After the Flood, We

We must be the only ones
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods

I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)

gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.

You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,

tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,

not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.





-Margaret Atwood

The Woodpecker Pecks, But the Hole Does Not Appear

It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that welve done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.

This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow-and-dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.

Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.




Charles Wright

Horace

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Horace

The Fragility of Heavy Machinery

They don't love
what live things do, not the blue drain
of veins, not the swell of lungs, certainly not

the slide of balls
in sockets, that slick
organic superiority. All this time,

they've been eyeing our particular kind
of flexibility as they go on drilling
and driving piles, wondering

at our lack of sensitivity. Look at the belly
of a jet sometime and see how thin,
how far, the skin's

been stretched, look at a crane's
bent arm, hold in your hand the cripple
of a stripped screw. None of these things

know what to do. No matter what they say, banging
their anger, sighing with that high whine, shrieking
fatigue, all we hear

is noise, all we see is something
serving. The occasional accident we put down
to human error, while all the while

they stare back smiling
from the wreckage, knowing
what we made them for.


— Caroline Fraser

Gull Skeleton

In the first verse I find his skeleton
nested in shore grass, late one autumn day.
The loss of life and the life which is decay
have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one

that what they left is perfect; and here in
the second verse I kneel to pick it up:
bones like the fine white china of a cup,
chambered for lightness, dangerously thin,

their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight
even now, from the warm solace of my hand.
In the third verse I bend to that demand
and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,

because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,
his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,
his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep
climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.


-Jonathan Revere

or any year, really

1999

It was a year in which sadness fulfilled the Socialist ideal
and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage.
The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked

a local representative, and friends came over
in all their casualty with pictures of sadness
in billfolds beside their babes.

Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket,
and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth
to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel,

the wall grieved down my thighs and still
born in the drench -- after such sadness
what resolution? -- the beginning.


Christina Davis

Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and slight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence






-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

hope

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.


Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baldwin

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

James Baldwin

shaw

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

-George Bernard Shaw

Intermission

They're feeding each other, two small birds
swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks
kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each
other's needs without question, drawing
the big world into their brief circle
of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
as if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
the path between desire and satisfaction
shorter than thought, the ground dividing
being from being—one flesh-protected
spark of life from another—covered
in no time, so even time, for the moment,
is a matter of no moment, smoke that
vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave
but a flaring thing behind—candescent,
burning its one good instant till all is ash,
redemptive breath recovering itself,
eyes seeking in eyes an answer
to what's happened. The fire at the heart
of things is what these two birds ignite
in their give and take, saying we live
in the one world—where some law of
loving exchange is what tends the blaze
and can startle us into a kind of intermission
of peace between two clamorous cliff-
crumbling waves that rear break roar and
rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
the air we stand in with a surf-storm of
salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.




Eamon Grennan

Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters,
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing; continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.


-Howard Nemerov