COLLECTING FUTURE LIVES - Stephen Dunn

Now that everybody was dead

only he and his brother knew

the blood secrets, the unequal

history each nervous system

keeps and rehearses

into a story, a life.

Over the years they’d agreed

to invent and remember

a long hum of good times,

love breaking through

during card games,

their father teaching them

to skip stones

under the Whitestone Bridge.

The smart liar in them

knew these stories

were for their children

who, that very moment

over dinner, were collecting

their future lives.

But sometimes

in their twice-a-year visits

late at night

when their wives had tired

of the old repetitions,

they’d bring up the silences

in the living room

after a voice had been raised,

father’s drinking, mother’s

long martyrdom before the gods

of propriety and common sense.

In their mannerisms

each could see the same ghosts.

And if they allowed themselves

to keep talking,

if they’d had enough to drink,

love would be all

that mattered, the love

they were cheated of

and the love they got,

the parental love

that if remembered at all

had been given, they decided,

and therefore could be given again.

AT HIS HOUSE - Stephen Dunn

In my friend's face it's not easy to separate

what's serenity, what's despair.

What the mouth suggests the eyes correct,

and what looks like acceptance

is a kind of détente, the world allowed

to encroach only so far.

At his house, we put aside

the large questions: Is there? And if so?

replace them with simple chores.

We bring vegetables in from the garden.

We shuck corn. Is it possible

to be a good citizen without saying a word?

Both his wives thought not, wanted love

to have a language he never learned.

He'd make wine for them from dandelions.

Sundays he'd serve them breakfast in bed.

In his toolbox he was sure he had a tool

for whatever needed to be fixed.

The deed reveals the man, he says.

I don't tell him that it's behind deeds

he and I often hide.

I've got a face for noon, a face for dusk,

a fact he lets slide. Both of us think friendship

is about what needn't be said. 

It seems we're a couple of halves, men

almost here, hardly there. At his house less

feels good. I always come back for more.

The Art of Disappearing - Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?

say no.

When they invite you to the party

remember what parties are like

before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say We should get together

say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.

You're trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven't seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don't start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

Solving the Puzzle - Stephen Dunn

I couldn’t make all the pieces fit,

so I threw one away.

No expectation of success now,

none of that worry.

The remaining pieces seemed

to seek their companions.

A design appeared.

I could see the connection

between the overgrown path

and the dark castle on the hill.

Something in the middle, though,

was missing.

It would have been important once.

I wouldn’t have been able to sleep

without it.

The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab

Everything you have heard about me

is true, or true enough.

You shouldn’t think

I’d change my story now.

A stubborn, willful little girl

comes sneaking

around my house, peering

in all the windows. She’s disobeyed

her parents, who knew

where the witch lived. “If you go,

you’re not our daughter any more.”

That’s what they told her. I have

my ways of knowing. All pale

and trembly then, she knocks at my door.

“Why are you so pale?”

I ask, although of course

I know that too.

She'd seen what she’d seen—

a green man on the stairs, and the other one,

the red one, and then the devil himself

with his head on fire, which was me,

the witch in her true ornament, as I

like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed

to send her running home

but she walked right in, which is the part

I never understand completely. Maybe

she believed, just then,

that she was no one’s daughter any more,

and had to take her chances, poor thing,

inside with me. “So you’ve come

to brighten up my house,”

I said, and changed her into a log.

It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.

But I’d been waiting all day.

I was cold, and even that

small fire was bright, and warm enough.

Strangers - Richard Shelton

we find ourselves at the exact place

where the light becomes darkness

and turn our faces toward one another

realizing we could be lovers we could

be anything we could even be friends

we could carry our scars

like banners we could pray to each other

and answer each other’s prayers

                 

this is the earth we can touch it

the mountains expose their nipples

to the last rays of the sun

and day lingers on the undersides of leaves

with so much need on the horizon

surely there is a heart around here somewhere

but we are characters from a book who have

come here on vacation

to listen to the pulse of the sea

which makes an affirmation beyond despair

those who have heard it

do not recommend it to anybody

we have heard the hypnotized telephone

ring itself into a trance of silence we have

seen the poor pass by on borrowed legs

we have been enameled by the sun

and as we are slowly going under water

where all light

is the light of a green stone broken open

we keep our distance it is all we have

LONELY - Natalie Wee

I have taken to being in public places

by myself. My cleverest trick was

to hold intimacy against bone

without telling it my name. Like any

unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real

when I’m not being touched.

Because who am I but who

I am to someone else?

I know now the ways of nameless

birds & the cost of a life built

from waiting. I go to any window

I please, bare-handed, hovering

a/part. Watching when devotion

becomes duty. When soft becomes

stranger. Look. I was soft once, &

then I was a stranger to

myself. No tender mouth is worth

a slow death. No heart is worth

the belly of a beast. The secret is:

tender attends the heels of bruises.

The secret is: be bigger

than your alone.

MAGIC - Shel Silverstein

Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,

Eddie touched a troll,

Laurie danced with witches once,

Charlie found some goblins’ gold.

Donald heard a mermaid sing,

Susy spied an elf,

But all the magic I have known

I’ve had to make myself.

Thank-You Note - Wisława Szymborska (Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

I owe a lot

to those I do not love.

Relief in accepting

others care for them more.

Joy that I am not

wolf to their sheep.

Peace be with them

for with them I am free

––love neither gives

nor knows how to take these things.

I don't wait for them

from window to door.

Almost as patient

as a sun dial,

I understand

what love never could.

I forgive

what love never would.

Between rendezvous and letter

no eternity passes,

only a few days or weeks.

Our trips always turn out well:

concerts are enjoyed,

cathedrals toured,

landscapes in focus.

And when seven rivers and mountains

come between us,

they are the rivers and mountains

found on any map.

The credit's theirs

if I live in three dimensions,

in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,

with a real, ever-shifting horizon.

They don't even know

how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I owe them nothing,"

love would have said

on this open topic.

LETTER TO A LOST FRIEND - RICHARD SHELTON

War, trade, religious debts to discharge, these are mostly the reasons

for men’s distant journeyings: but you take pleasure in distant journeys

without reason.                                                               – St.-John Perse

we do not realize what we want

until we learn

what we are willing to give up for it

and you did God knows you did

when swimming was no longer possible

you learned to sink you learned

to live at the bottom of the sea

now tell me of the chambers where you sleep

tell me it does not matter

lie if you must

is your bed luminous is it festooned

with seaweed do all your narrow windows

open onto water

is the tide kind to you

forgive me if I do not understand

last night a stranger asked me what

gives you most pleasure and before I thought

I answered her revenge

AND THE SCARS WILL BE COVERED - Richard Shelton

responsibility fell at my feet

like a dead bird

and I left it for the collectors of feathers

now I am leaving these words on sand

for the water

and when everything is gone

a voice will say

that’s home

where two paths cross without speaking

where a lost shoe full of darkness

is curled up

under the roots of the snow

then I will point myself in the right direction

alone I hope

I was never much for company

and start off down an empty road

toward winter and a silence

which no one will ever repair

MOONLESS NIGHT - Louise Glück

A lady weeps at a dark window.

Must we say what it is? Can’t we simply say

a personal matter? It’s early summer;

next door the Lights are practicing klezmer music.

A good night: the clarinet is in tune.

As for the lady--she’s going to wait forever;

there’s no point in watching longer.

After awhile, the streetlight goes out.

But is waiting forever

always the answer? Nothing

is always the answer; the answer

depends on the story.

Such a mistake to want

clarity above all things. What’s

a single night, especially

one like this, now so close to ending?

On the other side, there could be anything,

all the joy in the world, the stars fading,

the streetlight becoming a bus stop.

Icarus, The Fool - Riley R.

It is easy to think me a fool,

the foolish boy whose foolish dreams

melted his wings and

broke his father’s heart.

What is harder to see:

I knew the math of it all,

remembered the geometry of

wax and feathers

so well I could taste it on my tongue

scraping like cardamom

and sour sweet like tangerines

on the roof of my mouth.

Height and wind speed,

melting points and velocity,

lift and thrust,

bird wings turned to equations

I held in my heart.

But oh,

to fly is nothing at all like math.

It is nothing at all like diagrams of

birds and insects and cloud formations.

To see the sun, The Sun, oh,

to spread your fingers through it’s warmth

as the air becomes tangible like the sea,

oh, there was no room in this heart for

the coldness of figures,

they were melted long long before my wings.

So judge, though the sky has never loved you

and I will yearn for the sun, The Sun,

oh,

from the bottom of the sea.

New World - Louise Glück

As I saw it,

all my mother's life, my father

held her down, like

lead strapped to her ankles.

She was

buoyant by nature;

she wanted to travel,

go to theater, go to museums.

What he wanted

was to lie on the couch

with the Times

over his face,

so that death, when it came,

wouldn't seem a significant change.

In couples like this,

where the agreement

is to do things together,

it's always the active one

who concedes, who gives.

You can't go to museums

with someone who won't

open his eyes.

I thought my father's death

would free my mother.

In a sense, it has:

she takes trips, looks at

great art. But she's floating.

Like some child's balloon

that gets lost the minute

it isn't held.

Or like an astronaut

who somehow loses the ship

and has to drift in space

knowing, however long it lasts,

this is what's left of being alive: she's free

in that sense.

Without relation to earth.

"A youth in apparel that glittered" - Stephen Crane

A youth in apparel that glittered

Went to walk in a grim forest.

There he met an assassin

Attired all in garb of old days;

He, scowling through the thickets,

And dagger poised quivering,

Rushed upon the youth.

"Sir," said this latter,

"I am enchanted, believe me,

To die, thus,

In this medieval fashion,

According to the best legends;

Ah, what joy!"

Then took he the wound, smiling,

And died, content.

THE FAIRY REEL - Neil Gaiman

If I were young as once I was, and dreams

     and death more distant then,

I wouldn't split my soul in two, and keep

     half in the world of men,

So half of me would stay at home, and

     strive for Faërie in vain,

While all the while my soul would stroll up

     narrow path, down crooked lane,

And there would meet a fairy lass and

     smile and bow with kisses three,

She'd pluck wild eagles from the air and

     nail me to a lightning tree

And if my heart would run from her or

     flee from her, be gone from her,

She’d wrap it in a nest of stars and then

     she'd take it on with her

Until one day she'd tire of it, all bored

     with it and done with it

She'd leave it by a burning brook, and off

     brown boys would run with it.

They'd take it and have fun with it and

     stretch it long and cruel and thin,

They'd slice it into four and then they'd

     string with it a violin.

And every day and every night they'd

     play upon my heart a song

So plaintive and so wild and strange that

     all who heard it danced along

And sang and whirled and sank and trod and

     skipped and slipped and reeled and rolled

Until, with eyes as bright as coals, they'd

     crumble into wheels of gold....

But I am young no longer now; for sixty

     years my heart's been gone

To play its dreadful music there, beyond

     the valley of the sun.

I watch with envious eyes and mind, the

     single–souled, who dare not feel

The wind that blows beyond the moon,

     who do not hear the Fairy Reel.

If you don't hear the Fairy Reel, they will

     not pause to steal your breath.

When I was young I was a fool. So wrap

     me up in dreams and death.

Today My Horoscope Read - Warsan Shire

You are the alchemist

of your loneliness.

You can create anything

in its place.

the lesson of the moth - DON MARQUIS

i was talking to a moth

the other evening

he was trying to break into

an electric light bulb

and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows

pull this stunt i asked him

because it is the conventional

thing for moths or why

if that had been an uncovered

candle instead of an electric

light bulb you would

now be a small unsightly cinder

have you no sense

plenty of it he answered

but at times we get tired

of using it

we get bored with the routine

and crave beauty

and excitement

fire is beautiful

and we know that if we get

too close it will kill us

but what does that matter

it is better to be happy

for a moment

and be burned up with beauty

than to live a long time

and be bored all the while

so we wad all our life up

into one little roll

and then we shoot the roll

that is what life is for

it is better to be a part of beauty

for one instant and then cease to

exist than to exist forever

and never be a part of beauty

our attitude toward life

is come easy go easy

we are like human beings

used to be before they became

too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him

out of his philosophy

he went and immolated himself

on a patent cigar lighter

i do not agree with him

myself i would rather have

half the happiness and twice

the longevity

but at the same time i wish

there was something i wanted

as badly as he wanted to fry himself