"Correspondence deserving of a wider audience."
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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Excerpt from “To A Sad Daughter,”
by Michael Ondaatje
One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
—all those possible worlds!—
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.
I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.
If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon’s
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.
One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
—all those possible worlds!—
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.
I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.
If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon’s
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
For Grace, After a Party
by Frank O'Hara
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
The Oregon Trail is undergoing photosynthesis
by Gregory Sherl
I want to write a sad poem but I’m not sad.
I am less than sad. Negative sad. I am looped
television laughter. I move through the trail
cloaked in bath water & the water never gets cold.
I shouldn’t be sad or sleep all day, I should lie
under the floorboards of our wagon, tell the spiders
to mind their distance, just swallow the poison.
i want to wrestle the bear that haunts your dreams
& eats our children. They are beautiful children,
in their hiking boots, climbing hills like they’ve
done this before, like they know why we sleep
on top of each other, so preious all of us humming
last spring. I want to lust for lust & your tongue
over my shoulder blades, but all I can think about
is building a snowman with your face on its white
frame. Your teeth look the best when you’re naked.
I close my eyes, count to ten thousand. I close my
eyes & forget why I closed my eyes. On the trail
everything smells green. You tell me I always want
to smell naked. A thief comes in the middle of the night,
leaves wild fruit, a note that says he found God
in a Wal-Mart parking lot. When we’re older I’ll lock
the front door of our house so tight the calcium
in our bones won’t be able to get out.
I want to write a sad poem but I’m not sad.
I am less than sad. Negative sad. I am looped
television laughter. I move through the trail
cloaked in bath water & the water never gets cold.
I shouldn’t be sad or sleep all day, I should lie
under the floorboards of our wagon, tell the spiders
to mind their distance, just swallow the poison.
i want to wrestle the bear that haunts your dreams
& eats our children. They are beautiful children,
in their hiking boots, climbing hills like they’ve
done this before, like they know why we sleep
on top of each other, so preious all of us humming
last spring. I want to lust for lust & your tongue
over my shoulder blades, but all I can think about
is building a snowman with your face on its white
frame. Your teeth look the best when you’re naked.
I close my eyes, count to ten thousand. I close my
eyes & forget why I closed my eyes. On the trail
everything smells green. You tell me I always want
to smell naked. A thief comes in the middle of the night,
leaves wild fruit, a note that says he found God
in a Wal-Mart parking lot. When we’re older I’ll lock
the front door of our house so tight the calcium
in our bones won’t be able to get out.
The Heat of Autumn
by Jane Hirshfield
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
A Story About The Body
by Stephen Dunn
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a panter, almost sixty,
and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her
work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked
at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his
questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her
door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have
me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double
mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my
breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest
cavity — like music — withered very quickly, and he made himself look
at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back
to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small
blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose
petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on
top; the rest of the bowl— she must have swept them from the corners
of her studio — was full of dead bees.
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a panter, almost sixty,
and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her
work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked
at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his
questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her
door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have
me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double
mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my
breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest
cavity — like music — withered very quickly, and he made himself look
at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back
to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small
blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose
petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on
top; the rest of the bowl— she must have swept them from the corners
of her studio — was full of dead bees.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Rival
by Sylvia Plath
if the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
you leave the same impression
of something beautiful, but annihilating.
both of you are great light borrowers.
her o-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected.
and your first gift is making stone out of everything.
i wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
and dying to say something unanswerable.
the moon, too, abases her subjects,
but in the daytime she is ridiculous.
your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
no day is safe from news of you,
walking about in africa maybe, but thinking of me.
if the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
you leave the same impression
of something beautiful, but annihilating.
both of you are great light borrowers.
her o-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected.
and your first gift is making stone out of everything.
i wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
and dying to say something unanswerable.
the moon, too, abases her subjects,
but in the daytime she is ridiculous.
your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
no day is safe from news of you,
walking about in africa maybe, but thinking of me.
Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
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