Call Me by My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow 
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Grief by John O’Donohue

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.

Miss you every damn day, Dad.
Wish you were here.  

Carnal Knowledge by Thomas Gunn

Even in bed I pose: desire may grow
More circumstantial and less circumspect
Each night, but an acute girl would suspect
My thoughts might not be, like my body, bare.
I wonder if you know, or, knowing care?
You know I know you know I know you know. 

I am not what I seem, believe me, so
For the magnanimous pagan I pretend
Substitute a forked creature as your friend.
When darkness lies—without a roll or stir—
Flaccid, you want a competent poseur.
I know you know I know you know I know. 

Cackle you hen, and answer when I crow.
No need to grope: I’m still playing the same
Comical act inside the tragic game.
Or is it perhaps simpler: could it be
A mere tear-jerker void of honesty?
You know I know you know I know you know. 

Lie back. Within a minute I will stow
Your greedy mouth, but will not yet to grips.
"There is a space between the breast and lips."
Also a space between the thighs and head,
So great, we might as well not be in bed.
I know you know I know you know I know. 

I hardly hoped for happy thoughts, although
In a most happy sleeping time I dreamt
We did not hold each other in contempt.
Then lifting from my lids night’s penny weights
I saw that lack of love contaminates.
You know I know you know I know you know. 

Abandon me to stammering, and go;
If you have tears, prepare to cry elsewhere -
I know of no emotion we can share.
Your intellectual protests are a bore,
And even now I pose, so now go, for
I know you know.

Walking At Night by Louise Gluck

Now that she is old,
the young men don't approach her
so the nights are free,
the streets at dusk that were so dangerous
have become as safe as the meadow.

By midnight, the town's quiet.
Moonlight reflects off the stone walls;
on the pavement, you can hear the nervous sounds
of the men rushing home to their wives and mothers; this late,
the doors are locked, the windows darkened.

When they pass, they don't notice her.
She's like a dry blade of grass in a field of grasses.
So her eyes that used never to leave the ground
are free now to go where they like.

When she's tired of the streets, in good weather she walks
in the fields where the town ends.
Sometimes, in summer, she goes as far as the river.

The young people used to gather not far from here
but now the river's grown shallow from lack of rain, so
the bank's deserted—

There were picnics then.
The boys and girls eventually paired off;
after a while, they made their way into the woods
where it's always twilight—

The woods would be empty now—
the naked bodies have found other places to hide.

In the river, there's just enough water for the night sky
to make patterns against the gray stones. The moon's bright,
one stone among many others. And the wind rises;
it blows the small trees that grow at the river's edge.

When you look at a body you see a history.
Once that body isn't seen anymore,
the story it tried to tell gets lost—

On nights like this, she'll walk as far as the bridge
before she turns back.
Everything still smells of summer.
And her body begins to seem again the body she had as a young woman,
glistening under the light summer clothing. 

There Comes the Strangest Moment by Kate Light

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free--
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.

The Knowing by Sharon Olds

Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-
comaed and woken, we lie a long time
looking at each other.

I do not know what he sees, but I see
eyes of surpassing tenderness
and calm, a calm like the dignity
of matter. I love the open ocean
blue-grey-green of his iris, I love
the curve of it against the white,
that curve the sight of what has caused me
to come, when he’s quite still, deep
inside me. I have never seen a curve
like that, except the earth from outer
space. I don’t know where he got
his kindness without self-regard,
almost without self, and yet
he chose one woman, instead of the others.

By knowing him, I get to know
the purity of the animal
which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly
smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,
his entire face lit. I love
to see it change if I cry–there is no worry,
no pity, no graver radiance. If we
are on our backs, side by side,
with our faces turned fully to face each other,
I can hear a tear from my lower eye
hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,
and then the upper eye’s tears
braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow
like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.

I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one who knows him.

When I wake again, he is still looking at me,
as if he is eternal. For an hour
we wake and doze, and slowly I know
that though we are sated, though we are hardly
touching, this is the coming the other
coming brought us to the edge of–we are entering,
deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,
this place beyond the other places,
beyond the body itself, we are making
love

Mother, A Cradle to Hold Me by Maya Angelou

It is true

I was created in you.
It is also true
That you were created for me.
I owned your voice.
It was shaped and tuned to soothe me.
Your arms were molded
Into a cradle to hold me, to rock me.
The scent of your body was the air
Perfumed for me to breathe.

Mother,
During those early, dearest days
I did not dream that you had
A large life which included me,
For I had a life
Which was only you.

Time passed steadily and drew us apart.
I was unwilling.
I feared if I let you go
You would leave me eternally.
You smiled at my fears, saying
I could not stay in your lap forever.
That one day you would have to stand
And where would I be?
You smiled again.
I did not.
Without warning you left me,
But you returned immediately.
You left again and returned,
I admit, quickly,
But relief did not rest with me easily.
You left again, but again returned.
You left again, but again returned.
Each time you reentered my world
You brought assurance.
Slowly I gained confidence.

You thought you know me,
But I did know you,
You thought you were watching me,
But I did hold you securely in my sight,
Recording every moment,
Memorizing your smiles, tracing your frowns.
In your absence
I rehearsed you,
The way you had of singing
On a breeze,
While a sob lay
At the root of your song.

The way you posed your head
So that the light could caress your face
When you put your fingers on my hand
And your hand on my arm,
I was blessed with a sense of health,
Of strength and very good fortune.

You were always
the heart of happiness to me,
Bringing nougats of glee,
Sweets of open laughter.

I loved you even during the years
When you knew nothing
And I knew everything, I loved you still.
Condescendingly of course,
From my high perch
Of teenage wisdom.
I spoke sharply of you, often
Because you were slow to understand.
I grew older and
Was stunned to find
How much knowledge you had gleaned.
And so quickly.

Mother, I have learned enough now
To know I have learned nearly nothing.
On this day
When mothers are being honored,
Let me thank you
That my selfishness, ignorance, and mockery
Did not bring you to
Discard me like a broken doll
Which had lost its favor.
I thank you that
You still find something in me
To cherish, to admire and to love.

I thank you, Mother.
I love you.

In Praise of Pain by Heather McHugh

A brilliance takes up residence in flaws—

a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design   

refuse. The wine collects its starlets

at a lip's fault, sunlight where the nicked   

glass angles, and affection where the eye   

is least correctable, where arrows of

unquivered light are lodged, where someone   

else's eyes have come to be concerned.

For beauty's sake, assault and drive and burn   

the devil from the simply perfect sun.   

Demand a birthmark on the skin of love,   

a tremble in the touch, in come a cry,   

and let the silverware of nights be flecked,   

the moon pocked to distribute more or less   

indwelling alloys of its dim and shine   

by nip and tuck, by chance's dance of laws.

The brightness drawn and quartered on a sheet,   

the moment cracked upon a bed, will last   

as if you soldered them with moon and flux.   

And break the bottle of the eye to see

what lights are spun of accident and glass.

Not Over It by Heather McHugh

In sympathy with Gaspara Stampa

By woman so touched, so pressed,

detachment being thought

achievable at all

 

is boggling in itself. Its being

thought achievable by love—but love

for only all (not someone’s single) sentience—

 

appears the precept of too cold

a form of flame. How much

of a hand in things

 

relinquishes the hold

of things-at-hand?

What kiss might such

 

a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust

in Buddhist schools, perhaps.

A view of several solar

 

systems from above.

Not love.

The thought

 

appeals as it appals:

Slow learners, we must spurn

the selving sensualities, to feel

 

for feelers of this kind,

unfasten passion’s burner

to identify what’s under it—

 

in short, must court

dispassion just

to be compassionate.

For Desire by Kim Addonizio

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look

One Love Story Eight Takes by Brenda Shaughnessy

                                    Where you are tender, you speak your plural. 
                                    Roland Barthes

                                               1

One version of the story is I wish you back—

that I used each evening evening out

what all day spent wrinkling.

I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine

you could see my ovaries through it.

This is how I thought I would seduce you.

This is how frantic I hollowed out.

                                                   2

Another way of telling it

is to hire some kind of gnarled

and symbolic troll to make

a tape recording.

Of plastic beads coming unglued

from a child’s jewelry box.

This might be an important sound,

like serotonin or mighty mitochondria,

so your body hears about

how you stole the ring made

from a glittery opiate

and the locket that held candy.

                                                    3

It’s only fair that I present yet another side,

as insidious as it is,

because two sides hold up nothing but each other.

A tentacled skepticism,

a suspended contempt,

such fancies and toxins form a third wall.

A mean way to end

and I never dreamed we meant it.

                                                    4

Another way of putting it is like

slathering jam on a scrape.

Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick?

Which is the worst! So much technology

and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it.

I mean there’s no relief unless.

So I’m coming, all this excitement,

to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play.

It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally

focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain.

                                                    5

In some cultures the story told is slightly different—

in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates

as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed

that the most personally attractive fish have eyes

only on one side and repel each other like magnets.

The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage.

Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has

those five pink moving suckerpads

that allow endless permutations so no solid memory,

no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid.

                                                    6

The story exists even when there are no witnesses,

kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete,

and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy

factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast

or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident.

This little tale tries so hard to be humorous,

wants so badly to win affection and to lodge.

Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.

                                                    7

Three million Richards can’t be wrong.

So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which,

in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously.

They think one may start a tale off whingy

and wretched in a regular voice.

But when one strikes out whimsically,

as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you,

as if this story is happening to nobody

it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody.

The Richards believe you cannot

privately jettison into the sky, just for fun.

You must stack stories from the foundation up.

From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it.

Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule,

not a hang glide. This is real life.

So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built.

Because no one unbuilds meticulously

and meticulosity is what allows hearing.

Three million Richards make one point.

I hear it in order to make others. Mistake.

                                                    8

As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.

I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is,

when it would be truer to say nothing.

I’ve invented so much and prevented more.

But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,

in absolute quiet. In extreme context.

To see you again, isn’t love revision?

It could have gone so many ways.

This just one of the ways it went.

Tell me another.

Liquid Flesh by Brenda Shaughnessy

In a light chocolatine room

with blackout windows,

a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s

 

syllables, crisscrossed

with a broken cloudiness

I’d choose as my own bedcovers

 

but cannot. My choice of sleep

or sky has no music of its own.

There’s no “its own” while the baby cries.

 

Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws

like a wrongly minor red wolf

who doesn’t know his mother.

 

I know I am his mother, but I can’t

quite click on the word’s essential aspects,

can’t denude the flora

 

or disrobe the kind of housecoat

“mother” always is. Something

cunty, something used.

 

Whatever meaning the word itself

is covering, like underwear,

that meaning is so mere and meager

 

this morning. Mother. Baby.

Chicken and egg. It’s so obnoxious

of me: I was an egg

 

who had  an egg

and now I’m a chicken,

as usual scooping up

 

both possibilities,

or what I used to call

possibilities. I used

 

to be this way, so ontologically

greedy, wanting to be it all.

Serves me right.

 

My belief in the fluidity

of the self turns out to mean

my me is a flow of wellwater,

                                                   

without the well, or the bucket,

a hole dug and seeping.

A kind of unwell, where

 

the ground reabsorbs

what it was displaced to give.

The drain gives meaning to the sieve.

 

As I said: a chicken who still

wants to be all potential.

Someone who springs

 

and falls, who cannot see

how many of us I have

in me—and I do not like them all.

 

Do I like us? Can I love us?

If anyone comes

first it’s him, but how can that be?

 

I was here way, way first.

I have the breasts, godawful, and he

the lungs and we share the despair.

 

For we are a we, aren’t we? We split

a self in such a way that there isn’t

enough for either of us.

 

The father of the baby is sleepy

and present in his way, in the way

of fathers. He is devoted like

 

few fathers, and maybe hurts

like I hurt, like no fathers.

I don’t know what someone else

 

feels, not even these someones

who are also me. Do they hurt

like I do?  Why can’t they

 

tell me, or morse or sign: let

me know they know where and how

and why it hurts? Or something?

 

What is the point of other people,

being so separate, if we can’t

help a person get that pain

 

will stick its shiv into anything,

just to get rid of the weapon

and because it can? For if we share

 

ourselves then they, too, must

also be in so much pain.

I can hear it. Oh, my loves.

 

The wood of the crib, the white

glow of the milk (which must

have siphoned off the one

 

and only pure part of me, leaving

me with what, toxicity

or sin or mush?), the awful softness.

 

I’ve been melted into something

too easy to spill. I make more

and more of myself in order

 

to make more and more of the baby.

He takes it, this making. And somehow

he’s made more of me, too.

 

I’m a mother now.

I run to the bathroom, run

to the kitchen, run to the crib

 

and I’m not even running.

These places just scare up as needed,

the wires that move my hands

 

to the sink, to the baby,

to the breast are electrical.

I’m in shock.

 

One must be in shock to say so,

as if one’s own state is assessable,

like a car accident or Minnesota taxes.

 

A total disaster, this sack of liquid

flesh which yowls and leaks

and I’m talking about me

 

not the baby. Me, this puddle

of a middle, this utilized vessel,

cracked hull, divine

 

design. It’s how it works. It’s how

we all got here. Deform

following the function . . .

 

But what about me? I whisper

secretly and to think,

around these parts used to be

 

the joyful place of sex,

what is now this intimate

terror and squalor.

 

My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again

at six and eleven. This is why the clock

is drowning, as I said earlier.

 

I’m trying to explain it.

I repeat myself, or haven’t I already?

Tiny self, along with a tiny self.

 

I’ll say it: he hurt me, this new

babe, then and now.

Perhaps he always will,

 

though thoughts of the future

seem like science fiction novels

I never finished reading.

 

Their ends like red nerves

chopped off by cleaver, not aliens,

this very moment, saving nothing for later.

 

He howls with such fury and clarity

I must believe him.

No god has the power

 

to make me believe anything,

yet I happen to know

this baby knows a way out.

 

This dark hole closing in on me

all around: he’ll show me

how to get through

 

the shock and the godlessness

and the rictus of crushed flesh,

into the rest of my life.

Art Shay

"At some point, we need to stop identifying with our weaknesses and shift our allegiance to our basic goodness. It’s highly beneficial to understand that our limitations are not absolute and monolithic, but relative and removable. The wisdom of buddha nature is available to us at any time." 

Pema Chodron

Mon Semblable by Stephen Dunn

"No man has ever dared to describe himself as he truly is."
                                                                    -Albert Camus
I like things my way
every chance I get.
A limit doesn’t exist

when it comes to that.
But please, don’t confuse
what I say with honesty.

Isn’t honesty the open yawn
the unimaginable love
more than truth?

Anonymous among strangers
I look for those
with hidden wings,

and for scars
that those who once had wings
can’t hide.

Though I know it’s unfair,
I reveal myself
one mask at a time.

Does this appeal to you,
such slow disclosures,
a lifetime perhaps

of almost knowing one another?
I would hope you, too,
would hold something back,

and that you’d always want
whatever unequal share
you had style enough to get.

Altruism is for those
who can’t endure their desires.
There’s a world

as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors

might think a crime.
It’s where we could live.
I’ll say I love you,

which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid

poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone ever has.

Silk of a Soul by Zbignew Herbert

Never
did I speak – with her

either about love
or about death

only blind taste
and mute touch
used to run between us
when absorbed in ourselves
we lay close

I must
peek inside her
to see what she wears
at her centre

when she slept
with her lips open
I peeked

and what
and what
would you think
I caught sight of

I was expecting
branches
I was expecting
a bird
I was expecting
a house
by a lake great and silent

but there
on a glass counter
I caught sight of a pair
of silk stockings
my God
I’ll buy her those stockings
I’ll buy them

but – what will appear then
on the glass counter
of the little soul
will it be something
which cannot be touched
even with one finger of a dream