Winter Happiness

 

Jack Gilbert 
 

ur, one billion years later

 Kristin Lueke

Poverty Mountain

Hannah Brooks-Motl 

The false explanation of time

Michael March

Η απατηλή ερμηνεία του χρόνου

The false explanation of time

The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

James Wright 

To my Daughter

TO MY DAUGHTER

Give me another life, and I’ll be singing
in Caffè Rafaella. Or simply sitting
there. Or standing there, as furniture in the corner,
in case that life is a bit less generous than the former.

Yet partly because no century from now on will ever manage
without caffeine or jazz. I’ll sustain this damage,
and through my cracks and pores, varnish and dust all over,
observe you, in twenty years, in your full flower.

On the whole, bear in mind that I’ll be around. Or rather,
that an inanimate object might be your father,
especially if the objects are older than you, or larger.
So keep an eye on them always, for they no doubt will judge you.

Love those things anyway, encounter or no encounter.
Besides, you may still remember a silhouette, a contour,
while I’ll lose even that, along with the other luggage.
Hence, these somewhat wooden lines in our common language.

Joseph Brodsky

So Forth (1984)

High on Laughing gas

High on Laughing gas
I’ve been here before
The odd vibration of the same old universe 

The nasal whine of the dentist’s drill Singing against the nostalgic
Piano Muzak in the wall
Insistent, familiar, penetrating 

The teeth, where’ve I heard that Asshole jazz before? 

It’s the instant of going
Into or coming out of existence that is Important – to catch on
To the secret of the magic
Box
Stepping outside the universe
By means of Nitrous Oxide Anaesthetising mind-conscious
The chiliasm was an impersonal dream – One of many, being mere dreams 

The sadness of birth
And death, the sadness of Changing from dream to dream The constant farewell
Of forms ...
Saying ungoodby to what Didn’t exist 

The many worlds that don’t exist All which seem real
All joke
All lost cartoon 

Allen Ginsberg, 1963

Phoenix Song

then I shall never grow up

not if child means a sense of wonder

and my head in the wind rain rain

I will not wither in the blaze of time

but prove myself a phoenix

(ashes like powdered stars)

born again and again and again

Lenore Kandel

I won't be able to write from the grave

 Fanny Howe 

Goodtime Jesus

 James Tate

Sea Chanty

My mother hates the sea 

my sea especially 

I warned her not to

it was all I could do

Two years later 

the sea ate her

Upon the shore, I found a strange

yet beautiful food

I asked the sea if I could eat it 

and the sea said that I could 

Oh, sea, what fish is this

so tender and so sweet?

Thy mother's feet

Gregory Corso

And If I Fall

There’s this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same
thing as making, and as if making might
bring it back, somehow, the real
cathedral. In anger, as in desire, it was
everything, that cathedral. As if my body
itself cathedral. I conduct my body
with a cathedral’s steadiness, I
try to. I cathedral. In desire. In anger.
Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.
Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.

Carl Phillips 

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

Lisel Mueller, 1996

Choose Something Like a Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to the wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Robert Frost, 1916

The Dissolving Fabric

He who has his own wound

cannot speak of it.

Nor is there any geography which

takes cognizance of it.

To know and then to heal

that is the rule.

But discipline is not sufficient

despite our speculations.

And there is no one, not the god

who understood it.

And the fact is that she withdrew it,

the fact is that she owned it.

She possesed her own life, and took it.

Paul Blackburn, 1955

Archaic Fragment

I was trying to love matter. 

I taped a sign over the mirror: 

You cannot hate matter and love form. 

It was a beautiful day, though cold. 

This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture. 

.......your poem: 

tried, but could not. 

I taped a sign over the first sign: 

Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments— 

List of things to love: 

dirt, food, shells, human hair. 

....... said 

tasteless excess. Then I 

rent the signs. 

AIAIAIAI cried 

the naked mirror. 

Louise Glück 

Small Song

A. R. Ammons

echo

 

echo 


In the way it was in the street 


it was in the back it was 
in the house it was in the room 
it was in the dark it was 

 

Robert Creeley

Chaplinesque

 

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

 

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

 

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

 

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

 

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

 

 Halt Crane, 1933

The Ring

The Ring

 

I am learning to speak, again.
Astral, spectral, half-in-dream.
I make my way through the jig-
saw of a cruel and perfect grammar.
Or, just barely. And I have stopped
making work that can’t disappear.
But the music is too much for me. I can take it
but only in minute and fixed increments.
Baby food in a spoon, measured in bite-fulls, 
or a capsule I swallow only in daylight, 
mid-day after classes. I take it, a sweet 
obscene ointment, cosmetic, or
medicine. The most nourishing.
delicate gold capsule of infinite
emollient and sorrow, I swallow
the power and it enters me.
Like ink spilling, or voracious,
an appetite, and all-consuming.
A memory or a snapshot, its flash-light, 
illuminating, it takes me, and then
it erases everything.

 

Cynthia Cruz