Testimonial by Rita Dove

Back when the earth was new

and heaven just a whisper,

back when the names of things

hadn't had time to stick;

back when the smallest breezes

melted summer into autumn,

when all the poplars quivered

sweetly in rank and file . . .

the world called, and I answered.

Each glance ignited to a gaze.

I caught my breath and called that life,

swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet.

I was pirouette and flourish,

I was filigree and flame.

How could I count my blessings

when I didn't know their names?

Back when everything was still to come,

luck leaked out everywhere.

I gave my promise to the world,

and the world followed me here.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Speculations about "I" by Toi Derricotte

A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.
— Henry David Thoreau

i

I didn’t choose the word — 

it came pouring out of my throat

like the water inside a drowned man.

I didn’t even push on my stomach.

I just lay there, dead (like he told me)

& “I” came out.

(I’m sorry, Father.

“I” wasn’t my fault.)

 

ii

(How did “I” feel?)

Felt almost alive

when I’d get in, like the Trojan horse.

I’d sit on the bench

(I didn’t look out of the eyeholes

so I wouldn’t see the carnage).

 

iii

(Is “I” speaking another language?)

I said, “I” is dangerous.

But at the time I couldn’t tell

which one of us was speaking.

 

iv

(Why “I”?)

“I” was the closest I could get to the

one I loved (who I believe was

smothered in her playpen).

Perhaps she gave birth

to “I” before she died.

 

v

I deny “I,”

& the closer

I get, the more

“I” keeps receding.

 

vi

I found “I”

in the bulrushes

raised by a dirtiness

beyond imagination.

I loved “I” like a stinky bed.

While I hid in a sentence

with a bunch of other words.

 

vii

(What is “I”?)

A transmission through space?

A dismemberment of the spirit?

More like opening the chest &

throwing the heart out with the gizzards.

 

viii

(Translation)

Years later “I” came back

wanting to be known.

Like the unspeakable

name of God, I tried

my 2 letters, leaving

the “O” for breath,

like in the Bible,

missing.

 

ix

I am not the “I”

in my poems. “I”

is the net I try to pull me in with.

 

x

I try to talk

with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust

me. “I” says I am

slippery by nature.

 

xi

I made “I” do

what I wasn’t supposed to do,

what I didn’t want to do — 

defend me,

stand as an example,

stand in for what I was hiding.

I treated “I” as if

“I” wasn’t human.

 

xii

They say that what I write

belongs to me, that it is my true

experience. They think it validates

my endurance.

But why pretend?

“I” is a kind of terminal survival.

 

xiii

I didn’t promise

“I” anything & in that way

“I” is the one I was most

true to.

Act by Leon Salvatierra

I’m going to say what love signifies

My grandfather said it was the desire of  the I for another I

And since then I began to search for you

My father said the number of  love was seven

Because creation lasted seven days

Seven days making love to its seven nights

I looked for you in each seven that ciphered my life

And I found you slipping away to other numbers

One confuses oneself with one’s other self

When two bodies intertwine in bed, three loves

have been in my life, four it will be when you have left

five days that I cannot stand you, six kisses in La Paz Centro

seven years of not finding you, love, show me

from one to a thousand your nights

What is your philosophy of love

you ask me in bed: and I respond

It’s not a flower but maybe it is a number. Here, I gift it to you

Hide it between your legs. At the count of two

Make sure that it does not fall: One

Open Sesame. Two

Loves have stepped into your kingdom.

  

Little Father by Li-Young Lee

I buried my father 

in the sky. 

Since then, the birds 

clean and comb him every morning   

and pull the blanket up to his chin   

every night. 

I buried my father underground.   

Since then, my ladders 

only climb down, 

and all the earth has become a house   

whose rooms are the hours, whose doors   

stand open at evening, receiving   

guest after guest. 

Sometimes I see past them 

to the tables spread for a wedding feast. 

I buried my father in my heart. 

Now he grows in me, my strange son,   

my little root who won’t drink milk,   

little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,   

little clock spring newly wet 

in the fire, little grape, parent to the future   

wine, a son the fruit of his own son,   

little father I ransom with my life.

Blackout

When life seems gray

And short of fizz

It seems that way

Because it is.

Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall by Margaret Fishback

Sometimes I wish that I were dead

    As dead can be, but then again

At times when I've been nicely fed

    On caviar or guinea hen

And I am wearing something new

    And reassuring, I decide

It might be better to eschew

    My tendency to cyanide.

these sloppy greens are the goods

Staying by Pierluigi Cappello

My eyes turned to salt in looking back,

my thoughts stood still in gestures,

in the silence of what’s been done;

I gathered the crumbs of another lunch

and shook them into the garden’s vitreous air

where the sun’s just cracked and spilled.

Here, even a flutter of blackbird beyond the hedge

stands still, as my words stand still, like ships in bottles.

Your language is mine but mine is not yours.

At home, I could feel myself thinking

while the television glowed in shadow

and a film score spread like smoke in a saloon.

I keep to myself what it means to tend a fire,

the thick scent of soaked wood, a match between my fingers,

the way a day resides in what’s to do, in another light

split by the clouds, a different sunset tied to the tallest trees

flush in the eyes of houses, on the poor man’s livestock;

a touch here, a touch there — the way loneliness comes,

today, a day like this, one day more alone.

  

The Empty Glass by Louise Gluck

I asked for much; I received much. 

I asked for much; I received little, I received 

next to nothing. 

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors. 

A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table. 

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was 

hard-hearted, remote. I was 

selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny. 

But I was always that person, even in early childhood. 

Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children. 

I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract 

tide of fortune turned 

from high to low overnight. 

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, 

to celestial force? To be safe, 

I prayed. I tried to be a better person. 

Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror 

and matured into moral narcissism 

might have become in fact 

actual human growth. Maybe 

this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, 

telling me they understood 

the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, 

implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick 

to give so much for so little. 

Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)— 

a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos. 

I was not pathetic! I was writ large, 

like a queen or a saint. 

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture. 

And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe 

in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying, 

a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse 

to persuade or seduce— 

What are we without this? 

Whirling in the dark universe, 

alone, afraid, unable to influence fate— 

What do we have really? 

Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, 

tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring 

attempts to build character. 

What do we have to appease the great forces? 

And I think in the end this was the question 

that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, 

the Greek ships at the ready, the sea 

invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future 

lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking 

it could be controlled. He should have said 

I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

Cast Off by Belle Randall

If thy own hand . . . offend thee
      —Matthew 18:8

Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated—

chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw

for reasons they leave tactfully unstated,

leaving you to guess at your faux pas

From all you did and didn’t say for ages,

as in some vast congressional report,

your sin, at last, is lost among the pages;

a snow of detail cuts inquiry short.

In downtown windows where late sunlight glares,

you see yourself, as if you’d never met.

Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears

a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat?

Your eighth grade diary still makes you cringe

saved—for what?—that you might now despise

pages time has lent a jaundiced tinge

pouring forth their daisy-dotted i’s?

Some second-guesser in you finds untrue

the echo of your own voice in your ears,

and wants to ask which one most sickens you:

the voice that whines with neediness and fears,

Or one no doubts can ever undermine,

that speaks before a general assembly,

proclaiming loudly what to do with thine

own hand (or his, or mine), should it offend thee?

Love Poem by Dorothea Lasky

The rain whistled.

 

A taxi brought me to your apartment building

And there I stood.

 

I had dreamed a dream

Of us in a bedroom.

The light shining upon us in white sheets.

 

You were singing me a song of your sailing days

And in the dream

I reached deep in you and pulled out a cardinal

Which in bright red

Flew out the window.

 

Sometimes when we talk 

On the phone, I think to myself

That the deep perfect of your soul

Is what draws me to you.

But still what soul is perfect?

All souls are misshapen and off-colored.

Morning comes within a soul

And makes it obey another law

In which all souls are snowflakes.

 

Once at a funeral, a man had died

And with the prayers said, his soul flew up in a hurry

Like it had been let out of something awful.

It was strangely colored, that soul.

And it was a funny shape and a funny temperature.

As it blew away, all of us looking felt the cold.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” 

The giver by James Baldwin

If the hope of giving

is to love the living,

the giver risks madness

in the act of giving.

Some such lesson I seemed to see

in the faces that surrounded me.

Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,

what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?

          The giver is no less adrift

          than those who are clamouring for the gift.

If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,

if their empty fingers beat the empty air

and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer

knows that all of his giving has been for naught

and that nothing was ever what he thought

and turns in his guilty bed to stare

at the starving multitudes standing there

and rises from bed to curse at heaven,

he must yet understand that to whom much is given

much will be taken, and justly so:

I cannot tell how much I owe.