9/13/16

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.

9/8/16

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.

9/7/16

BROTHER - Richard Shelton

you still carry
your guilt around for company
I will not deprive you of it
but I have an empty space
where my hate lived
while I nursed it
as if it were a child

brother my only
brother it was too late for us
before we were born

it was too late
before you learned to be brutal
and I learned to be weak

your childhood
was a hallway of doors
each closing just as you
got to it
but I was younger
and all the doors were closed
before I could walk

how could I have expected you
to save me when you could
not save yourself

brother my only
brother if not from you
from whom did I learn
so much despair

I went in search
of a father and found you
with a whip in your hand
but what were you searching for
in such dark places
where I was searching for love

9/6/16

THE BOTTOM LINE - Richard Shelton

                                                       For William Stafford

You and I think about it: who pays
the price for the way we live?
Some people live so still
they incur no expenses. Others,
so wild there's the Devil to pay.
Some don't even know they're in debt
and others go slow to avoid it.

People like you pay as you go
and people like me live in debt,
but we know who we owe. I owe
a woman, a good woman, and I
will never be able to pay.

People like you are beautiful
and free of all debt. The best
that can be said for people like me
is that we know who we owe.

9/5/16

Lightness - Meg Bateman (translated from the Gaelic)

It was your lightness that drew me,
the lightness of your talk and your laughter,
the lightness of your cheek in my hands,
your sweet gentle modest lightness;
and it is the lightness of your kiss
that is starving my mouth,
and the lightness of your embrace
that will let me go adrift.

9/4/16

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.