Utopia

When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I
know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the
woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds
of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child
thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair
has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word,
she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language
like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.

Louise Gluck

Desire

Let's just say I seem to be enjoying these three chicken drumsticks
far more than the young man doing sit-ups just across the lawn

beside his girlfriend here at the Jardin de Reuilly is enjoying himself:
after all, he's huffing and puffing, and I'm sitting here, devouring

my chicken, basking in the spring sun, but now he's rolling over,
it's push-ups he's doing, push-ups right on top of his girlfriend,

and the push-ups are getting slower and slower, just as my chicken
is disappearing, and, before long, the push-ups stop altogether, he's

merely lying there on top of her, and he seems, even from a distance,
much happier than when he was doing push-ups, then he suddenly

sits up, looks up at the heavens, and stares (with an expression
of pure longing) over at me. Oh, he seems to be saying,

I sure wish I had some chicken.

Michael Blumenthal

Untitled

I thought, when I was twenty, that when I turned 
fifty, I'd be immune to love's vicissitudes, 
and here I am at fifty, indoors, peeling the skin
of a beet, my fingers bloody seeming, and I'm
watching you outside with our grown daughter,
her back's to me, she could be me, something 
about how she leans forward from her shoulders. 
All those years ago, what was it we argued about
so fiercely I crossed the Michigan Avenue bridge,
the Wrigley Building white and tranquil behind us,
but we couldn't let it go, couldn't walk away, we 
hollered across the traffic. Even now I can feel 
my spine lengthen, my shoulders square back, 
a little ferocity hardening me. I finish the beets 
and lean toward the screen, as if to hear what you 
and she say to one another, how you work it out.

Athena Kildegaard

My Life Before I Knew It

I liked rainy days
when you didn't have to go outside and play.
At night I'd tell my sister
there were snakes under her bed.
When I mowed the lawn I imagined being famous.
Cautious and stubborn, unwilling to fail,
I knew for certain what I didn't want to know.

I hated to dance. I hated baseball,
and collected airplane cards instead.
I learned to laugh at jokes I didn't get.
The death of Christ moved me,
but only at the end of Ben Hur.
I thought Henry Mancini was a great composer.

My secret desire was to own a collie
who would walk with me in the woods
when the leaves were falling
and I was thinking about writing the stories
that would make me famous.

Sullen, overweight, melancholy,
writers didn't have to be good at sports.
They stayed inside for long periods of time.
They often wore glasses. But strangers
were moved by what they accomplished
and wrote them letters. One day

one of those strangers would introduce
herself to me, and then
the life I'd never been able to foresee
would begin, and everything
before I became myself would appear
necessary to the rest of the story.

Lawrence Raab

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer—
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

The Hill

I have come this far on my own legs,
missing the bus, missing taxis,
climbing always. One foot in front of the other,
that is the way I do it.

It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on.
Grass beside the road, a tree rattling
its black leaves. So what?
The longer I walk, the farther I am from everything.

One foot in front of the other. The hours pass.
One foot in front of the other. The years pass.
The colors of arrival fade.
That is the way I do it.

Mark Strand

Negative Space

My dad taught me to pack: lay out everything. Put back half. Roll things
that roll. Wrinkle-prone things on top of cotton things. Then pants, waist-
to-hem. Nooks and crannies for socks. Belts around the sides like snakes.
Plastic over that. Add shoes. Wear heavy stuff on the plane.
   We started when I was little. I'd roll up socks. Then he'd pretend to put me
in the suitcase, and we'd laugh. Some guys bond with their dads shooting
hoops or talking about Chevrolets. We did it over luggage.
   By the time I was twelve, if he was busy, I'd pack for him. Mom tried
but didn't have the knack. He'd get somewhere, open his suitcase and text
me—"Perfect." That one word from him meant a lot.
   The funeral was terrible—him laid out in that big carton and me crying
and thinking, Look at all that wasted space.

Ron Koertge

Late September

The leaves grow lighter and lighter,
yet they fall. As the woods thin
a house becomes visible,
and a plume of smoke hand-feeding the wind.
There's no hurry if you don't care.
For thirty years nothing knew paint,
but the house still stands.
What is dust, that we should mark
if it fills our empty boots while we sleep?

Children love you at first the way a dog does.
But eventually they will reveal
the history of your offenses
in high voices that carry across the pond.
Day opens and closes like a camera shutter,
mechanically, with more haste than necessary.
The cat lays a chipmunk at the back step.
I think of its burrow, of all it hoarded,
and of nine consecutive lives without remorse.

Connie Wanek

Reading Anna Karenina

In middle age Tolstoy apprenticed himself
to a bootmaker. He labored at learning
the skills of that trade. Sometimes his fingers
bled onto the leather as he punched the awl
or drew the needle in the outline of a foot.
Blisters, he knew, are holier than ink stains.
The boots were ugly and they pinched,
Sonya complained, and she refused to wear them.
Yet she copied Karenina by hand
how many times? It was his words she loved,
how he formed souls out of air. Just breath.
She preferred the page's purity to his
restless hands. If he were a man made only
of words she'd give her whole self to him.

Karina Borowicz

I never liked to run,
I still don't think I do yet I do it anyway.
You see, it's a lot like being with you.
I look forward to it
yet when I'm there
I sweat and sweat my fears away,
pants and groans escape my lips
and all it takes is one more minute,
one more step
until I can slow down again.

I leave the machine
and the machine may be you,
sweaty and broken,
a little bit bruised, ego wise,
not so much physically.
You see, you and me,
we belong in a love story
but not the ones that they tell in the movies.
No,
ours is much more realistic,
much more pragmatic,
we are both old and ugly
yet your body is fantastic.

So love me today,
love me tonight,
love me after I go for a run,
love me before I even think the thought of you
loving me in the morning sun.
I look forward to seeing you,
post run, pre shower,
post shower, pre run.
Running is definitely a lot like
being with you.

I read your letter today,
once, twice, thrice?
How many lifetimes have I read your letter through?
I read it in the burning sun
and in the icy waters of the Pacific,
I read it among the cool breezes
and grazing sheep,
among the cliffs of Dover.
I read your letter today
and it made me cry.
I had forgotten what tears of happiness were.
I had forgotten how much love you had for me.
I still remember your last prayer for me,
I still remember how you wished
that one day I would be loved unconditionally.
I heard all the words you never said.
I felt all the dreams you never dreamt
that and day and forever onwards.
Now all I have left is your letter,
my friend, my brother,
and I will recall those times we prayed
and ate cake.
Your kind eyes were a little bit sharper towards me.
I know you loved who I was
and I know you won't love who I am now.
I hope you are at peace, brother,
and know that I will remember you always,
at least, in the form of a letter.

You didn't know a lot of things.
You didn't know how much I cried,
and not just tears,
but fell to my knees and agonized to my God
about you.
You didn't know how for the longest time
I couldn't hear a song without thinking of you.

Hot Tub

I want to write about your lips,
your kiss,
the way your hair sparkles in the water,
flecked with grey under the fluorescent lighting.
I want to write about how I look forward to your smile
entering the hot water
while rainbow coloured visions cloud my judgement.
The water is hot around us
and we are burning up,
you more than me,
me less than you,
jets all around us
drowning our legs
our sorrows
our hopes
our love.

If she was the last person in the world,
would you defend her?
Would you stand up for her
in front of the end of the universe
or would you hide behind the sycamore tree,
a rock, big enough for you and me
and keep the peace until
all turned black?

She said,
"I really enjoy you, you know.
I really enjoy the way you are,
the way you breathe,
the way you touch,
the way you see things
in and out of shadows and corners,
bones from the grave growing and growing
into a tree."

"It really is enjoyable to watch you laugh and eat,
pleasure from tastebuds moving from your head
to your sunkissed feet outward back into the universe,
I know I don't make sense when I say this
but I really enjoy the way you seek
opportunity, employment, adventure
like a ferret on its way up a mountain."

She said a lot of strange things,
that girl,
she saw in ways that rabbits do,
some colours, some gods,
some carrots, some blues.
I miss her as much as you do.

I haven't done much, you know.
Not like the others.
I travelled when I was nine, thirteen
with my family
who liked to wake up at 7 am,
go to bed by ten,
and hated the sight of people kissing.

I haven't got a great job,
it's enough to pay bills
but not buy a house,
a dog,
a family,
a car.
I do eat well though.

I can't play the cello,
the instrument of human emotion,
and I'm not very good at that either.
I started with the piano, moved on
to the guitar
yet the notes eluded my fingers as
I avoid birds in the air that fly
frighteningly close to my face.

I guess I'm good at nothing,
and that's something
as I'm walking to my beat up car
in my beat up city
wearing my beat up jacket.
At least I can feed myself today.

Be Kind

Not merely because Henry James said
there were but four rules of life—
be kind be kind be kind be kind— but
because it's good for the soul, and,
what's more, for others; it may be
that kindness is our best audition
for a worthier world, and, despite
the vagueness and uncertainty of
its recompense, a bird may yet wander
into a bush before our very houses,
gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds
entirely equal to our own, still there's
weather arriving from every direction,
the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty
may yet prove to be one, so why not
allow the little sacrificial squinches and
squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate
the particular world with minute particulars?
Dust's certainly all our fate, so why not
make it the happiest possible dust,
a detritus of blessedness? Surely
the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked
witches of our childhood have died and,
from where they are buried, a great kindness
has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,
in the end so much comes down to privilege
and its various penumbras, but too much
of our unruly animus has already been
wasted on reprisals, too much of the
unblessed air is filled with smoke from
undignified fires. Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.

Michael Blumenthal

The Cabbages of Chekov

Some gamblers abandon carefully built houses
In order to live near water. It's all right. One day
On the river is worth a thousand nights on land.

It is our attraction to ruin that saves us;
And disaster, friends, brings us health. Chekhov
Shocks the heavens with his dark cabbages.

William Blake knew that fierce old man,
Irritable, chained and majestic, who bends over
To measure with his calipers the ruin of the world.

It takes so little to make me happy tonight!
Four hours of singing will do it, if we remember
How much of our life is a ruin, and agree to that.

Butterflies spend all afternoon concentrating
On the buddleia bush; human beings take in
The fragrance of a thousand nights of ruin.

We planted fields of sorrow near the Tigris.
The Harvesters will come in at the end of time
And tell us that the crop of ruin has been great.

Robert Bly

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert

The Apple Orchard

You won't remember it—the apple orchard
We wandered through one April afternoon,
Climbing the hill behind the empty farm.

A city boy, I'd never seen a grove
Burst in full flower or breathed the bittersweet
Perfume of blossoms mingled with the dust.

A quarter mile of trees in fragrant rows
Arching above us. We walked the aisle,
Alone in spring's ephemeral cathedral.

We had the luck, if you can call it that,
Of having been in love but never lovers—
The bright flame burning, fed by pure desire.

Nothing consumed, such secrets brought to light!
There was a moment when I stood behind you,
Reached out to spin you toward me...but I stopped.

What more could I have wanted from that day?
Everything, of course. Perhaps that was the point—
To learn that what we will not grasp is lost.

Dana Gioia

Radiance

Over your gray and white oval marble-top kitchen table,
the meeting of our eyes makes the room grow brighter.
Our faces, layer after layer, become so vibrant

the light appears to crest in waves.
We have become changed by it, nothing can be
the same after it. When I bend down to touch

the shape of deer tracks in the damp sand, it is in
the same way I place my fingers over your body.
When I stand beside a freshet in a meadow

the sun catches the rings of the water's long ripples
in the wind, that is the same glimmer we hold
when our eyes meet in the kitchen over

your gray and white oval marble-top table.
Every day for the rest of my life, yours is the face
I want to see when I awake in the morning.

Wally Swist

Twitter: @thatshaniperson

I got Twitter (and my first post is about the games club, obviously).

@thatshaniperson, come follow me!

Posters falling off the wall.
Like you,
they don't stay up anymore.
Despite the heat,
despite the cold,
my walls are blank
but for bits of tape,
collecting dust.

We kissed to the sound of heaven last night,
the simple guitars flowing over our tongues
and through your teeth into mine,
and I knew I could kiss you forever.
This morning I found your collection of girls
that I always knew existed,
faceless, clothesless,
do they mean more to you than me?
I know they don't,
they weren't there last night
but perhaps their ghosts
were following my footsteps,
whispering,
taunting,
"You'll never be as beautiful as us.
You'll never be as perfect as us."
And they were right,
they were images,
idols,
Venuses.
But will you settle for me,
a meteor in random orbit?
Everything is creeping in.

The Benefits of an Active Lifestyle

You seem to like things the most
if you can do them while you're sitting,
Father said. It doesn't seem like it's
the books you're reading that give
you pleasure, but that you read them
while you're sitting down. You
get most of your satisfaction from doing
things that require very little physical effort.
It's not that your brain needs to be filled
with new facts, but that you have grown
accustomed to being lazy. You can learn
just as much from being active. And since
that'll put you with other active people,
none of them will have the time to sit down
& read a book to prove that the information you got was wrong.

Hal Sirowitz

I'm wearing your jacket to bed tonight
and I will get too hot,
I know this.
I just cannot take it off
even if it doesn't smell like you.
I want to be romantic,
I want to be romantic with you.
I want to lay in bed and have my ceiling
open up to stars,
float on a magic carpet to Niagara falls,
share a bottle of wine
while shivering in the mist
warming up to your touch,
your taste,
the small of your back against my lips.
One day we will be old together
and I will lean over and kiss your shoulder
because love knows no age
and we won't be old but young
as we fade away.
The song is ending on the radio,
and how we will imitate the lovers before us
in our return to nothingness.
It meant something, I hope,
that is what I'll think when we fade away.

Grace

When the young professor folded
his hands at dinner and spoke to God
about my safe arrival
through the snow, thanking Him also
for the food we were about to eat,
it was in the tone of voice I use
to speak to friends when I call
and get their answering machines,
chatting about this and that
in a casual voice,
picturing them listening
but too busy to pick up the phone,
or out taking care of important
business somewhere else.
The next day, flying home
through a windy
and overwhelming sky, I knew
I envied his rapport with God
and hoped his prayers
would keep my plane aloft.

Linda Pastan

Deceiving the Gods

The old Jews rarely admitted good fortune.
And if they did, they'd quickly add kinahora—
let the evil eye not hear. What dummkopf
would think the spirits were on our side?
But even in a tropical paradise
laden with sugarcane and coconut,
something like the shtetl's wariness exists.
In Hawaii, I'm told, a fisherman
never spoke directly, lest the gods
arrive at the sea before him.
Instead he'd look to the sky,
the fast-moving clouds, and say,
I wonder if leaves are falling in the uplands!
Let us go and gather leaves.
So, my love, today let's not talk at all.
Let's be like those couples
eating silently in restaurants,
barely a word the entire meal.
We pitied them, but now I see
they were always so much smarter than we were.

Ellen Bass

On Prayer

Then a priestess said, "Speak to us of Prayer."

And he answered, saying:

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?

And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.

And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.

When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.

Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.

For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive.

And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:

Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall not be heard.

It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

I cannot teach you how to pray in words.

God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips.

And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains.

But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart,

And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying in silence,

"Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth.

It is thy desire in us that desireth.

It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which are thine also.

We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all."



Khalil Gibran

Sometimes it feels like
no matter what I do
I'm always faced with a brick wall
standing in front of me.
His feet are firm and hard
and he has no family
so all he has to do is spend time
with whomever gives him a chance.

I didn't want to but everywhere I turned,
he found a way to slip by and settle.
I tried to move him,
lose him,
but every decision I made,
he seemed to anticipate
and the fleeting moments of
being content and happy
made no sense
when I saw the tell-tale rubble skirting my ankles.

I ended up adopting him,
naming him Disappointment
and he knew what he was,
my stillborn follower.
He still makes me try, you know,
to break free,
to have goals that reach high above the sky and beyond,
even though his massive presence blocks out the sunlight.
I suppose I can only keep trying,
keep failing,
keep hoping,
keep dreaming.

One day it will all be okay.

It's not that being in pain is hard,
being helpless is.
Normally I bounce from step to step
destroying the world with my rhino horn
and cheery attitude.
But with pain,
I feel alone
and when I'm alone is when the voices start.
So many voices with their
"How come?" and "failures"
yelling in my head
and I can't get it to stop.
All I can focus on is my one tiny step
to another tiny step
until all the distances in the world have been covered
with sheer persistence
because the opposite doesn't exist.
Nothing does not exist.
Therefore I must,
and I do,
and I will.

I Wish I Ran

I wish I ran.
I wish I could lace up my trainers
and splash splash splash across the puddles
until my ankles became soaked with the waters of the sky.
I wish I ran so I wouldn't obsess over what is right and what is true
and that all this anger and hurt in me
had somewhere to go,
maybe up up up
or down down down,
as long as it was headed away from me
and I could let it go,
run far away from it
and hope it wouldn't be able to find its way home.

After years of plausible deniability,
you call me and say my name
and I gravitate towards you.
You fascinate me,
you are the legs of a bee,
the eyes of a dragonfly,
the wingspan of an eagle.
You are the way all the spirals
in the world
are equal whether they are
invisible or visible to the human eye.
Are you visible to my eyes?
You make me hear music
behind my ears
and underneath my brain,
you make me hear music
for the first time again.

Words

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia

Questionnaire

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

Wendell Berry

An Embarrassment

"Do you want to ask
the blessing?"

"No. If you do,
go ahead."

He went ahead:
his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes
rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft
thump.

If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party
a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

Wendell Berry

The first time I told you I loved you,
it was in a confessional
and I jumped as the words escaped my mouth.
The priest looked at me with his missing teeth
and his kind eyes, touched my arm
and told me that it was okay,
to let things be.

I think he thought I was scared.

Big hands,

he had big hands

and a really small heart.

That's how the saying goes,

doesn't it?

No, wait,

it's cold hands,

warm heart.

He had warm hands,

hot almost,

at least that's how they felt
as they traced my skin

and left ashes in their trail,

volcanic lava cascading 

in and out of my being

until all that was left

was a fossil,

dug out millions of years later

to reconstruct history.

Jehovah Jireh

The fear of uncertainty knits
itself into my veins,
and I can feel myself falter.

Breathing is hard.
I am so frail,
look a tremor, here and there.

I don't know what I can do,
patience,
patience one breath at a time.

Jehovah Jireh,
He will provide.
Have faith.

Faltering faith.
Jehovah Jireh,
my mouth can't stop trembling.

On my knees in my heart,
no more without You,
Jehovah Jireh,
God will provide.

Please don't take me away from here.

You said,
"Let's get married in Ireland."
And I agreed.
No mother, no father,
no sister, no guilt.
What a wonderful thought,
to be able to get married in Ireland.
I went to St. Patrick's as a kid, you know.
I can see it now,
the green of the fields.
I bet it'd be raining
and in love I'd look at you
in that old little stone church,
and we'd hear the bells ringing
and realise that now we were an and
and not an it,
not a he and she,
him and her,
just an and.
A conjunction, joined,
joining.
I would like to get married in Ireland now,
smell the ocean
and live together forever.
If these are only words,
let these be the holiest words I see.
Let's get married in Ireland,
no one else,
only you and me.

I was rejected four times today,
maybe five.
I was fine after the first two
and then I started getting irritable.
I spilled a drop of coffee
in the cafeteria downstairs
and wiped it with my sleeve so
no one would notice,
but I saw the old man sneer.
The third one, fourth one, fifth one,
all blended into a big red sign
that read "unworthy".
Hardly surprising.
It was hard to remind myself
 that I was made of stardust,
I felt rather that I was created
out of the dust of stars,
the careless sweeps of discarded material
from somewhere farther out than the sun.
But days go on as do the stars,
I burned my tongue.

Somewhere deep in me is unrest.
I am a mental vagabond,
jumping from universe to universe,
wanting to be part of all
and none of them.
I cannot sit still for a second,
can't you see my neurons firing
from Jupiter to Mars?
I want you to see,
I want you to see through me
and find Brasil, Indonesia, Cambodia.
I want you to listen to my heartbeat
and find the band
I wanted to start as a kid,
rising among the sea of french horns and trombones,
rising, rising.
Can you look at me and see all
the dreams I have left to dream about?
Can you look at me and
see all of my unfulfilled dreams?

What I'm Giving Up for Lent This Year

I'm giving up trying to be special. I'm not special.

I'm giving up trying to have a successful career. I'm giving up trying to want a successful career. You see, my brain knows what it's good at and what it wants to do. But I'm always not good enough. Not smart enough. Don't know the right people.

Maybe for Lent I'm not going to give up anything but accept the daily doses of humility. I will bow my head down again because it seems that is all I am called for in life.

Please don't tell me to try, I try. And I'm not hopeless or filled with despair, I am just coming to terms with the fact that there is no greater plan for me. Or maybe there is and I'm getting older and older without discerning what that is. And that probably is my fault, for straying off the right path and taking the wide road to my own gateway to hell (purgatory I am hoping).

What I'm saying is that for Lent I will try to accept it. I mean, I normally have to accept it (what else can you do but move on) but I will try to accept it with even more fervour than normal. I will realize that what I am drinking is bitter and I will not pretend it's sweet nor will I complain about the bitterness. A liquid is a liquid after all.

I'm giving up pizza and sweets. I'm giving up a part of myself. I know it's not a worthy part, it's not the part that can even be called Catholic anymore, but it is a part of myself. I have nothing else to offer the world.

On Faith

How do people stay true to each other?
When I think of my parents all those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
longing for anything else—or: no, they must
have longed; there must have been flickerings,
stray desires, nights she turned from him,
sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently,
smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath
and tangled limbs must have seemed
not enough. But it was. Or they just
held on. A gift, perhaps, I've tossed out,
having been always too willing to fly
to the next love, the next and the next, certain
nothing was really mine, certain nothing
would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;
faith that this latest love won't end, or ends
in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.
When he turns his back to me now, I think:
disappear. I think: not what I want. I think
of my mother lying awake in those arms
that could crush her. That could have. Did not.

Cecilia Woloch

My Stillborn Poem

I gave birth to a stillborn poem
not two weeks ago
and I hope you understand why I have trouble writing.
She was beautiful in the way that
anything that is yours is beautiful,
because it belonged to you
and possession counters logic, of course.
She had brown hair
the colour of autumn.
I grieve over her sometimes, still,
even though poems come and go,
for you see she tried to
mean something to me,
and although she bore the image of
an idea that I once had,
she did not carry that life
so I had to bury her under our files
and folders,
yellow and blue,
and there I came across
all the other stillborns I had buried too.
I realised in that moment although they were dead,
they were not gone or unloved,
they held the memories of a time long passed.
In one I saw anger and in five I saw hurt,
the products of my legacy all quieted
in this process of childbirth.
I sat down to think upon it
and a few tears went hence,
resurrection isn't only a theme for the Bible,
that maybe this time the tomb will be opened for me as well.

I want to write
to make you weep.
Not to make you sad, no,
but to make you weep
because you forgot what it was like
to feel something so beautiful as yourself.
I want you to cry as you realise
where you stand in the universe,
equal to the mountains and the oceans,
that you breathe in the same
dust that was breathed into the universe
at the very beginning
and is the very end,
for beauty has no beginning and end,
it has no constraint
for it is you,
and you are it.
I want you to weep upon this realisation.
I want to weep upon this realization.
I want to stand on the face of the moon
and kiss the cheek of that long lost man
and return to what I was made to do,
whatever that is,
and I hope that includes loving you.

A Story Can Change Your Life

On the morning she became a young widow,
my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,
looked up from her work to see a hawk turn
her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.
That same moment, halfway around the world
in a Minnesota mine, her husband died,
buried under a ton of rock-fall.
She told me this story sixty years ago.
I don't know if it's true but it ought to be.
She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt
on Sundays when the acolyte's silver bell
announced the moment of Christ's miracle,
it was the darker mysteries she lived by:
shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside,
a tapping at the door and nobody there.
The moral of the story was plain enough:
miracles become a burden and require a priest
to explain them. With signs, you only need
to keep your wits about you and place your trust
in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck
and grief are coming your way. And for that
—so the story goes—any day will do.

Peter Everwine

Ukraine

Father, I am scared.
Yet with You I can do all things,
believe all things,
hope all things,
endure all things.

Lord, grant me strength.

First Red, then Blue

I watched him hit the ball
and it was rough.
But he was fascinating
in the way that otters were,
lithe and destructive,
swimming around the rivers
in ways that only fish were allowed to.

He hit the red one first,
and then the blue.
The cue was loose in his hands,
yet it hit with precision.
Every single shot he made
I didn't make,
I was too distracted
by the bridge of his nose,
his shoulder rippling under the shirt
I got him for his birthday.

And I imagined us as strangers
sharing a game together,
walking around each other,
the road to hell paved with eggshells
and a bright blue bird
that sang to us out of a box.

But we weren't strangers
so I leaned over close to him
and gave him a kiss.
One game too many,
one game too few,
I guess walking around hitting balls
gave us something to do.

Rest.

It's so late I could cut my lights
and drive the next fifty miles
of empty interstate
by starlight,
flying along in a dream,
countryside alive with shapes and shadows,
but exit ramps lined
with eighteen wheelers
and truckers sleeping in their cabs
make me consider pulling into a rest stop
and closing my eyes. I've done it before,
parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy,
mom and dad up front, three kids in the back,
the windows slightly misted by the sleepers' breath.
But instead of resting, I'd smoke a cigarette,
play the radio low, and keep watch over
the wayfarers in the car next to me,
a strange paternal concern
and compassion for their well being
rising up inside me.
This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I'm not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?
But it is. Everything's fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I'm driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I've got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I'll be home by dawn.

Richard Jones

I love you (and that frightens me)

I need to tell you,
I need to confess to you
that you frighten me.
Not in the way a ghost does,
no, not that way,
but in a way that's ever more surreal
and ever more mysterious.

I don't know how to lie to you
so I don't,
I know I'm as transparent as they come.
Do you miss the mystery of it all?
Of lobes and lips and tongues
of strangers?
Do you miss being new?

I suppose I don't want to hide from you,
I want you to see all,
know all,
feel all.
I want you to know that when I look at you,
sometimes,
I get this painful rush of love
up and down my heart
and every heart beat makes me want heaven on earth for you,
and that frightens me.

I am no sacrificial lamb,
I have no sacrificial goat,
all I can say is the truth to you, for you.
I love you
and that frightens me.

Saint of the Year

St. Rene Goupil

No Hemlock Rock (don't kill yourself)

Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself.
Don't. Eat a donut, be a blown nut.
That is, if you're going to kill yourself,
stand on a street corner rhyming
seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with
racket. Allow medical terms.
Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost,
if necessary, but don't kill yourself.

Let your friends know that something has
passed, or be glad they've guessed.
But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are
bat crazy you will batter their hearts
in blooming scores of anguish; but kill
yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;
shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.
I will give badges to everyone who's figured
this out about suicide, and hence
refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank
you for staying. Please stay. You
are my hero for staying. I know
about it, and am grateful you stay.

Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus.
Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay.
Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.
Dare not to kill yourself. I won't either.

Jennifer Michael Hecht