Pronghorn by Debra Nystrom

Pronghorn

 

Shadows appeared earliest in patches of rough, steep

drop below the far east ridge, where the bluffs

fell off first, and antelope

fed together at evening on sage and grama tufts

 

that took less heat than the fields up top

or the lower bluffs stretching out to the river,

bleached grass bending east in wind, lifting up

sometimes then bending again like the fur

 

of bigger animals a hand might’ve just passed over.

Their elegant necks angled down as everything sloped

toward the river more than a mile across there,

full of sandbars whose shapes

 

the water slowly rearranged, so no map

ever stayed exact.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

 

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

 

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

An Obituary by Najwan Darwish

An Obituary

 

He hoped his obituary would read as follows:

He fought the invaders as best he could.

He wasn’t victorious,

but neither was he defeated.

In oblivion he made a life

for a thousand years to come.

He died fulfilling his poetic obligations.

 

(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid)

 

First Memory by Louise Glück

First Memory

 

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived

to revenge myself

against my father, not

for what he was—

for what I was: from the beginning of time,

in childhood, I thought

that pain meant

I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

Romantics: Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann by Lisel Mueller

Romantics: Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

 

The modern biographers worry

“how far it went,” their tender friendship.

They wonder just what it means

when he writes he thinks of her constantly,

his guardian angel, beloved friend.

The modern biographers ask

the rude, irrelevant question

of our age, as if the event

of two bodies meshing together

establishes the degree of love,

forgetting how softly Eros walked

in the nineteenth century, how a hand

held overlong or a gaze anchored

in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,

and nuances of address not known

in our egalitarian language

could make the redolent air

tremble and shimmer with the heat

of possibility. Each time I hear

the Intermezzi, sad

and lavish in their tenderness,

I imagine the two of them

sitting in a garden

among the late-blooming roses

and dark cascades of leaves,

letting the landscape speak for them,

leaving us nothing to overhear.

In Response to Feeling Alone by t. liem

In Response to Feeling Alone 

Doubtless our lives are solitary but also the inverse.

–Jenny Xie

 

Everything’s been known before us OK. The clouds

 

disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it. When we stood on Seminyak beach

like a pair of exclamation points,

 

we heard the same offing tone heard when someone went to look for their father’s

corpse in 1965, didn’t we. Please don’t make me explain this. After the fact

 

a siren seesaws by my open window. Passing on the street a voice in a phone

says no I’m alone now so it’s possible ghosts also vacation

 

from whats-to-come. How many people can you name who want to be loved without

enthusiastically loving back? The common

 

cause of disappearances costs us. We live in the aftermath. In other words, if one more person tells me the country of my father’s birth is cheap

 

I will lose it. In other words, this is the only language I speak. To my slightest

disappointment: I’m just writing to say hello. No need to write back.

 

Don’t get me wrong, waiting isn’t passive, but what if they never found him? Spoiler

alert you already know they didn’t; or they found him

 

a thousand times a thousand times. The story I was told was cooked on a soaking wet

 skewer piercing the meat of it through and through. In other words,

 

an implication. Not to change the subject, but if you think an apocalypse will eliminate

the wealth gap, let’s hold together the premonition

 

it will not. Admiration turned me into a housefly, repeating my body against a window

trying to get out. I lied

 

low about having let particular men touch me, but don’t leave me alone now before I

recover. Their spines turned in on the shelves reveal thick wads of time I spent in

omission. Gentle paper, I ask for it back. Doubtless

 

this moment is our opening.

 

Argot by Mary Ruefle

Argot

 

The moon passes her twentieth night.

Month after month, she dies so young.

What are the trout thinking?

At dawn on the thirteenth

I am lost in the great expanse

of tiny thoughts.

When I say trout I mean you.