poems

Charles Wright

—I think of Issa, a man of few words: The world of dew Is the world of dew. And yet . . . And yet . . .

—Three words contain                                                    all that we know for sure of the next life Or the last one: Close your eyes. Everything else is gossip,                                                       false mirrors, trick windows Flashing like Dutch glass In the undiminishable sun.

—I write it down in visible ink, Black words that disappear when held up to the light— I write it down                                     not to remember but to forget, Words like thousands of pieces of shot film                                                                                   exposed to the sun. I never see anything but the ground.

—Everyone wants to tell his story. The Chinese say we live in the world of the ten thousand things, Each of the ten thousand things                                                                  crying out to us Precisely nothing, A silence whose tune we’ve come to understand, Words like birthmarks,                                                  embolic sunsets drying behind the tongue. If we were as eloquent, If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood does, Its votive candles                                           phosphorous and articulate in the green haze Of spring, surely something would hear us.

—Even a chip of beauty                                                     is beauty intractable in the mind, Words the color of wind Moving across the fields there                                                               wind-addled and wind-sprung, Abstracted as water glints, The fields lion-colored and rope-colored, As in a picture of Paradise,                                                          the bodies languishing over the sky Trailing their dark identities That drift off and sieve away to the nothingness Behind them                                   moving across the fields there As words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.

—Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghosts Along the way,                                       their destinations bereft In a rub of brightness unending: How distant everything always is,                                                                     and yet how close, Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees.

—Birds sing an atonal row                                                           unsyncopated From tree to tree,                                           dew chants Whose songs have no words                                                              from tree to tree When night puts her dark lens in, One on this limb, two others back there.

—Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude. They start here, they finish here No matter how high they rise—                                                                  my judgment is that I know this And never love anything hard enough That would stamp me                                                  and sink me suddenly into bliss.

John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Ashbery

A little girl with scarlet enameled fingernails Asks me what time it is—evidently that's a toy wristwatch She's wearing, for fun.  And it is fun to wear other Odd things, like this briar pipe and tweed coat

Like date-colored sierras with the lines of seams Sketched in and plunging now and then into unfathomable Valleys that can't be deduced by the shape of the person Sitting inside it—me, and just as our way is flat across Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil

Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps We both come to see distance as something unofficial And impersonal yet not without its curious justification Like the time of a stopped watch—right twice a day.

Only the wait in stations is vague and Dimensionless, like oneself.  How do they decide how much Time to spend in each?  One beings to suspect there's no Rule or that it's applied haphazardly.

Sadness of the faces of children on the platform, Concern of the grownups for connections, for the chances Of getting a taxi, since these have no timetable. You get one if you can find one though in principle

You can always find one, but the segment of chance In the circle of certainty is what gives these leaning Tower of Pisa figures their aspect of dogged Impatience, banking forward into the wind.

In short any stop before the final one creates Clouds of anxiety, of sad, regretful impatience With ourselves, our lives, the way we have been dealing With other people up until now.  Why couldn't We have been more considerate?  These figures leaving

The platform or waiting to board the train are my brothers In a way that really wants to tell me whey there is so little Panic and disorder in the world, and so much unhappiness. If I were to get down now to stretch, take a few steps

In the wearying and world-weary clouds of steam like great White apples, might I just through proximity and aping Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine To them?  That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,

That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions of home?

It's as though a visible chorus called up the different Stages of the journey, singing about them and being them: Not the people in the station, not the child opposite me With currant fingernails, but the windows, seen through,

Reflecting imperfectly, ruthlessly splitting open the bluish Vague landscape like a zipper.  Each voice has its own Descending scale to put one in one's place at every stage; One need never not know where one is

Unless one give up listening, sleeping, approaching a small Western town that is nothing but a windmill.  Then The great fury of the end can drop as the solo Voices tell about it, wreathing it somehow with an aura

Charles Wright

Three years ago, in the afternoons,                                             I used to sit back here and try To answer the simple arithmetic of my life, But never could figure it— This object and that object Never contained the landscape                                                           nor all of its implications, This tree and that shrub Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient I took from or carried to,                                                nor do they do so now, Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate, Looking to see what adds up.

Kaveh Akbar

Charles Wright

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back.    No one believes in his own life anymore.

The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs.

In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings.    They sing songs, and their fingers blear.

And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot    And belladonna insist on our comforting, Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more,

Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. Moon-fingers lay down their same routine On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.    I want to be entered and picked clean.

Charles Wright

Charles Wright

Amanda Nadelberg

A light bulb clad as language hell bent towards sentences a shape returning, the community  cheering for someone’s descent  I witnessed people reclining in a meadow.

Have you ever given yourself a haircut? I am able to change the poem because it’s mine. You are not here when I write it.  You are there, waiting for nothing  you don’t need to be said.

Delayed, I dressed to go outside to find myself.  Here I am an idea. I could be you  if you remember what it means  to speak to one another. Thinking as  ordinary means, thinking isn’t a poem.  (The poem is not you.) To reset  the elision of time, friends  in the flatbed, searing. 

Amanda Nadelberg

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

As of October 2024, 658 anti-trans bills were under consideration across the United States, seeking to deny trans people access to basic healthcare, education, safety, legal recognition, and the right to exist (see translegislation.com).

I: My beloved is called an inconceivable beast, a spectacle diagnosed with teratoid genitalia, a chaos of pronouns, a body breaking the rules. Hair & suture & unexpected timbre, outside the map. My beloved is first in the firing line. In the active shooter drill, given no refuge. We are expunged from curricula, disallowed the toilet’s relief. Fascistic tendencies festering. National evangelism of binaries taken as daily bread. A congressman in Florida jokes about putting us all to death, a pastor in Texas gives Sunday Sermon saying every gay person in America should be executed—lined up & shot in the head. The Supreme Court stuffs its mouth with theories of religion. Police steel our kin down to concrete & coffin. A brass & parabellum cessation of breath. Interlude: It is telling that Western science has a term for animal behavior called “deceptive sex signaling.” (See marsh harriers & hummingbirds, for example.) All malleability a criminal betrayal for panic defense. No opera for perpetual metamorphosis.

II: Neither Man, nor Woman, I am water & shorebird. Over tea, we ask the hard questions. How to reach beyond this periphery. Reverse the enclosures of mind. All bodies in theatre. All theatre, life.

III: My beloved says we are cosmic faggots, making new & better pleasures. Generations of illegible & exquisite. Extending possibility to the youngers. We are years of chrysalides, wild longings & wing. Among the immortelles: again, then again, & again. My beloved wields the syringe, a chemical & intramuscular intimacy. I kiss his pectoral scars, lick the summer beaded up in his clavicle. He carries me to the bedroom where we make an ambient weather, hold each other to the bone. My beloved suffocates in the bind. Passing: a difficult joy & sorrow. In the laboratory of our bodies, experiment cobbles glimpses of freedom. We tape our chests, we punk & drag. Leave norms in the gutter. Herald us a wreckage of genders. Name ourselves extraordinary monsters.

I take inventory in the holy hours & find:             we are a transgression everywhere, beautiful & alive.

Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,    Metropolitan poetry here and there,    In the park sit pauper and rentier,    The screaming children, the motor-car    Fugitive about us, running away,    Between the worker and the millionaire    Number provides all distances,    It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,    Many great dears are taken away,    What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...)    Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)    What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suffer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days    Restored all life from infancy, The children shouting are bright as they run    (This is the school in which they learn ...)    Ravished entirely in their passing play! (... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years,    But what they were then?                                      No more? No more? From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,    Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume Not where they are now (where are they now?)    But what they were then, both beautiful;

Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then, As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things), A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

John Ashbery

Anne Carson