Katy by Frank O'Hara

Katy

 

They say I mope too much

but really I’m loudly dancing. I

 eat paper. It’s good for my bones.

I play the piano pedal. I dance,

I am never quiet, I mean silent.

Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara.

I think I’ll be alone for a little while. 

Hoki Mai by Tayi Tibble

Hoki Mai

 

She kisses him goodbye with her eyes still wet and alight from their

last swim in the Awatere River. At the train station celebration, she

leads the kapa haka but her voice keeps breaking under and over

itself like waves. Like last night, on the riverbank, between the moss

and the baby’s-breath, where he had kissed her sticky until she cried

out from her chest. And she was thinking about the rolls of white

fabric her sister kept in the shed and how she would make a dress

pressed with shiny bits of shell. She could even fix a veil from a

fishing net or wear knots of pale hydrangeas like a crown upon her

head. Then together they would move to the empty plot of ancestral

land forgotten by the sea and have little brown babies that she would

make sure to stuff fat with potatoes and wobbly mutton. And her

children would slurp kina in the summer. Collect driftwood for the

fires on their way home from school. And their father would take up

a good job in Gisborne. Return home, with sacks of boiled sweets

and powdery jam-filled treats, and maybe, on special occasions, a

European perfume or powder that she would keep but never use.

And already she could smell the florals and the meat. Feel them

turning inside her. Sensations so visceral that she cried out from

her chest but when the sun lit up and the train started pulling

away, with every salute, march and funeral-wave farewell, she felt

the world changing. The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that

threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard. But

she promised that every day she would be the first to check the mail

and that was the only vow she took.

  

Your Voice by Alejandra Pizarnik

Your Voice

 

Ambushed in my writing

you are singing in my poem.

Captive of your sweet voice

engraved in my memory.

Bird intent on its flight.

Air branded by absence.

Clock that keeps time with me

so I never wake up.

 

(translated by Yvette Siegert)

Poppies in July by Sylvia Plath

Poppies in July

 

Little poppies, little hell flames,

Do you do no harm?

 

You flicker. I cannot touch you.

I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

 

And it exhausts me to watch you

Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

 

A mouth just bloodied.

Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.

Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

 

If I could bleed, or sleep!

If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

 

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

Dulling and stilling.

 

But colorless. Colorless.

An Old Man’s Winter Night by Robert Frost

An Old Man’s Winter Night

 

All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him

Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,

That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze

Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.

What kept him from remembering what it was

That brought him to that creaking room was age.

He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.

And having scared the cellar under him

In clomping there, he scared it once again

In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,

Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar

Of trees and crack of branches, common things,

But nothing so like beating on a box.

A light he was to no one but himself

Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,

A quiet light, and then not even that.

He consigned to the moon—such as she was,

So late-arising—to the broken moon

As better than the sun in any case

For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,

His icicles along the wall to keep;

And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt

Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,

And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.

One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house,

A farm, a countryside, or if he can,

It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

An Old Story by Tracy K. Smith

An Old Story

 

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful

Dream. The worst in us having taken over

And broken the rest utterly down.

 

                                                                 A long age

Passed. When at last we knew how little

Would survive us—how little we had mended

 

Or built that was not now lost—something

Large and old awoke. And then our singing

Brought on a different manner of weather.

 

Then animals long believed gone crept down

From trees. We took new stock of one another.

We wept to be reminded of such color.

A Glimpse by Walt Whitman

A Glimpse

 

A glimpse through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I

    unremark’d seated in a corner,

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that

    he may hold me by the hand,

A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.