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Wild is the Wind-Nina Simone

Poem to an Unnameable Man by Dorothea Lasky

You have changed me already. I am a fireball
That is hurtling towards the sky to where you are
You can choose not to look up but I am a giant orange ball
That is throwing sparks upon your face
Oh look at them shake
Upon you like a great planet that has been murdered by change
O too this is so dramatic this shaking
Of my great planet that is bigger than you thought it would be
So you ran and hid
Under a large tree. She was graceful, I think
That tree although soon she will wither
Into ten black snakes upon your throat
And when she does I will be wandering as I always am
A graceful lady that is part museum
Of the voices of the universe everyone else forgets
I will hold your voice in a little box
And when you come upon me I won’t look back at you
You will feel a hand upon your heart while I place your voice back
Into the heart from where it came from
And I will not cry also
Although you will expect me to
I was wiser too than you had expected
For I knew all along you were mine

Syringe by Joanne Diaz

Perhaps you’ve always known her obvious desire,
her thirst for more, then more: the way she’d wish
for more kissing after the warmth of sex
had risen and gone; the way she’d beg
dinner guests to stay long after the servant
had cleaned the plates and the oil in the lamps
had burned dry; the way she always asked,
even in courtship, the how and the why
of your every declaration, wringing
the roots of thought as if the answers could
fill what existed before the pain began—
that presence that came unannounced, uninvited,
rejected at first then welcomed as part
of daily life.
              Even so, if heat is all she feels
in the throbbing, each filament a knife
of fire, a guarantee that cinders through
the night; if she wakes to weep
in the certainty of pain, its circling
through each pathway in the cheeks,
the eyes, the upper lip, so that only
the sweep of a finely woven handkerchief
can count as a kind of washing; if she
can spend all day tending to its need as if
it were the child you never had; then one day
you will have to acknowledge that she might
love the pain, and you won’t be able to
imagine when or how she learned to love
anything to such excess. After
the tooth extractions have failed to relieve
the shooting; after the melancholy
has withered in her temples and refused
to leave; after you have seen the nets of nerves
unfurl in a revolt of heat; after you
and she have exhausted your search for a word
that encompasses the largeness of this woe;
remember this: the garden of lilacs
that she planted before the pain began.
Go there and see the buds clustered,
enclosed and clean, then their limbs, the lean
from left to right, the dew-glistened drift
to the mulch, the blossoms that do not unfold
in time. Think syringa vulgaris. Think
tube, pipe, fistula. Think of filling
the barrel of the syringe, then plunging it
deep in her skin to fill the canals
of her nerves with a dark, sweet dream
of forgetting, then imagine her loving
that opposite of sense, the moment
at which the hairs of your moustache
branch into lilacs, common pinks
and blues flourishing behind her closed eyelids.
The poppy’s milk has a voice
that will sing her into sleeping, and a word
for every thought as she rises
beyond the small feather bed.

"I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent. As for me, I'll share
my mulcher with anyone who needs to mulch."

The Reverse Side by Stephen Dunn

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

—A Japanese Proverb

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.

And perhaps why as we fall in love
we’re already falling out of it.

It’s why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to reign things in—
the snapshot, the lie of the frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.

"Last year in a room where survivors
were gathered 
I watched one man's obstinate calm
when it was his turn to thank God,
how he kept what was his
his, the lovely discrepancy
between what the world expected
and what he gave.
or perhaps he was just shy, and I made him
into a man I needed just then. Either way,
I was happy
to witness and be part of something
that ever-so-little could rock the heart, 
tip it
toward fullness." 

#loveliness

Monogamy by Stephen Dunn (excerpt)

"After all, there's the suddenly desirable
mono in monogamy to celebrate,
the new freedom of wanting
only one person. Start again,
but admit you wouldn't advocate this
for anyone save yourself. Acknowledge
it's a state you've traveled far
to reach, motels and the overly careful
spelling of aliases behind you.
Acknowledge it takes long experience
in order to think of sameness
as an opportunity for imagination."

Beliefs by Stephen Dunn

I believed in nothing, so I thought
no system of smoke and desire
got in the way of what I saw.

There is another world
if only it could be seen,
slag heaps and golden valleys,
crime and celibacy-

visible companions-if say,
your politics could braid them,
and there were all the gods
in the darkness of our needs.

That was when I realized
that to believe in nothing
is a belief too, and not much fun
either, and acceptance

of the world as it is is as dumb
as standing still when floodwaters rise.
Fortunately in the midst of it all

you came along with your singular beauty,
the truth of things for a while
tactile and unequivocal.

But often when you left the room
a few questions replaced you.
When you returned, they remained.

Is it possible to be in love
and wise at the same time?

In love, I might be so intuitively right
I'd be banned from a republic.  In love
I might believe any foolish thing I felt.

Over time, questions formed curlicues
in your hair. They became part of what
I thought when I thought about you.

So good then, when you stayed in the room,
giving them flesh, making them real.

"....It's over. It's time for loss to build
its tower in the yard where you
are merely a spectator now.

Admit you'd like to find something
discarded or damaged, even gone,
and lift it back into the world."

Stephen Dunn
                                   

Pure Balance by Galway Kinnell

Wherever we are is unlikely.
Our few kisses-I don't know if
they're of goodbye or of
what-or if she knows either.

neither do I understand why it's
exhilarating-as well as the other things it is-
to know one doesn't have a future,
or how much longer one won't have one.

Future tramples all prediction.
Hope loses hope. Clarity
turns out to be
an invisible form of sadness.

We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings

all the way to the sea
have been bombed. We look for a tree-
touch it-touch
right through it-sometimes nowhere

is there anything to hitch oneself to,
and we must make our way by pure balance.
This is so and can't be helped
without doing damage to oneself.

Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

If your eyes are not deceived by the mirage
Do not be proud of the sharpness of your understanding;
It may be your freedom from this optical illusion
Is due to the imperfectness of your thirst.
                         
                                          -Sohrawardi

“We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have."

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.

Let our scars fall in love.”

Galway Kinnell

True Love by Wisława Szymborska

True love. Is it normal

is it serious, is it practical?

What does the world get from two people

who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,

drawn randomly from millions but convinced

it had to happen this way – in reward for what?

For nothing.

The light descends from nowhere.

Why on these two and not on others?

Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.

Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,

and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.

Couldn’t they at least try to hide it,

fake a little depression for their friends’ sake?

Listen to them laughing – it’s an insult.

The language they use – deceptively clear.

And their little celebrations, rituals,

the elaborate mutual routines -

it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!

It’s hard even to guess how far things might go

if people start to follow their example.

What could religion and poetry count on?

What would be remembered? What renounced?

Who’d want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?

Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,

like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.

Perfectly good children are born without its help.

It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,

it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love

keep saying that there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

YES!!!!

"We have been raised to fear...our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for...many facets of our own oppression." Audre Lorde

We are hard by Margaret Atwood

i

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aim, our choices
turn them criminal.

ii

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them

iii

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

iv

Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.

Freedom of Speech by Lucie Brock-Broido

If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you.

The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open,

Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity.

The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury.

Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable,

                                 Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing.

Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere.

Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia.

And opening, most delft of blue,

                                                                  Your heart was a mess—

A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand,

Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned.

The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale,

With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke.

The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.

                                                                   I adore you more. I know

The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers,

Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour.

                                 Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected.

The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking,

                                                                                        Longing for to work.

"I learned, but can no longer remember

with what dignity another’s care imbues one."

#joshuabeckman

"I love a broad margin to my life"

A Woman Alone by Denise Levertov

When she cannot be sure
which of two lovers it was with whom she felt
this or that moment of pleasure, of something fiery
streaking from head to heels, the way the white
flame of a cascade streaks a mountainside
seen from a car across a valley, the car
changing gear, skirting a precipice,
climbing…
When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie
talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter
with friends, without worrying
that it’s late, dinner at midnight, her time
spent without counting the change…
When half her bed is covered with books
and no one is kept awake by the reading light
and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon…
Then
self-pity dries up, a joy
untainted by guilt lifts her.
She has fears, but not about loneliness;
fears about how to deal with the aging
of her body—how to deal
with photographs and the mirror. She feels
so much younger and more beautiful
than the looks. At her happiest
—or even in the midst of
some less than joyful hour, sweating
patiently through a heatwave in the city
or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray,
toneless, the sound of fatigue—
a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe
in her future as an old woman, a wanderer
seamed and brown,
little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,
watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,
without being watched; not grim nor sad,
an old winedrinking woman, who knows
the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself…
She knows it can’t be:
that’s Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby from The Water Babies,
no one can walk the world any more,
a world of fumes and decibels.
But she thinks maybe
she could get to be tough and wise, some way,
anyway. Now at least
she is past the time of mourning,
now she can say without shame or deceit,
O blessed Solitude.

Flickering Mind by Denise Levertov

Lord, not you
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away -- and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn.  Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow.
You the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

Old Love Poems by Denise Duhamel

I can burn the pictures, but not the poems

since I published them in books, which are on shelves

in libraries and in people’s homes. Once my cousin told me

not to write anything down because the words would be there forever

to remind me of the fool I once was. My cousin

was the little dog on the Tarot card, barking at the Fool’s heels

as I headed right toward the cliff.

                                                 When James Taylor and Carly Simon broke up, I was shocked. Taylor’s drug use or not,

couldn’t they work it out? I was in college

and, though I didn’t really believe in marriage,

I believed in them. How could they part

having written those love songs? And how could they go on s

inging those love songs after the divorce?

                                                 But now, I know.

After time, when they reached for those notes,

there wasn’t really a beloved there anymore,

just a strand of hair each left behind

on the other’s scarf or pillow, a cologne trigger that transcended

into something more real than they were,

the lovers themselves ephemeral muses.

                                                 It’s still hard

for me to accept the notion of love outliving the lovers—

a notion so romantic, it’s unromantic. Hard to accept

that those big lumps of affection

would find alternate places to stick,

that Simon and Taylor would be swept away and marry

others. That need is not so much a deficit

                                                 as an asset,

like a wallet that keeps manufacturing its own dollar bills

even after it’s been robbed of everything.

Or to say it another way: the plant that will bloom

despite being uprooted. The new seedling that will pop up,

It’s hard to believe when you are down to your last penny,

when the soil is dry and rocky and full of weeds,

                                                 when your love

is freeze-dried into a metallic pouch and you are full of snarky rage.

You look back at a love poem you wrote and ask:

did I really feel this way? Even if you no longer remember tenderness,

even if the verse was simply artifice, your idea of love, a subspecies

you made up to tag and define that one poor sap, you read the poem again, grateful, holding the words in your hands like a bunch of flowers.

Denise Duhamel

Continuity by A. R. Ammons

I’ve pressed so
far away from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

42/42

"This is the only place my body feels right anymore,/ the inside of an egg being kept warm by something/ that wants it to live."

Next Time by Mary Oliver

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.

"where attention goes, energy flows"

"We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves"

Note to Self: Pain is inevitable; Suffering is optional.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come
because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain
     that was entrusted to you.
Like the Mother of the World,
 Who carries the pain of the world in her heart,
      Each one of us is part of her heart,
                 And therefore endowed
            With a certain measure of cosmic pain.

That's how my heart is, I thought-
it lies coiled up inside of me, asleep,
then springs out and shocks me
with all of its muchness.
               
Tony Hoagland

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation 

-Marilynne Robinson

Credulity by Tony Hoagland

We believe we are giving ourselves away,

And so it feels good,

Our bodies swimming together

In afternoon light, the music

That enters our window as far

From the voices that made it

As our own minds are from reason.

There are whole doctrines on loving.

A science. I would like to know everything

About convincing love to give me

What it does not possess to give. And then

I would like to know how to live with nothing.

Not memory. Nor the taste of the words

I have willed you whisper into my mouth.