dial tone - Riley R.

The saddest poem I ever wrote

was the “goodbye” I whispered

on the skin of your temple

so softly you didn’t hear it

until the fifth time you called

and I didn’t pick up

when the voicemail you left

was ten seconds of silence

followed by a sigh

as you took the phone from your ear.

Remember How Sad That Was When - Paul Guest

I missed sadness because I no longer missed you,

how emotionally counterintuitive it was

as my citizenship in the nation I made of you

gradually lapsed. I woke some other

place with lakes and blue skies and rush hours

and strangers I worried about. But no you.

No ages of you. No your name three times

when I walked somewhere or lay down at night

to bargain with sleep. No you

falling from my mouth everywhere I went.

No you anywhere to be seen.

A secret to keep. And mostly I did,

even beside other women who asked

with the privilege of their bodies

if you had ever existed and what did you do

and did you have a name I’d share

and had you been good to me

but I never gave you up. I left the last of you

to be lost in the fog inside me.

Napping in bomb craters, haggling

over debts I couldn’t deny were mine,

memorizing every month’s horoscope.

It seemed then the days

you had left me stained in sadness

were like that. Good apples on back order from God

and the steaks full of blood

you taught me to love, rationed.

At least I told myself this,

thinking of all the never you were.

But there were limits and lengths

and limits again. There were

songs inside the fog inside the world.

You Must Accept - Kate Light

You must accept that’s who he really is.

You must accept you cannot be his

unless he is yours. No compromise.

He is a canvas on which paint never dries;

a clay that never sets, steel that bends

in a breeze, a melody that when it ends

no one can whistle. He is not who

you thought. He’s not. He is a shoe

that walks away: “I will not go where you

want to go.” “Why, then, are you a shoe?”

“I’m not. I have the sole of a lover

but don’t know what love is.” “Discover

it, then.” “Will I have to go where you go?”

“Sometimes.” “Be patient with you?” “Yes.” “Then, no.”

You have to hear what he is telling you

and see what he is; how it is killing you.

The Geranium - Theodore Roethke

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled,

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,

Or a wizened aster in late September,

I brought her back in again

For a new routine--

Vitamins, water, and whatever

Sustenance seemed sensible

At the time: she'd lived

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,

Her shriveled petals falling

On the faded carpet, the stale

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--

The dumb dames shrieking half the night

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,

Me breathing booze at her,

She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--

And that was scary--

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,

I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,

I was that lonely.

Mending Wall - ROBERT FROST

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side.  It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it

Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.'  I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself.  I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines - Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.

Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.