The Fist by Derek Walcott

The fist clenched round my heart

loosens a little, and I gasp 

brightness; but it tightens 

again. When have I ever not loved

the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong

clench of the madman, this is 

gripping the ledge of unreason, before

plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Let my past be my greatest asset.

Faith Healing by Philip Larkin

Slowly the women file to where he stands   

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly   

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,   

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care   

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,   

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer   

Directing God about this eye, that knee.   

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some   

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud   

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb   

And idiot child within them still survives   

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice   

At last calls them alone, that hands have come   

To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd   

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:   

By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps   

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make   

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.   

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,   

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above   

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

53

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
We dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which our names do not appear.

Compulsively Allergic to the Truth by Jeffrey McDaniel

I’m sorry I was late.
I was pulled over by a cop
for driving blindfolded
with a raspberry-scented candle
flickering in my mouth.
I’m sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
I am not the egg man.
I am the owl
who just witnessed
another tree fall over
in the forest of your life.
I am your father
shaking his head
at the thought of you.
I am his words dissolving
in your mind like footprints
in a rainstorm.
I am a long-legged martini.
I am feeding olives
to the bull inside you.
I am decorating
your labyrinth,
tacking up snapshots
of all the people
who’ve gotten lost
in your corridors.

It Felt Love by Hafiz

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being,

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened

A Blessing in Disguise by John Ashbery

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you.  You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right.  The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into
    the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer "you" in the plural, I want "you,"
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

In the Street by Mary Jo Bang

Here we are, on top of the utopian arc. The water is shallow. An oil spill shimmers on the surface like a lens catches light and folds it in front of a mirror. If someone stands next to you, they are there, even when outside the picture. Which makes total obscurity relative to luck and such. Unlike the law, architecture lasts. A façade, like an ideal, can be oppressive unless balanced by a balcony on which you can stand and call down to those in the street, Come over here and look up at us. Aren’t we exactly what you wanted to believe in?

Ecce Homo, He Says, And I Do by Traci Brimhall

I behold the man chosen—philtrum bristled, 
his lip a pink bruise among beard spokes.

The underdown of parakeets nestled 
in his armpit, a soft white fury of curls.

He says I’m a better wife than I think I am.
Amorous. Loyal. And I decide to enjoy 

the rare comfort of being told I am good, 
even as I hide the handcuff key beneath 

my tongue. Hair on his chest flat but curving 
like a map of the trade winds over his belly.

My love a plummet and a plumbing, a chart 
for the nautical miles I travel away and back 

again. My love happiest like this, arresting desire
in its nascent swelling. The want lingering in 

its catalog, still sinless and waiting, weighing, 
letting imagination tax the body. His knuckles

scarred by the beaks of macaws displeased 
at his sweet thieving, splinters in his fingers

from carrying someone else’s dream into 
the wilderness. One nipple turns in on itself, 

the other bitten and unpuckered. The ghost-hoof 
arched on his chest like a door to heaven 

I could open with a charm, a kiss, a word, 
and with a tongue, pull the radiance through.

Bell Theory by Emily Jungmin Yoon

When I was laughed at for my clumsy English, I touched my throat.

Which said ear when my ear said year and year after year

I pronounced a new thing wrong and other throats laughed.

Elevator. Library. Vibrating bells in their mouths.

How to say azalea. How to say forsythia.

Say instead golden bells. Say I’m in ESL. In French class

a boy whose last name is Kring called me belle.

Called me by my Korean name, pronouncing it wrong.

Called it loudly, called attention to my alien.

(I touched the globe moving in my throat, a hemisphere sinking.)

Called me across the field lined with golden bells.

I wanted to run and be loved at the same time. By Kring.

As in ring of people. Where are you going? We’re laughing with you.

The bell in our throat that rings with laughter is called uvula. From uva: grape.

A theory: special to our species, this grape-bell has to do with speech.

Which separates us from animals. Kring looked at me and said

Just curious, do you eat dogs? and I wanted to end my small life.

Be reborn a golden retriever of North America.

Lie on a field lined with golden bells, loved.

Today, in a country where dogs are more cherished

than a foreign child, an Oregon Senate candidate says no

to refugees. Says, years ago, Vietnamese refugees ate dogs,

harvested other people’s pets. Harvest as in harvest grapes.

Harvest as in harvest a field of golden rice. As do people

from rice countries. As in people-eat-dog worlds.

Years ago, 1923 Japan, the phrase jūgoen gojissen was used

to set apart Koreans: say 15 yen 50 sen. The colonized who used the chaos

of the Kanto Earthquake to poison waters, set fire: a cruelty special to our species.

A cruelty special to our species — how to say jūgo, how to say gojit,

how jūgo sounds like die in Korean, how gojit sounds like lie — 

lie, lie, library, azalea, library.

I’m going to the library, I lied, years ago, on a field lined with forsythia.

OUT OF THESE WOUNDS, THE MOON WILL RISE by Jay Hopler

Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,
And every porch light 

                                 in the neighborhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I’d like a new

Way of experiencing the world, a way of taking 
Into myself the single light shining at the center 

Of all things without losing the dense, eccentric 
Planets orbiting around it.

                                 What you’d like is a more 
Attentive lover, I suppose—. Too bad that slow,

Wet scorch of orange blossoms floating towards 
The storm drain is not a vein of stars...we could 

Make a wish on one of them; not that we would 
Wish for anything but the impossible.

Radical Self-Honesty: The Joy of Getting Real

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

Adrienne Rich

Days I Delighted in Everything by Jessica Greenbaum

I was listening to a book on tape while driving

and when the author said, “Those days I delighted in everything,”

I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub

because surely there was a passage of life where I thought

“These days I delight in everything,” right there in the

present, because they almost all feel like that now,

memory having markered only the outline while evaporating

the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage

my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast

that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian?

And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self

might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator

in hindsight, had only been an overboard character — 

but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden

dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm

in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live

only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey

caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and

again, heartbreak. I didn’t have whatever that time of life

then demanded — a book, a wedding band, a baby — 

but the present, like the lie of “fair and balanced” news reporting

where creationists are granted air time with the scientists,

the present might have me believe that “in those days

I delighted in everything.” But to be ... fair and balanced ...

I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist

to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it

with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors,

attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote

exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I

delighted in everything — then I couldn’t find the ticket stub.

I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I

couldn’t go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized

I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it,

not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting

my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where

she realizes that “Those days I delighted in everything,”

but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.

Be ground. Be crumbled,

so wildflowers will come up

where you are.

You have been stony for too many years.

Try something different. Surrender.

Rumi

❤️