Poetry

Elevation - Henri Cole

Pigs eat the rats that eat the corn,
and we eat the pigs and forget about this.
Life cannot shake off death.
Like a study in genteelness,
you were neatly dressed in a jacket
and trousers. Removing your coffin,
they leant it up against a wall. Things always
start out organized and get messier.
Outside, birds scattered, jip-jip and pip-pip-pip,
as some new version of America became itself.

Each night I dreamed the dream called elevation
in which a wondrous man sought my hand and my heart.
Then I awoke, and he departed.
Look at the flock of pigeons
flying into a thunderhead! I always feel an elevation
when small things overmaster the great.

Henri Cole - "Doves"

Gray and white, as if with age, or some preserving
of the past, as in Beowulf, our hoary ancestor,
hoary as in a bat or a willow, or the venerable
hoary dove that flew straight into my picture
window today and then lay dead on the front porch.
We buried it—in some distorted version of its normal self—
folded in a white cloth napkin in the backyard.
Still soft enough to be cut into like a cabbage, I thought,
I’m glad I’m not dead. Listen to them now,
higher up in the trees, biting and scratching,
with their unmistakable twitch of life. Don’t fear
nothing, their twittering voices cry. The true spirit
of living isn’t eating greedily, or reflection, or
even love, but dissidence, like an ax of stone.

From Walt Whitman's "A Song for Occupations"

“…The light and shade—the curious sense of body and
identity—the greed that with perfect complaisance
devours all things—the endless pride and outstretching
of man—unspeakable joys and sorrows,

The wonder every one sees in every one else he sees….
and the wonders that fill each minute of time forever
and each acre of surface and space forever…“

Cavafy - "Aboard the Ship"

It certainly resembles him, this small
pencil likeness of him.

Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:
an enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.

It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.
To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,
and it illumined his expression.
Handsomer, he seems to me,
now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.

Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

Cole Swensen - "Only"

It’s something to be sole—in fact, it’s the definition of a thing—to be discrete, integral, except that, of course nothing really is—a kernel nestled in its own palm. Thinking of only as lonely stripped of introspection—a stone on a beach about three inches long—not the beach, but the stone—and sovereign in the sun.

(from The American Poetry Review)

Devin Gael Kelly - "Sunday at the Laundromat"

Sunday at the Laundromat (from Good River Review)

I’m good at putting quarters in the washing machine.

I make a stack atop the steel & slip the coins from one
hand to another.

I walk away the moment the machine begins to turn.

I drink a beer next door & think about my life.

I want to say the world turns like dirty clothes
around a center, but really the world turns whether
we learn to call anything dirty or not.

Most days, I am scared of loss.

I know I will miss loading someone else’s
underwear into a washer if I ever find myself alone.

The other day, a friend journeyed to his old apartment
to scavenge his last books. The other day, I watched
a dog greet its dog-park-friend by leaping like a demon—
a good one, so beautiful—upon its shoulders.

I love a perfect hug after a too-long time apart.
I love plants that raise their leaves just moments
after being watered. I love how,
if you turn anything towards light,
you might save its life.

There’s something perfect about the warmth of dry clothes.
I want to pile them in a pile, jump together into them.

I remember rain by what it leaves behind:
water on the sidewalks, muddy puddles by the trees.

The world reminds us of everything we might forget.
It says: everything clean must be dirtied again.
It says: you can’t be perfect; don’t try.

It says something about the light
not being able to choose its object.

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" - Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,   

The only moving thing   

Was the eye of the blackbird.   


II

I was of three minds,   

Like a tree   

In which there are three blackbirds.   


III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   

It was a small part of the pantomime.   


IV

A man and a woman   

Are one.   

A man and a woman and a blackbird   

Are one.   


V

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   


VI

Icicles filled the long window   

With barbaric glass.   

The shadow of the blackbird   

Crossed it, to and fro.   

The mood   

Traced in the shadow   

An indecipherable cause.   


VII

O thin men of Haddam,   

Why do you imagine golden birds?   

Do you not see how the blackbird   

Walks around the feet   

Of the women about you?   


VIII

I know noble accents   

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   

But I know, too,   

That the blackbird is involved   

In what I know.   


IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,   

It marked the edge   

Of one of many circles.   


X

At the sight of blackbirds   

Flying in a green light,   

Even the bawds of euphony   

Would cry out sharply.   


XI

He rode over Connecticut   

In a glass coach.   

Once, a fear pierced him,   

In that he mistook   

The shadow of his equipage   

For blackbirds.   


XII

The river is moving.   

The blackbird must be flying.   


XIII

It was evening all afternoon.   

It was snowing   

And it was going to snow.   

The blackbird sat   

In the cedar-limbs.

James Wright - "A Blessing"

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.   
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me   
And nuzzled my left hand.   
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

In Italy, On a Boat, In a Cave, On a Boat, In Italy - Molly Johnsen

God carved the virgin from this
stone, apparently. My heart was
made in the dark of my mother; her
body surrounded the start of my own
—the way the earth holds the
horizon. Birth is the beginning of an
echo. In this divinity of dark, God’s
daughter won’t take shape for me—
like the woman trapped in my own
body cage. I yearn to give birth to
her. Anchored here, we bend our
knees to stay steady. We point up at
rock—at where the sky should be—
while our boat rocks in the wake of
another.

Austen Leah Rose - "Seventh Meditation on the Existence of God"

It’s the thing that happened that was never solved.
It’s the thing that happened that was solved
years later on an apple farm outside of town. It was somebody’s birthday,
the bus broke down, and an animal swept across the sky.
Then it hid inside a vowel sung by a woman in a bar at midnight.
That’s when it led me to its secret chamber.

Now it sighs; it’s becoming self-conscious.
Now it’s humming because it hasn’t got the words.
Now it’s telling me its middle name, which it’s never told anyone.
When it says pain, it means all pain.
When it says longing, it means every type of longing.
It’s stored in a golden vessel in the shape of a cat with sapphire eyes.

It can only be thought of from the inside.
At dusk, it disappears in an explosion of screeching blue light;
that’s why we’re all so sad,
that’s why we stare into empty cups.
You can still find it in a motel room in Wyoming while the TV plays softly,
and you look in the mirror and notice how you’ve changed.

James Wright - "Sun Tan at Dusk"

When was the last time
You remembered you
Had gone out? A bee
Blew past me. Jays
Raised hell down stream,
You rose up
Slow out of the mountain pool.
Color of doe out of green
Against dark.
The fawn’s honey weeping down stream.
I just got up. This is
When I wake.