Fragment

The glass does not break because it is glass,
Said the philosopher. The glass could stay
Unbroken forever, shoved back in a dark closet,
Slowly weeping itself, a colorless liquid.
The glass breaks because somebody drops it
From a height — a grip stunned open by bad news
Or laughter. A giddy sweep of grand gesture
Or fluttering nerves might knock it off the table —
Or perhaps wine emptied from it, into the blood,
Has numbed the fingers. It breaks because it falls
Into the arms of the earth — that grave attraction.
It breaks because it meets the floor's surface,
Which is solid and does not give. It breaks because
It is dropped, and falls hard, because it hits
Bottom, and because nobody catches it.

A. E. Stallings

Archipelago

This happens in Schubert
And elsewhere,

Iowa, for example.
There is something incomplete that lingers,

Trails off
And a pause —

That lengthens
And goes on — and on.

Strand by strand,
The rope breaks.

The fingertips cannot remember
The last thing they touched.

The boat pulls away from the dock —
The old confusion

Between forgetting and loss.
Then a series of notes played more slowly,

Softer,
Echoing — remotely, precisely —

The previous phrase,
Almost a melody,

On the edge —
A very slow waterfall

Suggesting completeness,
Gifts

Exchanged
In the interstices of the stars.


Robert Rehder

untitled

I step outside
myself, out of my eyes,
hands, mouth, outside
of myself I
step, a bundle
of goodness and godliness
that must make good
this devilry
that has happened.


Ingeborg Bachmann

A Man May Change

As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap
escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water
is how a man may change
and still hour by hour continue in his job.
There in the mirror he appears to be on fire
but here at the office he is dust.
So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains,
he stands easily on the pavement
and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one
cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others,
and life stands on the brink. It rains
or it doesn't, or it rains and it rains again.
But let it go on raining for forty days and nights
or let the sun bake the ground for as long,
and it isn't life, just life, anymore, it's living.
In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days,
it sometimes happens that a man has changed
so slowly that he slips away
before anyone notices
and lives and dies before anyone can find out.



Marvin Bell

A Woman Acquainted with the Night

My wife is not afraid of dark.
She uses lights like handholds,
climbing down caverns she accepts as found.
She is as comfortable as blossoms

when the sun goes down.
Forests we've camped in at night
are forests, to her, clear-eyed,
seeing no visions she can't

blink away. In sudden dark,
she goes on mending clothes by feel
while I sweat and rage
to make the spare fuse fit.

When she was six a fat man
digging a storm cellar
shut her and a friend inside,
stood on the black steel door

and stomped like thunder.
Frozen, too frightened to reach
for Becky screaming in her ears,
she felt nothing could ever

be that dark again. In time
the door clanged open and light
baptized her with perhaps
too deep a trust in saviors.

She lies down now in darkness
with no human hand but mine
to cling to, nothing but faith
in the moment to let her sleep.

When storms short out
the relay stations, she knows
how to touch me, how to make
romance of failure,

knows like blind friends
how many steps to the candles
so if our children wake and cry
for light, there will be light.

Walter McDonald
The Flying Dutchman (George Elliston poetry prize)

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

How Some of it Happened

My brother was aftraid, even as a boy, of going blind--so deeply
that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him,

he said, as they lay on the kitchen table.
He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door

from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle
of the night when everyone was sleeping.

We found the pile of sharp shining crystals in the upstairs hall.
So you understand, it was terrible

when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through
his cheek
and up into his eye from underneath

and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out
once a week for many weeks. He learned to, lean into it,

to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated,
breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue

and wide open, looked and looked at the clock.

My brother promised me he wouldn't die after our father died.
He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me
five years,

as clearly as he promised he'd be home for breakfast when I watched him
walk into that New York City autumn night. By nine, I promise,

and he was--he did come back. And five years later he promised five
years more.
So much for the brave pride of premonition,

the worry that won't let it happen.
You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober

and I thought, OK, I'm not. I'm going to see thirty and live to be an old
man.
And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn't that funny?

--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

This is what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed
so I can see you.


Marie Howe

After

Where I am going now
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.


Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job


it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.


It is to be the beam of morning in the room,


the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.


The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.


The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.


No one,
and the father of no one.


Franz Wright

Epilogue

Those blesséd structures, plot and rhyme --
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.


Robert Lowell

Ice Fishing

For hours at this hole in the ice
the boy pretended to be the last person alive,
left with the task of testing the world's depths,
pulling up line, measuring by arm's lengths.
He'd feel the little tug
of the metal weight and then all the lovely looseness
of the line. This morning he'd heard his mother breaking dishes,
his father sobbing with anger again,
crying out, "For God's sake,
for God's sake, Kay."
He thought if he just tried hard enough,
did one thing well,
he might fix things, he'd bring home a fish
just as if he were a normal kid in a normal family,
and his mother would be so pleased, she'd get dressed,
and the kitchen would fill with tarragon and butter
and fish sizzling, that luxurious oily smell,
and his father would open the windows at last,
and the winter air, sharp and clean,
would cut through the grease
of too much happiness.


Christopher Bursk

Tell Me Why This Hurry

Edit
Tell Me Why This Hurry
by Marta Kvande on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:40am

The lindens are blossoming the lindens have lost their blossoms
and this flowery procession moves without any restraint
Where are you hurrying lilies of the valley jasmines
petunias lilacs irises roses and peonies
Mondays and Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays
nasturtiums and gladioli zinnias and lobelias
yarrow dill goldenrod and grasses
flowery Mays and Junes and Julys and Augusts
lakes of flowers seas of flowers meadows
holy fires of fern one-day grails
Tell me why this hurry where are you rushing
in a cherry blizzard a deluge of greenness
all with the wind racing in one direction only
crowns proud yesterday today fallen into sand
eternal desires passions mistresses of destruction


Julia Hartwig

sonnet

Edit
sonnet
by Marta Kvande on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:39am

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
and look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee -- and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The Well Dressed Man with a Beard

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.


Wallace Stevens

untitled

As if death was an island:
anyone could go there, on a slow
ferry crowded with eyes
and disembark at villages
distilled to whitewash and cypress.
As if you memorised
the first cicadas
and listened through eternity for change:
the buttermilk coin
melting beneath your tongue;
the same crows wheeling in a wide
hoop; a distant voice
calling your name, worn smooth by constant use,
a word you should, but do not, recognise.


John Burnside
Selected Poems (Cape Poetry)

The Too Late Poem

Nothing in the room can go back.
The ashes couldn’t be paper again,
the paper couldn’t return to its parental linen rags.
That arrow doesn’t reverse: the linen
could never again be a possibility
waiting, alive, inside the field of flax.
Whatever’s recently happened
in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem,
but we know this: its people can’t go back
to who they were before. And the light,
here, now, or any light as the day goes forward,
yours, or mine ... it can’t regain its first existence,
at the start of things: an innocence.
For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit.

__________________

She’s left the room. He stays in the bed,
below the covers, and when she exits the house
—the door is audible—he curls up, bean of sadness
that he is. Her travel is greedy, it needs the miles (by now
she’s past the city limits). His is weaker, but ambitious,
if by fetal position we mean a desire to travel
the whole life-corridor back to its insular source.
I’m sorry, but we can’t: nor can the photons of the cosmos
do a U-turn and reconstitute the Original Field of Energy
the size of a barnyard egg. They’re going to scatter outward
over the edge of zero. Barnyard egg ... he remembers
his grandparents’ small, hand-labor farm ... the horror when he first saw
a decapitated chicken running crazy in the grit, to flee
the fate that had already happened.


Albert Goldbarth