Pagination Poetry

Capta

I will not ask again if you prefer me

slumped in silver stamp of date palm’s shadow,

Rome at my back, my grief bowed to its chains.

The broken sibyl mourns her shattered laws,

her children fighting doomed and rag-shod

or dissolving, quick as candles, to the wind of history.

You like my face in that half-blistered filmstrip,

that canceled passport, that marble weathered gold.

I will not ask—I know—you never saw me

standing beneath the emperor’s brother’s triumph

whose pride, bold in lost bronze, mine outlived.

I walked dry bricks of baths and theaters, singing

that jargon of poets and partisans, desert

diaspora. Here I still am, no memorial.

I live on the other riverbank.

I take the trains.

several sizes too big. It hung on me like a mother’s dress. Even now,

as we speak, I am stitching a darkness you’ll need to unravel,

unraveling another you’ll need to restitch. What can I give you

that you can keep? Once you asked, Does the sky stop? It doesn’t stop,

it just stops being one thing and starts being another.

Sometimes we hold hands and tip our heads way back

so the blue fills our whole field of vision, so we feel like

we’re in it. We don’t stop, we just stop being what we are

and start being what? Where? What can I give you

to carry there? These shadows of leaves—the lace in solace?

This soft, hand-me-down darkness? What can I give you

that will be of use in your next life, the one you will live without me?

by Langston Hughes

by Leonard Cohen

As the mist leaves no scar On the dark green hill, So my body leaves no scar On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawk encounter, What remains to keep? So you and I encounter, Then turn, then fall to sleep.

and no, she won't ever curl up sweetly on my lap

but she stretches out her leggies real far and puts her perfect feet on my leg and would stay there all day if I let her

and this is also love

“Boss made a dollar Granddad made a dime But that was a poem From a simpler time.

Boss made a thousand Gave pa a cent But that penny paid the mortgage Or at least it paid the rent

The granite spoke of ages in the heat of deep Earth.

The moss sang the taste of sunlight and the softness of salamander bellies.

They named one another. And told those names to no one at all.