slaughter our finest impulses

Let me tell you about longing. Let me presume that I have something new to say about it, that this room, naked, its walls pining for clocks, has something new to say about absence. Somewhere the crunch of an apple, fading sunflowers on a quilt, a window looking out to a landscape with a single tree. And you sitting under it. Let go, said you to me in a dream, but by the time the wind carried your voice to me, I was already walking through the yawning door, towards the small, necessary sadnesses of waking. I wish I could hold you now, but that is a line that has no place in a poem, like the swollen sheen of the moon tonight, or the word absence, or you, or longing. Let me tell you about longing. In a distant country two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons, unafraid, are perching beside them. She places a hand on his knee and says, say to me the truest thing you can. I am closing my eyes now. You are far away.

Jack Veasey, [loving]

Sure, I want to believe a poem can block a bullet too that a poem could save me at the end of the world, my bug-out bag teeming with “Good Bones.” My friend’s husband sells guns. He’s a republican. His sales boom under a democratic president, and sometimes he feels strange-weird about making money off his opposition. But people are afraid, he says, that their guns will get taken away, so they load up and up, and now that Trump is here people are pushing poems around the Internet like a salve, slathering feeds with verse as sustenance for the apocalypse. I’m getting emails about my work, they read: it’s so important right now. I think right now has always been for sale. I was always born writing poems about my skin and country. Anyone in marketing knows about fads. Sometimes when I enter a new house I wonder if they have a gun hiding under their bed, locked and cocked… when I just have a poem in my pocket or stuck in my head. Like when I’m in traffic, sometimes I say out loud: I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves. Sometimes I’ll mess up and say it again until the line rolls over my tongue like warm milk. If someone breaks into my house and wants to kill me, do it. I’ll have nothing but a stack of books by my bed that I’ve been wanting to read or am in the middle of reading or holding a gift from a friend who said you need this book right now. I thought of you when I read this book. See: when you [                       ], everything be a poem. Everything be – my life still standing – a loaded Gun. Every. Thing. Be, a deadly foe bent on my destruction. No, I can’t separate my politics from my family or my body from my body. You say you love me/You say you love me/You say you love me, then love these parts of me you didn’t vote for, and then say how much you love me again. Say it louder. Say it till you’re tired like I’m tired of forgiving and explaining myself. Sometimes, I don’t want to forgive, or explain myself. Yes, I write what I know and what I want you to know (and what I don’t know): is everything, how everything be so in right now, yes, everything might be falling apart, but the center must hold, because when you [                      ]: it has to. The center can hold—the center can hold and still sing.

Poem: http://foggedclarity.com/article/right-now/

Art: “March on Washington” by Alma Thomas (1964)

i tried for five there was an honest effort to choose only five and it lasted about eight seconds

seamus heaney, “north” (x)

marina tsvetaeva, “poems for moscow” (x)

w.h. auden, “musee des beaux arts” (x)

derek walcott, “midsummer, tobago” (x)

lewis carroll, “the walrus and the carpenter” (x)

james wright, “a blessing” (x)

alexander pushkin, “the prophet” (x)

dante alighieri, inferno

nadine sabra meyer, “invocation: a fragment” (x)

william blake, “jerusalem: the emanation of great albion” (x)

sappho, “fragment 94”

paul celan, “death-fugue” (x)

philip larkin, “bridge for the living” (x)

kim addonizio, “for you” (x)

arthur rimbaud, “barbarian” (x)

w.b. yeats, “the second coming” (x)

kay ryan, “stardust” (x)

wilfred owen, “dulce et decorum est”

geoffrey hill, “tenebrae” (x)

h.d., eideolon (book iii section vii (x))

pablo neruda, “sonnet xxxiv” (x)

emily dickinson, “i dwell in possibility” (x)

jacob shores-argeüllo, “paradise”

anon, sir gawain and the green knight

kathleen sheeder bonanno, “death barged in” (x)

john donne, “holy sonnet xiv” (x)

elizabeth bishop, “at the fish-houses” (x)

rainer maria rilke, “the boy” (x) and “lament” (x)

mahmoud darwish, “your night is of lilac” (x)

gregory orr, “trauma (storm)” (x)

frank o’hara, “having a coke with you” (x)

john milton, paradise lost (books v & ix)

anne carson, “the autobiography of red”

naomi shihab nye, “burning the old year” (x)

christopher marlowe, hero and leander

sylvia plath, “three women: a poem for three voices” (x)

anna akhmatova, “voronezh” (x)

ted hughes, “bride and groom lie hidden for three days” (x)

anon, beowulf

dylan thomas, “fern hill” (x)

margaret atwood, “sumacs” (x)

kiki petosino, “genuflect”

t.j. jarrett, “how to speak to the dead” (x)

louise glück, “landscape” (x)

jorge luis borges, “poem of the gifts” (x)

e.e. cummings, “i will wade out” (x)

sean ó coileáin, “the ruins of timoleague abbey” (x)

Okay these are the ones that made me die a little

“all people are driven to the point of eating their gods” 

“if I love you / is that a fact or a weapon?”

“the kingdom of god is within you because you ate it”

“the blood in your mouth – I wish it was mine”

“his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars”

“I am singing now while rome burns”

“that corpse you planted last year in your garden,  has it begun to sprout? will it bloom this year?”

“so the gods sank to human shape with longing”

“those imperial, disimpassion’d eyes”

“this beautiful speed will be the end of us.  those are stars in our teeth.”

“if love wants you, if you’ve been melted into stars”

“out of the ash I rise with my red hair / and I eat men like air”

“your body hurts me as the world hurts god”

“lessons on loving a prophet”

“and I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void”

“tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”

“to love a prophet is to become their desert”

—For Mammoth Cave National Park

Humongous cavern, tell me, wet limestone, sandstone caprock,      bat-wing, sightless translucent cave shrimp,

this endless plummet into more of the unknown,                            how one keeps secrets for so long.

All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,            car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through                              concrete, and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.

Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.

What’s it like to be always night? No moon, but a few lit up      circles at your many openings. Endless dark, still time must enter you. Like a train, like a green river?

Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.      To be the thing not touched by light (no that’s not it) to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.

Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body’s wants,            more praise, more hands holding the knives away.

I’ve been the one who has craved and craved until I could not            see      beyond my own greed. There’s a whole nation of us.

To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.

To you, your Frozen Niagara, your Fat Man’s Misery,            you with your 400 miles of interlocking caves that lead only to more of you, tell me,

what it is to be quiet, and yet still breathing.

           Ruler of the Underlying, let me speak to both the dead and the living as you do. Speak to the ruined earth, the stalactites, the eastern small-footed             bat,

to honor this: the length of days. To speak to the core      that creates and swallows, to speak not always to what’s shouting, but to what’s underneath asking for nothing.

After Richard Siken

Driving through Pennsylvania in autumn, I watch leaves flip in the air. Their yellow bodies

hover and float, almost motionless, above the concrete before a final collapse. Honestly,

it looks like magic or a hundred tiny Icaruses. I know none of us are going back. We can’t

undo what is already undone—a scarf unraveled, my feathers melting from

the heat of your breath. I am in awe of this season: how every room

in nature becomes a funeral. I remember you in this light—your hair haloed by gold,

your hand on my thigh, a wake of leaves around us. None of us are going back.

Winter will be served cold and alone, the way things lay in museums. Welcome

to our finest exhibit: the heart gutted, the lovers who know no springtime. 

tell me there are no gods then, no master plans for this anatomy with its mobile and evident spark

someone says “children of light” and another, “goddessfragment” and another, “chosen” / a dozen makers, myriad paths, one goal:

some scalpel, some chisel, some crazed sentimental engineer giving rib, giving eyelash, giving gut and thumb –

all mattering. all set down in a going world, vulnerable and divine

in the beginning was the word.

or before time there was a void until a voice said “I” and was

or there was star and dust, explosion and animal, mineral, us::

praise the veins that river these wrists praise the prolapsed valve in a heart praise the scars marking a gall bladder absent praise the rasp and rattle of functioning lungs praise the pre-arthritic ache of elbows and ankles praise the lifeline sectioning a palm praise the photographic pads of fingertips praise the vulnerable dip at the base of a throat praise the muscles surfacing on an abdomen praise these arms that carry babies and anthologies praise the leg hairs that sprout and are shaved praise the ass that refuses to shrink or be hidden praise the cunt that bleeds and accepts, bleeds and accepts praise the prominent ridge of nose praise the strange convexity of ribcage praise the single hair that insists on growing from a right areola praise the dent where the mole was clipped from the back of a neck praise these inner thighs brushing praise these eyelashes that sometimes turn inward praise these hips preparing to spread into a grandmother’s skirt praise the beauty of the freckle on the first knuckle of a left little finger

we’re gone / in a blizzard of seconds love the body human while we’re here, a gift of minutes on an evolving planet, a country in flux / give thanks

what we take for granted, bone and dirt and the million things that will kill us someday, motion and the pursuit of happiness / no guarantees / give thanks

for chaos theory, ecology, common sense that says we are web. a planet in balance or out, the butterfly in tokyo setting off thunderstorms in iowa, tell me you don’t matter to a universe that conspired to give you such a tongue, such rhythm or rhythmless hips, such opposable thumbs – give thanks or go home a waste of spark

speak or let the maker take back your throat march or let the creator rescind your feet dream or let your god destroy your good and fertile mind