January 2012
53 posts
3 tags
Elegy What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else...
December 2011
45 posts
5 tags
Fragile
It’s fall in this corner of the landscape. You’re dressed in green, tempting. And I, on the other hand, again this fragile. And you, on the other hand, as passionate as that.
Yes, perhaps I’d place my hand on your back, drop it to your waist, to dance. Lie down in this nest, sleep and at twilight awaken.
It’s a desert on this street. You’re dressed in mist,...
4 tags
In Flight
The Himalayan legend says there are beautiful white birds that live completely in flight. They are born in the air,
must learn to fly before falling and die also in their flying. Maybe you have been born into such a life
with the bottom dropping out. Maybe gravity is claiming you and you feel ghost-scripted.
For the one who lives inside the fall, the sky beneath the sky of...
3 tags
Thursday
And if I loved you Wednesday, Well, what is that to you? I do not love you Thursday— So much is true.
And why you come complaining Is more than I can see. I loved you Wednesday,—yes—but what Is that to me?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
4 tags
100 words Over How I Don’t Bear a Grudge For the Heart
I don’t carry a grudge against the government. I have the nation of you. I have your hands and what they can do. I have the heart of you — special core of your purpose and power. I have the gift of your sweat stained sage, your hummingbird’s bliss, sanctuary that you would find in me. I don’t carry a grudge...
4 tags
“”
– Notes About His Hands, Part 4
(Elegy for his Hands) It was late, I was drunk, you were warm to my hand, I would say, please don’t leave, touch me there, but you never I was late, you were drunk, it was warm to my hand, I would want, just to please, you were there, but I never I was warm,...
4 tags
love poem #3
1 i will put a bee under your bed
2 every day for a year
3 so you do not perceive the increase
4 of bees under your bed
5 and become unconsciously accustomed to their activity
6 which at its culmination
a. (364 bees)
7 will be substantial
8 you will lay down over a large, undulating field
9 of meticulous noise
a. their dark purr will comfort you
b. you will require...
solar flares (67A)
i am covered in sunspots and this heat is swelling my scars ruinous god with your red currant lips I swear I did not love their touch but now because they reveal intent and the reason neither good nor gentle nothing much just a desire for more summer in my belly
Annette C. Boehm
6 tags
the five parts of love (176, 174, 173, 175, 177)*
1 / yechida
lyre lyre lyre an unplanned desire for song music of the unmoving fingers
2 / chaya
my eyes don’t see: i see channel my breath toward my lips and yours
3 / nefesh
all sinews, veins and elbows a vine that grows up trees sap driving up leaves and blossoms
4 / ruach
dawn rises and descends comes downstairs for breakfast to fill her...
3 tags
αγριο σκυλι στη Σαντορινη*
black dog comes closer to sniff my prayer skin through the blue door senses the small way I learned to hold myself shut Helen Vitoria
*wild dog on Santorini
Theater
I have a habit of remembering every day I spent with you, from the grocery store parking lots to the late night movies, and I have an even worse habit of retelling the stories behind each one of these days when I’m in your company, from every word we spoke to that crinkle that formed on the bridge of your nose when you laughed. I even think of our taste test of red plums and white...
3 tags
These are Please God Days
When she says sacrifice is something she understands, she means there is no God of courage. He tells her he is crumbling. He keeps his broken self in his front pocket, fingering it like a buckeye. Sometimes he holds it in the side of his cheek—
a damp apology. They sledge stakes in the yard and in the bed and throw themselves against imaginary fences, falling back into...
3 tags
Human Beauty
If you write a poem about love… the love is a bird, the poem is an origami bird. If you write a poem about death… the death is a terrible fire, the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames you feed to the fire. We can see, in these, the space between our gestures and the power they address —an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty, a distinctly human beauty. When a...
3 tags
The Philosophies of Loneliness
1. Western Nothing matters. Except your eyes. They might matter. No, nothing matters. Except your lips. They might. Nothing matters except your legs, but when I see your breasts your legs don’t matter. Nothing matters. I think, therefore I am not with you. It doesn’t matter that I think. It doesn’t matter what I think. God is dead. Therefore, I am...
3 tags
NARROW OPENINGS
A constant dripping on a day of steady rain and a contentious woman are alike. —Proverbs 27:15
It’s hot. The clouds’ soft faces are closed, a billowing refusal, and I want to quarrel with my lover who just sits risen dull from a bed we left damp as horses that have run for a long time. Hair hangs, humid and tangled, on my neck, but he won’t unlatch the window. Doesn’t like the...
4 tags
Actual Animals
It’s not that the antlers pain, exactly, budding from her forehead, but they do in the first few weeks feel raw, and her gait changes to accommodate the weight of them, ...
4 tags
Indigo
What I see now in our snapshots together is the hole in your T-shirt, a torn seam at your left shoulder, dark in the sun. Already up close, you can see the indigo thread coming out, and this is what worries me, how fast a thing unravels. From the loose weave of what covers us, touches our freckled skin, we are open to desire or absence. We count on the way our clothes keep us together,...
5 tags
Single Thread
When I was a weaver, I chose a red silk thread to get me to the heart of my creation and then back out, across the loom, to whatever life was waiting.
And when you found the little red pathway, buried between warp and woof, you were sure you’d found a flaw. Please remember what happens
when there’s no exit. Years of breathing wool dust, reeking of lanolin, staring into...
3 tags
TO MAP YOUR TONGUE AGAIN
That: after-waking, sardine-silver tornado swirling, reaching taste-grips, and blooms, not buds,
checking what and where. I’ve been reading about savory when I thought all I needed to know
was salty— my seventh grade science project now trash. I traced and colored an enormous tongue for it. This “sweet,”
this “bitter,” etcetera. Here this, here that. And just...
3 tags
The Darker Sooner
Then came the darker sooner, came the later lower. We were no longer a sweeter-here happily-ever-after. We were after ever. We were farther and further. More was the word we used for harder. Lost was our standard-bearer. Our gods were fallen faster, and fallen larger. The day was duller, duller was disaster. Our charge was error. Instead of leader we had louder, instead of...
3 tags
POSTHUMOUS LOVE POEM 6
house arms a face a layer of the distance shared with leaves
and the thing between the leaves we could never have held holding
there was a zipper and a balloon and we woke
in the dream i used to be having back when i was a thing
having having when i was for you
a thing a thing to have
Christopher Janke
3 tags
4th of July
If I have any romantic notions left, please let me abandon them here on the dashboard of your Subaru beside this container of gas station potato salad and bottle of sunscreen. Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet waiting to be shaken open by some other man’s hand. Let there be another town after this one, a town with an improbable Western name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get a...
3 tags
You Loved A Woman Once
She told you of childhood summers, mayflies trembling beside the bridge of her nose, hunting frogs. Skinning them on a brick, the house smelling like their small, fried legs.
All she wanted was for you to carry her home in a canoe with paddles, life vests, a flare. You promised to teach her how to swim when she was in your arms.
Your own body, broken into so many times,...
2 tags
WatchHacienda Motel, Pickwick
4 tags
Blustery
Blustery 25-below, O Walt, I wouldn’t go And live with animals tonight— Or anytime soon. How do They survive in their snowy lairs? How could I, for that matter, who Haven’t taken the wild Swedish plunge Every chilly night to thicken my fur layer By layer, I who doze by the fire With the phone to my ear, Doze the whole new year Listening to my wife in such weird...
Humid
The dandelion mouths dip amidst fields, hazy and wet while a few little birdies, such small blimps, flit about all the tender tendrils.
Sitting adirondack on a porch and listening to the pink hour when sprinklers buzz and bats
swoop and holler, for once I wish it possible to travel by telephone to you, or whoever is still there on the line.
So, I sing sometimes the love call of...
3 tags
This Morning the Small Bird Brought a Message from the Other Side
I would not call it fear or the absence of fear that I woke with, but worry, this morning when I rose up from the bed, & saw, with clear seeing, for the first time, that my chest was a small, red cup, or bird in my hand, somehow thirsty, its injury made me panic for it & I carried it with me not knowing what to do...
3 tags
synesthesia after anesthesia waking up like a needle
in a haystack afraid to be found
and if found to make nothing more than a stitch in water
but even so the unimaginable ripple might touch the tongue
of a passing deer who has bent to drink so long and so deeply
I forget my fear and become the current in her liquid eye
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
3 tags
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.
A. E. Housman
I can make you out with difficulty. What tricks the water has played all around! We’ve been parted by the ice. Now we are on different sides. The houses and woods have grown gaunt. A maple sways pale, emaciated. After settling on the water, our voices will move quietly on, with the water. The ice floe groans and sinks in the struggle, and you are slender, like a piece of ice far...
Under the lime tree on the open field, where we two had our bed, you still can see lovely both broken flowers and grass. On the edge of the woods in a vale, tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale.
Walther von der Vogelweide
3 tags
After Pavese’s Grappa in September
No laziness like mine, little crystal cup, tomatoes canned, late basil crushed to pesto. Nothing better than 95 degrees in the shade. People like us don’t sweat in the heat because we work. The sun finds a place on our skin and has no need to make it shine.
Judith Vollmer
3 tags
She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep
She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half words whispered low: As earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow.
Robert Graves
thank you, poetry365
3 tags
Dualities
The night you slip and hum her name into my ear, I shall become light– as wave reinventing myself in every warped windowpane of your room; as particle
I will snarl your hair, tangle your bedclothes, bind your lover in a knot of shadow and make her watch me vibrate every atom in your blood, sing hallelujah in the cavern of your chest.
Planck taught us that the body gives off heat ...
3 tags
The Return: “She Collected Dictionaries”
excerpt
She Collected Dictionaries as other women take up men and shelve them: manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh, like a passion for clothes that would hang unworn in the dark, for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls in a shut case, nouns declined. Each unknown word shone with delicious fire and the...
4 tags
Studying for the Massage Licensing Exam
It is 5:00 a.m. and for an hour I have been trying to draw the body piece by piece from the page the medial malleolus is formed from the distal portion of the tibia. Outside, cicadas rub transitional light between their legs the thigh bone connected to the knee bone and I wish I could open the window and cut a square from the dark, Brachioradialis :...
3 tags
…Morning pours the ocean deep Into the hollow of my sleep But the ocean can’t be mine Your perfection can’t be mine
So drive me down the 405 Where my airplane leaves tonight I’m tipping up and touching down Leave LA sparkling on the ground LA glitters on the ground …
Cruisers, Red House Painters
3 tags
from Naomi Poems
When our hands are alone, they open, like faces. There is no shore To their opening.
Bill Knott
thank you, uutpoetry
3 tags
from Stone
more sluggish the snowy hive, clearer the window’s crystal,
on a chair, a turquoise veil, thrown there, carelessly, lies.
a tissue, self-intoxicated, as if it never felt winter’s
touch, experiencing summer’s,
by its own delicacy, caressed:
and, if in icy diamonds
frost is eternally streaming,
here — it’s dragonflies flickering,
blue-eyed, living, and gone.
osip...
You are me and I am you.
Isn’t it obvious that we inter-are?
You cultivate the flower in yourself so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself so that you do not have to suffer.
I support you, you support me.
I am here to bring you peace you are here to bring me joy.
Thich Nhat Hanh
3 tags
BLESSED The ground is hardening again after the long rain and I feel stable enough to run, hard and fast, cold air burning my chest, with the dog just ahead, stolen roses in my hands. They are candy-cane striped, disgustingly pink and heavy on their woody stems. I’ll put them in water, in a jelly jar, place it on the countertop for you. Darling. If I had nothing else to say, then this could...
3 tags
The Peace That So Lovingly Descends
“You” have transformed into “my loss.” The nettles in your vanished hair Restore the absolute truth Of warring animals without a haven. I know, I’m as pathetic as a railroad Without tracks. In June, I eat The lonesome berries from the branches. What can I say, except the forecast Never changes. I sleep without you, And...
3 tags
Fireworks at Wilmington
The boom of revolution echoes –
how it melts in our mouths,
a whirring of having made it
to somewhere with no map, just you,
my love, here on the field, the night air
turns into yellow-eyed cats,
and cotton candy, into a girl
...