May 2012
20 posts
1 tag
'Lending Out Books' by Hal Sirowitz
You’re always giving, my therapist said. You have to learn how to take. Whenever you meet a woman, the first thing you do is lend her your books. You think she’ll have to see you again in order to return them. But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will want to...
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'It is not so much that I miss you' by Dorothea...
It is not so much that I miss you as the remembering which I suppose is a form of missing except more positive, like the time of the blackout when fear was my first response followed by love of the dark.
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'Their Sex Life' by A.R. Ammons
One failure on Top of another.
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'Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes' by Richard Brautigan
Fuck me like fried potatoes on the most beautifully hungry morning of my God-damn life.
(in memory of the pommes frites I couldn’t finish at dinner on Wednesday evening)
3 tags
'Cello' by Adam Zagajewski
Those who don’t like it say it’s just a mutant violin that’s been kicked out of the chorus. Not so. The cello has many secrets, but it never sobs, just sings in its low voice. Not everything turns into song though. Sometimes you catch a murmur or a whisper: I’m lonely, I can’t sleep.
(translated from the Polish but not sure who by)
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'Alcohol' by Franz Wright
You do look a little ill. But we can do something about that, now. Can’t we. The fact is you’re a shocking wreck. Do you hear me. You aren’t all alone. And you could use some help today, packing in the dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and grinning with terror flowing over your legs through your fingers and hair… I was always waiting, always here. Know...
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'The Mutterings of Old Snow' by Allan Cooper
The night Sibelius died, a flock of swans flew over his house. When I was ten, I thought death was the silence of a pail-trapped frog. What will leap over my house when I die? How many days are etched on my table? I walk outside, converse with a drift, the mutterings of old snow; the tan of dry oak leaves, rising on the wind in wildest speech.
2 tags
'the flowering of the rod' by H. D.
i go where i love and where i am loved,
into the snow;
i go to the things i love
with no thought of duty or pity
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'This Heavy Craft' by P. K. Page
The wax has melted but the dream of flight persists. I, Icarus, though grounded in my flesh have one bright section in me where a bird night after starry night while I’m asleep unfolds its phantom wings and practices.
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'December 21st, 2002' by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
It’s said it takes seven years
to grow completely new skin cells.
To think, this year I will grow
into a body you never will
have touched.
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'Pain has an element of blank' by Emily Dickinson
Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there was A time when it was not. It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain.
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'The Letter' by Linda Gregg
I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking good care of myself. The weather is perfect. I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea. I expect to swim soon. For now I am content. I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am doing my best. It reminds me of when I was sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something in me that others receive...
1 tag
'Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently' by Raul...
Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago. Everyone knows at least one secret language. When nobody is looking, I can fly. We are all...
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'Timor Mortis' by Sean O'Brien
Into the pit go all Estates, All princes, pimps and potentates, The fiend next door, the BBC - The living and those yet to be, Eminem, Ms Ruby Wax And Robert Johnson’s vanished tracks, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Madonna and the Duke of Earl, Occam’s razor, Charlie Chan, Lord Lucan and the bogey man, Mister Tony, Conrad Black, The orchestra from Crackerjack, The Andrews Sisters,...
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'A Byzantine Mosaic' by Wislawa Szymborska
“O Theotropia, my empress consort.” “O Theodendron, my consort emperor.” “How fair thou art, my hollow-cheeked beloved.” “How fine art thou, blue-lipped spouse.” “Thou art so wondrous frail beneath thy bell-like gown, the alarum of which, if but removed, would waken all my kingdom.” “How excellently mortified thou art, my lord and...
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'Brutal' by Andrea Cohen
Brutal to give the prisoner a window— a blue sky glimpse— as if an afterlife existed.Brutal for you to parade in a body in the same room where I dream you.
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'Anniversary' by Jason Whitmarsh
She says he isn’t as funny as he used to be. About fifty percent as funny, maybe less. He thinks, but doesn’t say, no, it’s you, you’re depressed, you don’t find anyone funny anymore. She thinks, but doesn’t say, I’ve always been depressed. I’ve never found anyone funny—except you, once.
1 tag
from 'Forward to New Numbers' by Christopher Logue →
crushedfingers:
If this book doesn’t change you give it no house space; if having read it you are the same person you were before picking it up, then throw it away. Not enough for me that my poems shine in your eye; not enough for me that they look from your walls or lurk on your shelves; I want my poems to be…
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'Australian politics' by Kathleen McLeod →
kathleenjoy:
when I overdosed the doctors at the hospital force fed me charcoal the cruellest antidote to a bottle of vodka and fistfuls of smooth white pills my body spewed black dust when I got the bill from the hospital there was an itemised line for the Carbon Tax I wanted to be baptised in Ash Wednesdays…
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'The Practice' by Aaron Shurin →
April 2012
14 posts
2 tags
'Fantasy' by Ben John Smith →
(please note the poems at this URL are not safe for work. Also, I happen to be wearing green nail polish, at the insistence of my Master - Butter London’s Thames!)
1 tag
'All Objects Reveal Something About the Body' by... →
april-is:
All Objects Reveal Something About the Body Catie Rosemurgy
Crisp is to the apple what flexed is to the body. Poor apple. Being bitten is to the crisp apple what walking is to the ripe body, but it’s more complicated than that: the apple of the face has been given to the running juice of the…
1 tag
'What Things Want' by Robert Bly
You have to let things Occupy their own space. This room is small, But the green settee Likes to be here. The big marsh reeds, Crowding out the slough, Find the world good. You have to let things Be as they are. Who knows which of us Deserves the world more?
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'Beauty Secrets, Revealed by the Queen in Snow...
Do for your neck what you do for your face.
Face your neck whatever the case. Pace yourself
for 35-55, a quick
and bumpy ride, gone in a sneeze. Avoid
petroleum; replace with olive oil.
Check bitterness at the door; be happy!
Do for yourself what you do for others,
the money guru says to sisters. Embrace
a stash and a place, Virginia wrote, 80
years ago. Don't be dopey or sleepy,
and don't buy...
1 tag
'Here City' by Rick Snyder
The sounds of the train piped in through the PA system. The whole city slightly askew but familiar in its shadows, its symmetrical brick, its dry hot breeze and its lack of pedestrians, save you. * The blinking message said: More alcohol is needed to achieve escape velocity * The salutations and styles erupting on the top few stairs, where service is mercifully restored and the world resumes its...
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'Sweetness' by Stephen Dunn
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small. I acknowledge there is no sweetness that...
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'The Dancers Inherit the Party' by Ian Hamilton...
When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy— Not so when I have danced for an hour: The dancers inherit the party While the talkers wear themselves out and sit in corners alone, and glower.
'How to Build an Owl' by Kathleen Lynch →
april-is:
How to Build an Owl Kathleen Lynch
1. Decide you must. 2. Develop deep respect for feather, bone, claw. 3. Place your trembling thumb where the heart will be: for one hundred hours watch so you will know where to put the first feather. 4. Stay awake forever. When the bird takes shape …
1 tag
'Rock Candy' by Joel Ephraims →
(winning poem for the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, Australia)
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'The Stranger' by Adrienne Rich
Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart of the street to the river walking the rivers of the avenues feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt watching the lights turn on in the towers walking as I’ve walked before like a man, like a woman, in the city my visionary anger cleansing my sight and the detailed perceptions of mercy flowering from that anger if I...
1 tag
'Prelude' from 'Practising Bach' by Jan Zwicky
for performance with Bach’s E Major Partita for Solo Violin, BMV 1006
Prelude There is, said Pythagoras, a sound the planet makes: a kind of music just outside of our hearing, the proportion and the resonance of things — not the clang of theory or the wuthering of human speech, not even the bright song of sex or hunger, but the unrung ringing that supports them all. The wife, no warning,...
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'The Green Plant' by Wallace Stevens
Silence is a shape that has passed. Otu-bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper And the shadows of the trees Are like wrecked umbrellas. The effete vocabulary of summer No longer says anything. The brown at the bottom of red The orange far down in yellow, Are falsifications from a sun In a mirror, without heat, In a constant secondariness, A turning down toward finality— Except that a...
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'Animal Functionsong' by Albert Goldbarth
Make me a place of peace, and leisure spider, beaver, mountainwasp Teach me pain’s more beautiful gesture oyster, salmon, eiderduck Let me survive past Time that bred me lemur, tapir, coelacanth Lead me into the cared-for family lioness, dambear, pelican But if I pray too huge this morning buffalo, mountain gorilla, white rhino Asking one gift too outré tusk, milk,...
1 tag
'13 Ways of Deconstructing a Blackbird' by Scott... →
March 2012
25 posts
1 tag
'Some Ghosts & Some Ghouls' by Jay Macpherson
While we loved those who never read our poems,
Answered our letters, said the simple things we
Waited so long for, and were too polite to
See we were crying,
Irony fed us: for the days we watched our
Chances to please them, nights in rumpled beds lay
Gored by their phantoms, guilty most of suffering,
We were rewarded.
While we admired how ignorance became them,
Coldness adorned, they...
1 tag
'Sonnet 30' by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain, Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again. Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, pinned...
1 tag
'A Diminished Thing' by Rachel Contreni Flynn
We could make a meal of what’s left in this box: potato, onion, rind of cheese, elderly egg. We could make another baby without much fear, at our age. Name her Rosa and set her in the yard with us, pulling weeds, listening to the birds dusting their wings in the drive. We could instead just hold each other here in the cold house, and say enough, enough.
1 tag
'Anorexic' by Eavan Boland
Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. Yes I am torching ber curves and paps and wiles. They scorch in my self denials. How she meshed my head in the half-truths of her fevers till I renounced milk and honey and the taste of lunch. I vomited her hungers. Now the bitch is burning. I am starved and curveless. I am skin and bone. She has learned her lesson. Thin as a rib I turn in...
1 tag
'A Martian Sends A Postcard Home' by Craig Raine
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings - they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper. Rain is when the earth is...
1 tag
'How to Build an Owl' by Kathleen Lynch
1. Decide you must. 2. Develop deep respect for feather, bone, claw. 3. Place your trembling thumb where the heart will be: for one hundred hours watch so you will know where to put the first feather. 4. Stay awake forever. When the bird takes shape gently pry open its beak and whisper into it: mouse. 5. Let it go.
1 tag
'Simpatico' by Ravi Shankar
Unavowable, us, after midnight’s plash has darkened The storefronts and filled the cabs, Leaving behind a keening the flavor of turmeric, Yellowing the air, acquitting the moment From historicity. What exists but now, wet and pulmonary, Rinsed of context like two glasses used to mix a drink, What’s not soluble in liquid exchange? Personally, I’d trade my kingdom for your clavicle, The...
1 tag
'since feeling is first' by e. e. cummings
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a...
1 tag
'Prayer' by Carol Ann Duffy
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift. Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train. Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano...
1 tag
'To E' by Sara Teasdale
I have remembered beauty in the night, Against black silences I waked to see A shower of sunlight over Italy And green Ravello dreaming on her height; I have remembered music in the dark, The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach’s, And running water singing on the rocks When once in English woods I heard a lark. But all remembered beauty is no more Than a vague prelude to the thought of you—...
1 tag
'Margo' by G.P. Greenwood
Margo drank champagne from a Mouseketeer’s hat on her fortieth birthday. She still likes cotton candy; she still looks hot in fish-net stockings. She names her cars after sexy film stars, and when she plants her sequinned sneaker on Marilyn’s gas pedal, a wind from a Saturday summer night in 1962 puts its tongue in your ear. Two cups of her amazing coffee have been known to cause...
1 tag
'Coming Down' by Colleen Allen →
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'Evidence' by Caroline Adams
I found a photograph and a letter while clearing out our room. It didn’t make things any better. It clarified at once when you had met her, not after we parted as you swore. I found a photograph and a letter. One friend was key - an aider and abetter. I often wondered at the time. It didn’t make things any better. The truth at last and still I betcha you’ll continue to...
1 tag
'Door in the Mountain' by Jean Valentine
Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in
1 tag
'The Madness Vase' by Andrea Gibson
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The...
3 tags
'Loving the Rituals' by Palladas →
(I love that this was on a train)