Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

- James Schuyler

“It comes the very moment you wake up each morning.

All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.”

- C.S. Lewis, from “Mere Christianity” (Book 4, ch. 8)

Two Harbors

When I started to talk to myself again
It was a good thing
Because I'm fascinating:
I know what I like to hear and when.

It happened when I got out of bed,
Wobbly from trazodone,
Looking for my phone.
Only the dogs heard what I said.

This brought back the hell of July,
When I hiked every chance
I got, talked to plants
And deer. I didn't want to die.

Silence. Life's an audition, you see.
As I make my bed,
Take another med,
I repeat what I said: "Will it be me?"

This cove and that eucalyptus tree,
Buffaloes, a herd of three,
Help me fit my soliloquy
To the undefeated affect of the sea.

- Rex Wilder

From the First Epistle General of John

"But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."

- I John 3:17-18

Strindberg Gray

He was trying to teach me to economize with my language. Strindberg gray
he said, instead of

and I thought, sad stuff; plays. Okay: born, rented room,

to Dad & Mom business & bar, how could you not? Or thought,
I cannot be your Lithuania nor her other Armenia,
emptied into river if not skein-tangled senseless. He won’t say her name
and not a word of the thitherings. Only that she was lost. Don’t speak
the heavy hinges, the crushed-bud breaking of taste
from language. That sort of excess has no place in the new economy.

Strindberg gray, say, when one thinks only January, January, January.
Of the Occurrence as recurrent. A single gunshot
in Dempster’s cistern, the echo chambers of sleep. The gray lot
of days in low-light hospitals, Strindberg.

I’ll call him gray, his sitting heavy. And her so Strindberg with veil and rose,
her poised in shadow at the door. Funereal nails sunk
into knees would be dripping were they not so goddamn gray.

Excess was for days when my mother sat turning grape leaves
with three sets of pockets: Turkish, English, & Armenian, plus lemon to dry it all out.
By ten, they’d sewn up two; said one is more than enough.

“English, only, Sanossian.
You will speak what we speak.”

I don’t know what it’s like to lose
a language. Instead,

Strindberg gray, I say, when I want to bring his lost girl back. Strindberg gray,
though I cannot take from him January, July, or the months of coping between.
When my mother leafs through me in her memory banks, bits of face are missing;
sometimes I’m limbless or smear. Gray even scentless, and still all Strindberg.

I tell him, I raise her: be darlings and come scream with me
from all the pockets sewn over. Maybe by late summer we’ll be humming:
Tennessee yellow; Tennessee, Tennessee.

- Knar Gavin

How to Continue

Oh there once was a woman
and she kept a shop
selling trinkets to tourists
not far from a dock
who came to see what life could be
far back on the island.

And it was always a party there
always different but very nice
New friends to give you advice
or fall in love with you which is nice
and each grew so perfectly from the other
it was a marvel of poetry
and irony

And in this unsafe quarter
much was scary and dirty
but no one seemed to mind
very much
the parties went on from house to house
There were friends and lovers galore
all around the store
There was moonshine in winter
and starshine in summer
and everybody was happy to have discovered

what they discovered
And then one day the ship sailed away
There were no more dreamers just sleepers
in heavy attitudes on the dock
moving as if they knew how
among the trinkets and the souvenirs
the random shops of modern furniture
and a gale came and said
it is time to take all of you away
from the tops of the trees to the little houses
on little paths so startled

And when it became time to go
they none of them would leave without the other
for they said we are all one here
and if one of us goes the other will not go
and the wind whispered it to the stars
the people all got up to go
and looked back on love

- John Ashbery

Stepping Out of Poetry

What would you give for one of the old yellow streetcars
rocking towards you again through the thick snow?

What would you give for the feeling of joy as you climbed
up the three iron steps and took your place by the cold window?

Oh, what would you give to pick up your stack of books
and walk down the icy path in front of the library?

What would you give for your dream
to be as clear and simple as it was then
in the dark afternoons, at the old scarred tables?

- Gerald Stern

Black Sea

One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long,
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear . . .
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?

- Mark Strand

Exclusion

It’s a relief to drift past lovely things that exclude me.

It would take a machete to open hedges of flaming xora,

a bolt cutter to reach jasmine, blindness to miss red flags,

though the ocean looks open, smoky blue, and gorgeous;

and vanity to intrude on neighbors, who stand face to face

near the door of our building, blessedly unaware of me,

one speaking, the other stricken with sympathy.

- Miriam Levine (first published @ On the Seawall)

A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs

At that time of year there is a turn in the road where
the hermit tones and meadow colours of
two seasons heal into
one another—

 when the wild ladder of a winter scarf is stored away in
a drawer eased by candle-grease and lemon balm
is shaken out from
the linen press.

 Those are afternoons when the Dublin hills are so close,
so mauve and blue, we can be certain dark
will bring rain and
it does to

 the borrowed shears and the love-seat in the garden where
a sparrow hawk was seen through the opal-
white of apple trees
after Easter. And

 I want to know how it happened that those days of
bloom when
rumours of wings and sightings—always seen by
someone else, somewhere else—
filled the air,

 together with a citrus drizzle of petals and clematis
opening,
and shadows waiting on a gradual lengthening
in the light our children
stayed up

later by, over pages of wolves and dragons and learned to
measure the sanctuary of darkness by a small
danger—how and why
they have chilled

into these April nights I lie awake listening for wings I
will
never see above the cold frames and
last frosts of our
back gardens.

- Eavan Boland