XIX, from Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Though the world keeps changing its form
as fast as a cloud, still
what is accomplished falls home
to the Primeval.

Over the change and the passing,
larger and freer,
soars your eternal song,
god with the lyre.

Never has grief been possesed,
never has love been learned,
and what removes us in death

is not revealed.
Only the song through the land
hallows and heals.

Le paysage
Robert Desnos (trans. T. Ang)

I had dreamed of loving. I still love but love
is no longer the bouquet of lilacs and roses
suffusing with their scent the woods where a flame
lies at the end of unbending paths.

I had dreamed of loving. I still love but love
is no longer the storm where lightning imposes
its flame on castles, destroys, distorts, and illuminates
in its light from forking paths.

It’s the sparking flint beneath my feet at night,
the word no dictionary in the world can translate
the foam on the sea, the cloud in the sky.

With age, everything turns rigid and luminous,
the nameless roads and knotless ropes.
I feel myself stiffening with the landscape.

day thirty.
Warsan Shire

your aunt gave birth
to still cities
hiroshima a cyst in her stomach
mogadishu a lump in her breast
everyone in your family
told her to
stop
loving
so hard
you won’t find a man who wants
to kiss an atlas
dont map out stars on your back
like that
where you gonna find
a man who wants to join
your constellations with his tongue
push out falestine from under your
tongue xayati
let damascus drip from your neck
and wash out the havana of
your ribs
your dreams are too large
too big
stifiling
they make everyone around you
hold their breath
what man wants a woman
covered in continents
teeth small colonies
stomach an island
what man wants to
watch the world
from his bedroom
face a small riot
hands a civil war
arms freckled
with an immigrants story home
behind your ears
a refugee camp
a body littered entirely
with ugly things

but god,
doesn’t she wear the world well.

(Source: warsanshire.blogspot.sg)

Piano
D. H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Turning Twenty-Three
Anne Michaels

You turned twenty-two in the rain.
We walked in rubber boots
along Lowther, the shiny street as albumen
under streetlamps.

At midnight, the sky suddenly clear
we drove your jazz-filled car
through cold, pungent streets to the lake
where we collected stones by flashlight.
The wind wrapped us in its torsions,
we couldn’t hear each other although we shouted,
wet with star-swallowing waves.

By morning the stones we’d found
were dull with air,
but I couldn’t forget the smell
of the trees’ intimate darkness
the scattered sound of the rain’s distracted hands,
husks of buds in green pools on the sidewalks.

To love one person above all others
is despair, you said, turning twenty-two.
Propaganda of the senses, the narrow-minded heart.

We are magnets, averted
by our sameness.

Above the corrugated, elastic lake
the darkening sky holds out its arms.
A thousand miles away, you’re turning twenty-three

I repeat your name, each time different
into sand, into moonlight.

Far off, the lake crumbles at its edges,
the sky holds out its arms.

Wherever You Are
Jeffrey Harrison

When I kissed you in the hall
of the youth hostel we fell
into the linen closet laughing
twenty years ago and I still
remember though not very often
the taste of cheap wine in your mouth
like raspberries the freckle
between your breasts and the next day
when we went to Versailles I hardly
saw anything because I was looking
at you the whole time your face I can’t
quite remember then I kissed you
good-bye and you got on a train
and I never saw you again just
one day and one letter long gone
explaining never mind but sometimes
I wonder where you are probably
married with children like me happy
with a new last name a whole life
having nothing to do with that day
but everybody has something like it
a small thing they can’t help
going back to and it’s not even about
choices and where your life might
have gone but just that it’s there
far enough away so it can be seen
as just something that happened almost
to someone else an episode from
a movie we walk out of blinded
back into our lives

The Bed That Is a Tree
Kim Lasky

… and as she mourns him the tears run down from her eyes, since this is the right way for a wife when her husband is far and perished.
                                                                      -The Odyssey Book XIV

Naked, I am without a sheet to wind me.

Even vacant sleep won’t shroud me tonight;
so exposed, I notice the blood thinning
in my corpse-veins, hear the shrinking of skin,
see bare limbs decompose in the darkness.

Lost, a tragedy without a body.
Scraps of lament my love I loved you well
distract me in this bed that is a tree
where we should lie together my love

I kept you well (forgive my wanton grief)
like musk in the box and wire in the reed
in this bed that is a tree, where night falls
and things are not as they seem.

When night falls, the sea is a distant death.
Your bones roll in the wash of the breakers
and I hold the living near to me, saved.
My love I kept you well; this bed, this tree.

Easing wanton grief, they come to caress
my dreamless breast, but you come to me too;
the listing hull of a driftwood ship.
My love I loved you well; this tree, this bed.

So much done in darkness, unsaid. Night work
scorns the loom’s reed, wires that would keep threads
apart are sidestepped. We come together
barbed in intimacy, secrets well kept.

I look for you in them, my love, don’t know
what they see in me. Aggrieved, perhaps
talons and beaks, the sharp flaunted freedom
of a woman always dreaming an eagle.

Lamenting: like musk in the box, and wire.

(Source: Guardian)

A Confession
Czeslaw Milosz

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Two Fragments
Sappho

Love holds me captive again
and I tremble with bittersweet longing

As a gale on the mountainside bends the oak tree
I am rocked by my love

XXIII (from The North Ship)
Philip Larkin

If hands could free you, heart,
     Where would you fly?
Far, beyond every part
Of earth this running sky
Makes desolate? Would you cross
City and hill and sea,
     If hands could set you free?

I would not lift the latch;
     For I could run
Through fields, pit-valleys, catch
All beauty under the sun -
Still end in loss:
I should find no bent arm, no bed
     To rest my head.

Coda
Marilyn Hacker

Maybe it was jet lag, maybe not,
but I was smoking in the kitchen: six,
barely, still dark: beyond the panes, a mix
of summer storm and autumn wind. I got
back to you; have I got you back? What
warmed me wasn’t coffee, it was our
revivified combustion. In an hour,
gray morning, but I’d gone back to my spot
beside you, sleeping, where we’d stayed awake
past exhaustion, talking, after, through
the weeks apart, divergent times and faces.
I fell asleep, skin to warm skin, at daybreak.
Your breasts, thighs, shoulders, mouth, voice, are the places
I live, whether or not I live with you.

Fog hid the road. The wipers shoved back torrents
across the windshield. You, on knife-edge, kept
driving. Iva, in the back seat, wept
histrionically. The crosscurrents
shivered like heat-lightning into the parent’s
shotgun seat. I shut up, inadept
at deflecting them. A Buick crept
ahead at twenty-five an hour. “Why aren’t
we passing him? My Coke spilled. The seat’s wet.
You guys keep whispering so I can’t hear.”
“Sit in the front with us, then.”
“No! I’ll get
too hot. Is the fan on? What time is it?
What time will it be when we get there?”
Time to be somewhere else than where we are.

“What do we have? I guess we still don’t know.”
I was afraid to say, you made me feel
my sectioned heart, quiescent loins, and spill
past boundaries the way blackberry-brambles grow
up those tenacious hills I left for you.
Their gritty fruit’s ripe now, but oceans still
separate us, waves opaque as oatmeal,
miles of fog roiling between your pillow
and mine while you say your best: sometimes, she’s where
your compass points, despite you, though a meal
with me, or talk, is good … Where our starfire
translated depths, low fog won’t let you steer
by sight. The needle fingers one desire,
and no other direction can compel.

If no other direction can compel
me upward from the dark-before-the-dawn
descending spiral, I drop like a stone
flung into some scummed-over stagnant well.
The same momentum with which once we fell
across each other’s skies, meteors drawn
by lodestones taproots clutched in unmapped ground
propels me toward some amphibious hell
where kissing’s finished, and I tell, tell, tell
reasons as thick and sticky as frogspawn:
had I done this, that wouldn’t have come undone.
The wolf of wolf’s hour cried at once too often
picks out enfeebled stragglers by the smell
of pond scum drying on them in the sun.

I miss you more than when I was in France
and thought I’d soon be done with missing you.
I miss what we’d have made past making do,
haft meshing weft as autumn days advance,
transliterating variegated strands
of silk, hemp, ribbon, flax, into some new
texture. I missed out on misconstrued
misgivings; did I miss my cue; boat? Chanc-
es are, the answer’s missing too. At risk
again, sleep and digestion, while I seize on
pricklier strands, crushed to exude the reason
I can’t expect you’ll ring up from your desk,
calling me Emer, like Cuchulain’s queen,
to say, we need bread and some salad greens.

On your birthday, I reread Meredith,
whose life’s mean truths inform, tonight, his text
so generously framed. There’ll be the next
night, and the next, cold gaps. I’d have been with
you now, lover and friend, across the width
of some candle-lit table as we mixed
habit and hope in toasts. Instead, perplexed
by separation like a monolith
bulked in the rooms and hours I thought would be
ours, I practice insensibility.
We crossed four miles, three thousand. You diminish
now, on a fogged horizon, far away.
Your twenty-fifth was our first class Tuesday
—will one year bracket us from start to finish?

Will one year bracket us from start to finish,
who, in an evening’s gallant banter, made
plans for new voyages to span decades
of love and work around a world we’d win? Wish
was overgrown with fears; voyages vanish
with empty wine bottles and summer’s paid
bills. Lengthens the legendary blade
between us: silence; hope I hope to banish;
doubt, till I almost doubt what happened, did.
Chicken from Zabar’s warms, and frozen spinach
simmers, while Iva writes a school essay:
“Both Sides: Everything has an opposite …”
sucking her inky fingers and her braid,
and I read Meredith, on your birthday.

“Why did Ray leave her pipe tobacco here
in the fridge?” Iva asks me while we’re
rummaging for mustard and soy sauce
to mix with wine and baste the lamb. “Because
cold keeps it fresh.” That isn’t what she means
we both know. I’ve explained, there were no scenes
or fights, really. We needed time to clear
the air, and think. What she was asking, was,
“Why did Ray leave
her stuff if she’s not coming back?” She leans
to extremes, as I might well. String beans
to be sautéed with garlic; then I’ll toss
the salad; then we’ll eat. (Like menopause
it comes in flashes, more or less severe:
why did you leave?)

“Now that you know you can, the city’s full
of girls—just notice them! It’s not like pull-
ing teeth to flirt,” she said, “or make a date.”
It’s quite like pulling teeth to masturbate
(I didn’t say), and so I don’t. My nice
dreams are worse than nightmares. As my eyes
open, I know I am; that instant, feel
you with me, on me, in me, and you’re not.
Now that you know
you don’t know, fantasies are more like lies.
They don’t fit when I try them on for size.
I guess I can, but can’t imagine what
I’d do, with whom, tonight. It’s much too late
or soon, so what’s yours stays yours. It has until
now. That, you know.

Who would divorce her lover with a phone
call? You did. Like that, it’s finished, done—
or is for you. I’m left with closets of
grief (you moved out your things next day). I love
you. I want to make the phone call this
time, say, pack your axe, cab uptown, kiss
me, lots. I’ll run a bubble bath; we’ll sing
in the tub. We worked for love, loved it. Don’t sling
that out with Friday’s beer cans, or file-card it
in a drawer of anecdotes: “My Last
Six Girlfriends: How a Girl Acquires a Past.”
I’ve got “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted”
run on a loop, unwanted leitmotif.
Lust, light, love, life all tumbled into grief.
You closed us off like a parenthesis
and left me knowing just enough to miss.

“Anyone who (I did) ran down Broadway
screaming, or dropped in Bryant Park in a faint
similarly provoked, will sniff a taint
of self-aggrandizement in the assured way
you say: so be it; then she cut the cord; hey,
the young are like that. Put yourself on main-
tenance, stoically, without more complaint?
Grown-ups, at least, will not rush to applaud. They
won’t believe you.” And he downed his Negroni.
Who wants to know how loss and sorrow hit
me daily in the chest, how like a stone
this bread tastes? Even though lunch is on me,
he doesn’t. Home alone is home, alone.
(I’d reach for Nightwood, but she “borrowed” it.)

Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I’ve cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

New York Sonnets
Stacie Cassarino

i.
I have never been to China, but you
pause, asking the price of chestnuts, each eye
held loosely in its scheme of home. We knew
it wouldn’t be easy. You measured my
reach among the fishwives and the fruit stands.
This was after the part about trust. How
we make these offers, your hand in my hand,
some space is filled and is enough, for now,
though we look behind us: the street inside
the crowd, the risk of pleasure beginning
all over. How we stumble forward, hide
in the park where men play chess and morning
turns over in the heart. It is a clear
day. We swallow love. It is everywhere.

ii.
The months have not left us, living apart
from city to treeline, how do we speak
tenderly or not speak at all, the heart
has many winters, the earth cannot keep
us still. In my dreams I touched you every-
where with my lips, and lost my feet in snow
fields, and told you a story of safety
on Snake Mountain. Now, you seem far, you know
where words fail to sound, you know we choose wrong,
sometimes, and look away. The mind paces
in its beautiful error. We belong
near to each other, like this, our faces
assigned to see again. My love, the air
grows around us, the body wakes, come here.

your blue
Judith Huang

It is difficult to paw the blue in you –
if I tried, you’d think I took you lightly,
or that I mock you, however gently.
It is a subject you may bring up
and lengthen; which I must agree with,
and after all, I do; after all, it is your blue.

Sometimes, in certain sudden company,
your blue vanishes completely
and I wonder at you – hiding your dear blue,
but then you turn your cheek and it blues dimly.
In a room, your blue makes you stand different
as though braced, waiting to be defiant,
waiting hungrily to defend your blue.

You have no qualms about touching my blue.
You hold it sometimes with two fists clenched
to shame it, to make light of it,
to show me how it pales against your blue.
So I am young, and rich, and good-looking,
in each convention – this is true, I nod,
and watch my blue fade to an almost-white shade.

But then at the best times,
your blue will gibber nimbly
and even let me stroke its lovely ear
before flashing tails in playful anger.

It makes me aching sad, to watch the way
your blue courses richly through your blue,
your handsome lips, sealed with blushing blue,
your strong limbs flushed, sinewed with your blue,
and wonder, if we had children
would they, too, have that dark blue run through them?
And if they did, would you love them more than me?

(Source: judithhuang.com)

Washington Mutual Is A Bank That Is Everywhere
Tao Lin

I had an urge one hour ago. To write poems
that make no sense, and
I felt happy. Stabbed
by hooded black youth.
Shocked by the willingness of grade-schoolers
to kill me. And eat my heart. The things that do not happen to me
each day. I feel
like shit. My life
is good, fantastic. I am not deformed. Thank you.

There should be something about you
in this poem. But

there is just me, being stupid.
Putting shampoo on things. My roommate’s shampoo. Uncouth. My heart
is a bar of soap. White, flashing. Soap
is clean. Admit it. That it will kill you
if you eat it
probably. I mean, look
at this poem. Where are you. I love life. November. Wonderful. The sun. A cloud
just said something. I don’t know what it said.
I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t care.

Immigrant
Fleur Adcock

November ‘63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.

I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer’s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.