Anne Carson Fan Club

Ada Limon - What it Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use

by Mark Doty

Maggie’s taking care of a man who’s dying; he’s attended to everything, said goodbye to his parents,

paid off his credit card. She says Why don’t you just run it up to the limit?

but he wants everything squared away, no balance owed, though he misses the pets

he’s already found a home for — he can’t be around dogs or cats, too much risk. He says,

I can’t have anything. She says, A bowl of goldfish? He says he doesn’t want to start

with anything and then describes the kind he’d maybe like, how their tails would fan

to a gold flaring. They talk about hot jewel tones, gold lacquer, say maybe

they’ll go pick some out though he can’t go much of anywhere and then abruptly he says I can’t love

anything I can’t finish. He says it like he’s had enough of the whole scintillant world,

though what he means is he’ll never be satisfied and therefore has established this discipline,

a kind of severe rehearsal. That’s where they leave it, him looking out the window,

her knitting as she does because she needs to do something. Later he leaves a message:

Yes to the bowl of goldfish. Meaning: let me go, if I have to, in brilliance. In a story I read,

a Zen master who’d perfected his detachment from the things of the world remembered, at the moment of dying,

a deer he used to feed in the park, and wondered who might care for it, and at that instant was reborn

in the stunned flesh of a fawn. So, Maggie’s friend — Is he going out

Into the last loved object Of his attention? Fanning the veined translucence

Of an opulent tail, Undulant in some uncapturable curve Is he bronze chrysanthemums,

Jane Mead

Jesus, I am cruelly lonely

and I do not know what I have done

nor do I suspect that you will answer me.

And, what is more, I have spent

these bare months bargaining

with my soul as if I could make her

promise to love me when now it seems

that what I meant when I said "soul"

was that the river reflects

the railway bridge just as the sky

says it should—it speaks that language.

I do not know who you are.

I come here every day

to be beneath this bridge,

to sit beside this river,

so I must have seen the way

the clouds just slide

under the rusty arch—

without snagging on the bolts,

how they are borne along on the dark water—

I must have noticed their fluent speed

and also how that tattered blue T-shirt

remains snagged on the crown

of the mostly sunk dead tree

despite the current's constant pulling.

Yes, somewhere in my mind there must

be the image of a sky blue T-shirt, caught,

and the white islands of ice flying by

and the light clouds flying slowly

under the bridge, though today the river's

fully melted. I must have seen.

But I did not see.

I am not equal to my longing.

Somewhere there should be a place

the exact shape of my emptiness—

there should be a place

responsible for taking one back

The river, of course, has no mercy—

it just lifts the dead fish

toward the sea.

Of course, of course.

What I meant when I said "soul"

was that there should be a place.

On the far bank the warehouse lights

blink red, then green, and all the yellow

machines with their rusted scoops and lifts

sit under a thin layer of sunny frost.

And look—

my own palm—

there, slowly rocking.

It is my pale palm—

palm where a black pebble

is turning and turning.

Listen—

all you bare trees

burrs

brambles

pile of twigs

red and green lights flashing

muddy bottle shards

shoe half buried—listen