Entertainment
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Blue Vase
Because you like to sleep with curtains drawn,
at dawn I rose and pulled the velvet tight.
You stirred, then set your hand back on my hip,
the bed a ship in sleep's doubled plunging
wave on wave, until as though a lighthouse
beam had crossed the room: the vase between
the windows suddenly ablaze,...Read more
The Cry
A man can cry, all night, your back
shaking against me as your mother
sleeps, hooked to the drip
to clear her kidneys from their muck
of sleeping pills. Each one white
as the snapper's belly I once watched a man
gut by the ice bins in his truck, its last
bubbling grunt cleaved in two
with a knife. ...Read more
Thin Ice
Reedy striations don't occlude the beneath-
earthy mash of leaves, flat pepper flakes, layered,
tips protruding, tender-desolate above a mirror
surface, gently pressing on horse-mane, nest material,
tickle-brush, fringe. Buff block-shapes further down,
ghost-bits of green-green, a lone leaf burned white.
...Read more
Moth Moon
With pollen of the white stars on thy wings,
Oh! would I shared thy flight, thy fantasy,
The aimless beauty of thy brightenings!
A worker, wed to Purpose and Things,
Earth-worn I turn from Day's sufficiency.
One lethed hour that duty never brings,
Oh! one dim hour to drift, Moth Moon, with thee!
...Read more
Limitations
The subtlest strain a great musician weaves,
Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony
To music in his soul. May it not be
Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves
That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves
Unheard in the transition. Thus do we
Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty
Of some rare mood, ...Read more
Emma Bovary
I would have liked then for someone to touch me
So I could know the purpose of this hardship.
Black-eyed and impassive as a canyon,
From the hive of my mind, I looked at their faces
As I moved between rows of espaliered pears.
I only intended for someone to show
Me, once, an affection like the sun
Shows ...Read more
Sorcery
I'm a witch who lost all her powers, then
in place of my powers, I got the coiled beauty
of seashells and sleeping infants. The coiled
beauty of eardrums, and the sound wave
of bells. The bells! This is the country of clouds.
The molten body, the Floridian pinks,
and centuries of sand dollars examining
...Read more
Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.
Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn't be needed
for children walking to school?
Those same children
also shouldn't require a suit
of armor when standing
on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs
as they ...Read more
The Answer
You have spoken the answer.
A child searches far sometimes
Into the red dust
On a dark rose leaf
And so you have gone far
For the answer is:
Silence.
In the republic
Of the winking stars
and spent cataclysms
Sure we are it is off there the answer is hidden and folded over,
...Read more
The Leash
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what's
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal...Read more
Read Genesis
I was betrayed by Bohemia early
in my life and left a run-down hotel
with my eye swollen shut by an insect bite
but got my revenge in France and Italy
and wasn't bitten once in those two countries.
I swore off free meals and book-stealing
both there and elsewhere and
if I got something for nothing...Read more
Accomplishments
What you have not done
is without error. What you
have not said is beyond contradiction.
What you understand of God
was yesterday. Today a bicycle
waits, chained to a bench.
The success of this afternoon's nap
is the dream of lifting seven boxes,
your week, sealed with clear tape.
...Read more
Alternate Self-Portrait
I will drift
into darkness
and know it
perhaps
the way a son
recognizes a mother
after he has returned
from many years
of travel
understanding
the new distance
is neither
beginning nor
end
...Read more
Gentle Collisions
extract longing.
fold its edges
in gold paper
to rest on a scale.
the catapult of one
plate plummets
the other swings
bobs and waits
for a leaf of one's
want to waft down.
such gentle collisions
crush more than steel
crack more than bones upon ...Read more
Like a Curtain
When she stretched her arms
the mist lifted and the red buds opened on the maple trees.
She, in the garden in pajamas,
danced with her friend Isabel,
as the fledgling robins wobbled and flew from branch to ground.
Cells multiplied in her body.
Her fingers spread, the warm cool air,
as the mist ...Read more
Winter Leafage
Each year I mark one lone outstanding tree,
Clad in its robings of the summer past,
Dry, wan, and shivering in the wintry blast.
It will not pay the season's rightful fee,-
It will not set its frost-burnt leafage free;
But like some palsied miser all aghast,
Who hoards his sordid treasure to the last,
It...Read more
The Desplaines Forest
The sun has sunk below the level plain,
And yet above the forest's leafy gloom
The glory of the evening lightens still.
Smooth as a mirror is the river's face
With Heaven's light, and all its radiant clouds
And shadows which against the river's shore
Already are as night. From some retreat
Obscure and ...Read more