black, the white space is not white. It is golden, a deep royal hue. Everywhere the body print isn’t is the color of a peeled Georgia peach.

7. Place your hands over your head and make the shape of a diamond.

8. Back to the portrait of a face. It appears like a ghost: centered in the torso, centered in the lower half of the frame. It appears beneath the nipples and above the elastic of wrinkled pants. It appears to be a photographic image of a Black man. It appears this man is closing his eyes, is seeing black.

9. What blacknesses do you see? What blacknesses have printed themselves onto you?

10. To make this body print, David Hammons coated his hair, skin, and clothes with grease and pressed his body onto the paperboard. Then the artist dusted a dark pigment on top, which adhered to the grease’s stickiness.

11. There is no face in the top half of the art work. Instead, a negative space, a rich, golden hue breathes into the space of the diamond.

12. The color of a lucky, double-yolk egg.

13. What must it feel like to shine in shadow; to glow darkly in the sun?

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real by Aleksandar Hemon

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real

 

That which doesn’t have to be named

just keeps being until it’s all undone.

Beyond all that, the world is negotiable

 

and cool, with readjusted coloring,

invisible pain—an ad for a harmless hell.

See the Styrofoam moon in a painted sky,

 

casting no light, just matted reflections,

the stars lurking through the tin-sky holes,

designed in a void that has never moved.

 

But just below, the passing birds, notches

in the night, with news of the cursed tribe

whose stories have no end or beginning,

 

who never lived but must now all be killed.

Cities razed, boats sunk, children drowned,

kindle wood carved from ancient olive trees,

 

shrapnel-shredded bodies in tall heaps.

The birds sing in mourning for the absent

gone unburied, never, nowhere to be found,

 

those who were there or here not so long ago,

asking us: Your name? Where do you come from?

Why are you with us when the others are dead?

 

Memory by Anthony Hecht

Memory

 

Sepia oval portraits of the family,

Black-framed, adorned the small brown-papered hall,

But the parlor was kept unused, never disturbed.

Under a glass bell, the dried hydrangeas

Had bleached to the hue of ancient newspaper,

Though once, someone affirmed, they had been pink.

Pink still were the shiny curling orifices

Of matching seashells stationed on the mantel

With mated, spiked, wrought-iron candlesticks.

The room contained a tufted ottoman,

A large elephant-foot umbrella stand

With two malacca canes, and two peacock

Tail-feathers sprouting from a small-necked vase.

On a teak side table lay, side by side,

A Bible and a magnifying glass.

Green velvet drapes kept the room dark and airless

Until on sunny days toward midsummer

The brass andirons caught a shaft of light

For twenty minutes in late afternoon

In a radiance dimly akin to happiness—

The dusty gleam of temporary wealth.