To Each His Chimera by Charles Baudelaire

Under a wide grey sky, in a great dusty plain, pathless, grassless,without so much as a thistle or a nettle, I came across some men walking, their shoulders bent.

Each carried on his back an enormous Chimera, heavy as a sack of flour or charcoal, or a Roman foot-soldier's pack.

But the monstrous beast was no dead weight; on the contrary, it enveloped and mauled its man with supple and powerful muscles; scratching with two enormous claws the chest of its mount. And its fabulous head surmounted the man's, like one of those horrible helmets ancient warriors wore, hoping to increase the terror of their foes.

I questioned one of these men and asked him where they were going. He told me he didn't know, nor did the others; but  obviously they were going somewhere, since they were driven by an invincible need to go. 

Curious to note: none of these travelers seemed annoyed by the fierce beast hanging at his neck and attached to his back; one must suppose he considered it a part of himself. All these faces, tired and serious,meet rayed no despair; under the splenetic cupola of sky, feet sunk in dust of a soil every bit as desolate as the sky, they trudged on, with the resigned faces of those condemned forever to hope. 

And the cortège passed by me and sank into the atmosphere at the horizon, where the planet's rounded surface renders it unavailable to human curiosity.

And for a few moments I persisted in trying to solve the mystery; but soon irresistible Indifference came over me, and I was more heavily burdened with it than they by their crushing Chimera.

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

 

 

Dominion Over The Larger Animal by Sophie Cabot Black

How many times I have provided

For your death; the apple turned one way

Then the other, an arrangement made, 

The softer ground. To hold your head 

As if this mattered, to say what I think

Essential into your ear,

To watch the eye look everywhere to find

What it does not know it looks for.

To fasten you down in the one place

Where no one can say anything more,

Being nothing else but breath leaving,

While the man with the needle stands by

Until the signal of how it is time. To believe

I know what will happen next; to leave the hill 

As the body stiffens; to pass each blossom

Of blood in the snow as if I understood 

All I was capable of.

Love: Beginnings by C.K. Williams (R.I.P)

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much
     frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity
     and unity they make —
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter
     at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of
     being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
     cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in
     flame into the sexual —
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that fill-
     ing of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again,
     stamping in its stall.

The Darker Powers by Carl Phillips

Even if you're right,
and there's in fact a difference
between trouble unlooked-for, and
the kind of trouble we pursued,
ruthlessly, until at last
it was ours,
                   what will the difference
have been, finally? What I've
called the world continues
to pass for one, the room spins
same as ever, the bodies
inside it do, flightless, but
no less addicted to mastering-
to the dream of mastering-the very
boughs through which
they keep falling without
motion, almost,
that slowly, my
                         pretty consorts, to whom
sometimes-out of pity
not mercy, for
nothing tender
about it-I show the darker
powers I've hardly shown
to anyone: Feel the weight of them,
I say, before putting them back,
just behind my heart, where they blacken
and thrive.

Fox by Rita Dove

She knew what

she was and so

was capable

of anything

anyone

could imagine.

She loved what

she was, there

for the taking,

imagine.

She imagined

nothing.

She loved

nothing more

than what she had,

which was enough

for her,

which was more

than any man

could handle.

"If I were a dream

you could say my countenance was... 

an expression unraveling like a carpet

into a narrow river of another life. Does truth matter

when it's floating face up or face down?

The answer to this makes all the difference."

my spirit starts

chiming into the wind my

craving for wonder

"You must worry about trusting a man
who feels he's damned
and knows there's a certain charm
in admitting it."

What Goes On by Stephen Dunn

After the affair and the moving out,
after the destructive revivifying passion,
we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more
on its periphery. She spent many nights
alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television.  When she got cancer
she kept it to herself until she couldn't
keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated
and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back-
his wife, who after all had only fallen
in love as anyone might
who hadn't been in love in a while-

and he held her, so differently now,
so thin, her hair just partially
grown back.  He held her like a new woman

and what she felt
felt almost as good as love had,
and each of them called it love
because precision didn't matter anymore.

And we who'd been part of it,
often rejoicing with one
and consoling the other,

we who had seen her truly alive
and merely alive,
what could we do but revise
our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

My heart is bleeding. It bleeds upward and fills

my mouth up with salt. It bleeds because of a city in ruins,

the chair still warm from sister's body,

because it will all be irreproducible. My heart

bleeds because of baby bear not finding mama bear and it bleeds

to the tips of my fingers like I painted my nails Crimson.

Sometimes my heart bleeds so much I am a raisin.

It bleeds until I am a quivering ragged clot, bleeds at the ending

with the heroine and her sunken cancer eyes, at the ending

with the plaintive flute over smoke-choked killing fields. I'm bleeding

a river of blood right now and it's wearing a culvert in me for the blood. My heart

rises up in me, becomes the cork of me and I choke on it. I am bleeding

for you and for me and for the tiny babies and the IED-blown

leg. It bleeds because I'm made that way, all filled up with blood,

my sloppy heart a sponge filled with blood to squezze onto 

any circumstance. Because it is mine, it will always bleed.

My heart bled today. It bled onto the streets

and the steps of city hall. It bled in the pizza parlor with the useless jukebox.

I've got so much blood to give inside and outside of any milieu.

Even for a bad zoning decision, I'll bleed so much you'll be bleeding,

all of us bleeding in and out like it's breathing,

or kissing, and because it is righteous and terrible and red.