Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise
Comes toward us like oar out of the silences
of rock. His heart, that dies, presses out
For others a wine that is fresh forever.

When the god's energy takes hold of him,
His voice never collapses in the dust.
Everything turns to vineyards, everything turns to grapes,
Made ready for harvest by his powerful devotion.

The mold in the catacomb of the king
Does not suggest that his praising is lies, nor
The fact that the gods cast shadows.

He is one of the servants who does not go away,
Who still holds through the doors
Of the tomb trays of shining fruit.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Robert Bly)

The Watch Of A Swan

I read somewhere that a swan snow-white
In the sun all day, in the moon all night,
Alone by a little grave would sit,
Waiting and watching it.

Up, out of the lake her mate would rise
And call her down, with his piteous cries,
Into the waters, still, and dim:
With cries she would answer him.

Hardly a shadow would she let pass
Over the baby's cover of grass;
Only the wind might dare to stir
The lily that watched with her.

Do I think that the swan was an angel? Oh,
I think it was only a swan, you know,
That for some sweet reason, winged and wild,
Had the love of a bird for a child.

- Sarah Piatt
(from Youth's Companion, 1883)

The Beauty Of Hopelessness

You are hanging from a branch
by your teeth. No
way to save yourself
or others who hang, too.
Arms that cannot reach
any branch, legs stretch but
cannot find the smooth safe trunk.

All around, your loved ones,
friends, strangers hang--
teeth clamp bony twigs
that suspend necessary hopes
and plans.

It is hopeless. No rescue will arrive.
So you relax, taste the clean,
unfamiliar tang of sap,
feel the forgiving wind against
your waving arms, arms
that swim through emptiness.

Without hope, life is
focused, fluid, a ledge
of fragile earth suspended
over the ocean of unknowing, the end
of the branch. Life is
the glorious moment
before the fall when all
plans are abandoned,
the love you give
as you hang, loving
those who hang with you.

- Rebecca del Rio

aaaaaaaaaaaaah. hopelessness - relief, release, refreshed. free to just be.
the antidote to "hope" - now defiled, debased by political usage and trickery.
thanks, larry, and blessings, judith

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Beauty Of Hopelessness

You are hanging from a branch
by your teeth. No
way to save yourself
or others who hang, too.
Arms that cannot reach
any branch, legs stretch but
cannot find the smooth safe trunk.

All around, your loved ones,
friends, strangers hang--
teeth clamp bony twigs
that suspend necessary hopes
and plans.

It is hopeless. No rescue will arrive.
So you relax, taste the clean,
unfamiliar tang of sap,
feel the forgiving wind against
your waving arms, arms
that swim through emptiness.

Without hope, life is
focused, fluid, a ledge
of fragile earth suspended
over the ocean of unknowing, the end
of the branch. Life is
the glorious moment
before the fall when all
plans are abandoned,
the love you give
as you hang, loving
those who hang with you.

- Rebecca del Rio

---

Blazing Trees


You have only to see

the blazing sunset through

the trees to be

in that dazzling presence

and hear a voice say

“Take off your masks.”



With a clatter they land

but you barely

notice because the fire

in your heart is bursting

towards that bright glow.



And when its last glimmering

rays are gone

you're left with a gateway

that will open at any—

even the darkest— hour.

- Raphael Block

Paul Robeson

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
that we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

Cross That Line

Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.

He sang into Canada.
His voice left the USA
when his body was not allowed
to cross that line.

Remind us again, brave friend!
What countries may we sing into?
What lines should we all be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Cross That Line

---

Congratulations and blessings on crossing the line once again on your journeys around the sun...

Happy Birthday Larry!

And thank you for blessing us with your thoughtful selections that "deepen our days".

Barry

How Birds Sing

One is not taxed;
one need not practice;
one simple tips
the throat back
over the spine axis
and asserts the chest.
The wings and the rest
compress a musical
squeeze which floats
a series of notes
upon the breeze.

- Kay Ryan

Where We Are

(after Bede)

A man tears a chunk of bread off the brown loaf,
then wipes the gravy from his plate. Around him at the long table, friends fill their mouths with duck and roast pork, fill their cups from pitchers of wine. Hearing a high twittering, the man

*
looks to see a bird -- black with a white patch
beneath its beak -- flying the length of the hall,
having flown in by a window over the door. As straight as a taut string, the bird flies beneath the roofbeams, as firelight flings its shadow against the ceiling.

*
The man pauses -- one hand holds the bread,
the other rests upon the table -- and watches the bird, perhaps a swift, fly toward the window
at the far end of the room. He begins to point it out to his friends, but one is telling hunting stories, as another describes the best way
*
to butcher a pig. The man shoves the bread in his mouth, then slaps his hand down hard on the thigh of the woman seated beside him, squeezes his fingers to feel the firm muscles and tendons beneath the fabric of her dress.

A huge dog snores on the stone hearth by the fire.

*
From the window comes the clicking of pine needles blown against it by an October wind.

A half moon hurries along behind scattered clouds, while the forest of black spruce and bare maple and birch surrounds the long hall the way a single rock can be surrounded
*
by a river. This is where we are in history -- to think the table will remain full; to think the forest will remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of good fortune will save us from the night -- a bird flies in from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.

*
******- Stephen Dobyns

When Your True Heart

When you find yourself
at the bottom of the ocean
no one has to say,
"Swim! Swim for your life
toward the light!"

Your arms, your heart, your legs
your lungs, your brain, your eyes,
every part of you is fixated
on that point of light,

and your body works
with all the efficiency of which
it is capable
to propel you toward it.

When your true heart
reveals to you
that which you really want,

though a lioness stand at the gate
with teeth like snow white daggers
pointing up and down,

she will not keep you from entering.

Ancient chains of clinging, judgment,
"This is how I do it," mind, and fear
slip away like silk off silk.

Open to your true heart
and the Surging Tide that
knows no season
will fill you up with Joy.

When you stop being
separate and can speak
from inside things,

all of creation will be
nothing but mouth singing
songs of joy and praise.

- Diane La Rae Bodach

Seventieth Birthday

There was rain in early November but afterwards
The land’s hope failed, the small grass on the mountain withered and died,
Dry fell the frost. Even the southwind brought no clouds,
The sun blazed in the air like a block of ice.

I rode up over the ridge from the ocean
And came into death’s own country; there were dead cows and calves under every bush and the little broken-
Windowed farmhouse was as dead as the cows. They lay flat on their flanks, black and white hides
Rather than carcasses, keeping their tryst with the earth, settling into the ground.
That’s the trouble with death—
So submissive, so docile ,so humbled, it tries to hide, to slide underground, it has no effrontery
Except the stench. I do not want to be humbled.

But now my love has died and I am half dead.
My friends are dying, even my dogs have died, even the grim and psychotic bull-dog
That used to turn and attack me from time to time and in mid-leap become sane. I loved him well
But when he hurt my grandchild we had him killed. That was betrayal; he trusted us. I fondled him going to die’
I was Judas. I have been perhaps all men.

Why do I dream lately so much about death?
Today’s my seventieth birthday: do I wan to die?
When I turned fifty I had the strength to be willing
To live forever. Even now twenty years weaker, I might endure it,
But the gleam is gone.

When I came down from the height—
The corpse-crowned hill—I saw a comedy of two survivors. Nearer the ocean a little nourishment
Under the kindly sea-fog grows from the ground. There was a worried cow grazing and walking,
Bone-gaunt, with a gaunt pig at here teats. She would step forward, he would catch and such, he would follow her
And she could not refuse him. Her calf no doubt had died but her watery milk was made to be sucked.
It was very funny: she would neither kick nor submit, she was like me with death, she with her pig.

- Robinson Jeffers

After the War


a day
after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
I will hold you in my arms
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war I have arms
and I will make to you with love
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war there is love
and if there is what it takes to make love


- Jotamario Arbeláez
(Colombia, 1940)

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

- Billy Collins

The Banker


His smile is like a cold toilet seat.

He shakes my hand as if he's found it

floating two weeks dead in a slough.

I tell him I need money.

Tons of it.

I want to buy a new Lamborghini,

load it with absinthe and opium,

and hit the trail out of these rainy hills

for a few years in Paris.

I try to explain

I'm at that point in my artistic development

where I require a long period

of opulent reflection.

The banker rifles my wallet.

Examines my mouth.

Chuckles when I offer 20 Miltonic sonnets

as security on the loan.

Now he's shaking his head, my confidence,

my hand good-bye. "Wait," I plead,

"I have debts and dreams

my present cash flow can't possibly sustain."

"Sorry," he mumbles, "nothing I can do,"

and staples some papers

in a way that makes me feel

he'd rather nail my tongue to an ant hill.

I stare at him in disbelief.

And under the righteous scathing of my gaze

the banker begins to change form.

First, he becomes a plate of cold french fries

drenched in crankcase oil.

Then a black spot

on a page of Genesis.

Finally, a dung beetle,

rolling little balls of shit

across a desk bigger than my kitchen.

Yet even as I follow these morbid transformations

I never lose sight of his bloated face,

the green, handled skin

shining like rotten meat.

But then his other faces

open to mine:

father, lover, young man, child -

our shared human history

folding us into one.

And only that stops me

from beating him senseless

with a sock full of pennies.



- Jim Dodge

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

- Mary Oliver

Men at Work
I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich.
—“Down Under.”

We middle-aged sense them immediately:

four brittle pop stars sprawled across

the rigid fibreglass chairs at the airport gate.

It’s not just that they’re Australian, that gorgeous

thunk of English, the stacked electric-guitar cases

draped with black leather jackets, or their deep

tans on this Sunday night in midwinter Toronto

that holds everyone’s attention, drawn as we are,

pale filings to their pull. Even their rail-thin

lassitude attracts us, as it must Doug, the portly

Air Canada gate manager in his personalized jacket,

who arrives to greet the band, cranking hands

and cracking jokes. Doug, who must live in

Mississauga with the wife and a couple of kids,

and who insists the boys come back to play Toronto

next year, when we clutchers of boarding passes

will have abandoned our carry-ons for tickets

to a midsized arena and a resurrected band

whose lyrics never did make sense but

which are laced to a beat that won’t let go—

propelling us down the carpeted ramps

of late-night flights on feeder airlines, hips

back in charge of our strange young bodies,

now shaking down runways in rows.

- Julie Bruck

The Lights in the Hallway


The lights in the hallway
Have been out a long time.
I clasp her,
Terrified by the roundness of the earth
And its apples and the voluptuous rings
Of poplar trees, the secret Africas,
The children they give us.
She is slim enough.
Her knee feels like the face
Of a surprised lioness
Nursing the lost children
Of a gazelle by pure accident.
In that body I long for,
The Gabon poets gaze for hours
Between boughs toward heaven, their noble faces
Too secret to weep.
How do I know what color her hair is? I float among
Lonely animals, longing
For the red spider who is God.


- James Wright

The Lives of the Heart

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible;are glassy;are clay;blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle;snort;cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit. .
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.,
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate --violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Lesson Of The Falling Leaves

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves

- Lucille Clifton

Do these leaves know as much as I?
They must
Know that and more—or less. We
See each other through the glass.
We bless each other
Desk and tree, a fallen world of holiness.
Blessed Francis taught the birds
All the animals understood.
Who will
Pray for us who are less than stone or wood?

- Zenshin Philip Whalen

The Icelandic Language

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

- Bill Holm

I will be traveling until September 25 so this will be my last poetry post until September 26. I apologize for the interruption of service.
Larry

The Snakes of September

All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

- Stanley Kunitz


The Excesses of God

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

- Robinson Jeffers

The Loss Of Memory

I have become reconciled to the forgetfulness.
The overtaking birds upon the unidentified traveler.
The reluctance to alter and the regret that accompanies the reluctance,
the dark, probable rose.

The room is uncertain like the spider's shining window.
Looking out upon the snow
across the squares and statues of the gameboard,
there is only the dissonance.

As if in preparation for an arrival, as if remembering
a promise of a return, a meeting,
not taken seriously, that now will occur.
The almost endless sequence of summers is about to conclude.

The loss of memory upon the mountain.
The wandering without pattern upon the snow,
misted unexpected crests and an immediate unlocatable bell...

Lord upon the mountain
I have not glimpsed the hanging monastery through the snowfall
in a moment of distance
where passage is unassisted. Is nothing, or is everything, revocable?

I follow the extinct figures that invented the firelight.
The unnoticeable bird at dusk like a small difficult word.

My heart will fall silent, that moment of inattention,
the last, instant, pointed stars and the unmistakable field.

- Fred Ostrander

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

- Jack Gilbert

Acrobat

The nimble artist hangs upside down
amber belly skyward
into the dawn’s first
light miraculously
catching tiny glimmers
of his multifarious
suspension hangar,

afloat in the lightest of
autumnal breezes,
each leg a
three joint crane
reaching ever so
delicately
out somehow to find
its best hold.

Unfooled, this master,
by my puffs of breath to test
his response, no he is
quite all business
between
creation time
and breakfast.

- Scott O'Brien

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower


Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Today
I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers
that we both loved,
even to this poor
colorless thing-
I saw it
when I was a child-
little prized among the living
but the dead see,
asking among themselves:
What do I remember
that was shaped
as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
with tears.
Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
though too weak a wash of crimson
colors it
to make it wholly credible.
There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.
And so
with fear in my heart
I drag it out
and keep on talking
for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on
against time.
It will not be
for long.
I have forgot
and yet I see clearly enough
something
central to the sky
which ranges round it.
An odor
springs from it!
A sweetest odor!
Honeysuckle! And now
there comes the buzzing of a bee!
and a whole flood
of sister memories!
Only give me time,
time to recall them
before I shall speak out.
Give me time,
time.
When I was a boy
I kept a book
to which, from time
to time,
I added pressed flowers
until, after a time,
I had a good collection.
The asphodel,
forebodingly,
among them.
I bring you,
reawakened,
a memory of those flowers.
They were sweet
when I pressed them
and retained
something of their sweetness
a long time.
It is a curious odor,
a moral odor,
that brings me
near to you.
The color
was the first to go.
There had come to me
a challenge,
your dear self,
mortal as I was,
the lily's throat
to the hummingbird!
Endless wealth,
I thought,
held out its arms to me.
A thousand tropics
in an apple blossom.
The generous earth itself
gave us lief.
The whole world
became my garden!
But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
when the sun strikes it
and the waves
are wakened.
I have seen it
and so have you
when it puts all flowers
to shame.
Too, there are the starfish
stiffened by the sun
and other sea wrack
and weeds. We knew that
along with the rest of it
for we were born by the sea,
knew its rose hedges
to the very water's brink.
There the pink mallow grows
and in their season
strawberries
and there, later,
we went to gather
the wild plum.
I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.
There is a hierarchy
which can be attained,
I think,
in its service.
Its guerdon
is a fairy flower;
a cat of twenty lives.
If no one came to try it
the world
would be the loser.
It has been
for you and me
as one who watches a storm
come in over the water.
We have stood
from year to year
before the spectacle of our lives
with joined hands.
The storm unfolds.
Lightning
plays about the edges of the clouds.
The sky to the north
is placid,
blue in the afterglow
as the storm piles up.
It is a flower
that will soon reach
the apex of its bloom.
We danced,
in our minds,
and read a book together.
You remember?
It was a serious book.
And so books
entered our lives.
The sea! The sea!
Always
when I think of the sea
there comes to mind
the Iliad
and Helen's public fault
that bred it.
Were it not for that
there would have been
no poem but the world
if we had remembered,
those crimson petals
spilled among the stones,
would have called it simply
murder.
The sexual orchid that bloomed then
sending so many
disinterested
men to their graves
has left its memory
to a race of fools
or heroes
if silence is a virtue.
The sea alone
with its multiplicity
holds any hope.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death's
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
Begin again.
It is like Homer's
catalogue of ships:
it fills up the time.
I speak in figures,
well enough, the dresses
you wear are figures also,
we could not meet
otherwise. When I speak
of flowers
it is to recall
that at one time
we were young.
All women are not Helen,
I know that,
but have Helen in their hearts.
My sweet,
you have it also, therefore
I love you
and could not love you otherwise.
Imagine you saw
a field made up of women
all silver-white.
What should you do
but love them?
The storm bursts
or fades! it is not
the end of the world.
Love is something else,
or so I thought it,
a garden which expands,
though I knew you as a woman
and never thought otherwise,
until the whole sea
has been taken up
and all its gardens.
It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.
I should have known,
though I did not,
that the lily-of-the-valley
is a flower makes many ill
who whiff it.
We had our children,
rivals in the general onslaught.
I put them aside
though I cared for them.
as well as any man
could care for his children
according to my lights.
You understand
I had to meet you
after the event
and have still to meet you.
Love
to which you too shall bow
along with me-
a flower
a weakest flower
shall be our trust
and not because
we are too feeble
to do otherwise
but because
at the height of my power
I risked what I had to do,
therefore to prove
that we love each other
while my very bones sweated
that I could not cry to you
in the act.
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.

- William Carlos Williams

A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

- Wendell Berry

On the Day the Last Drag Queen Leaves Town
for Issan


The boys downstairs huff gasoline

off strips of Mother’s emerald gown,

making what joy they can

out of fume and a knockoff Halston.

No note, no explanation, only thing

she left is a hole where reason should be.

You grow a heart and feed it leftovers:

stray earrings, scuffed-out pumps,

the soft pink flame of her first feather boa.

How it curled around her shoulders

when she did the lucky snake dance,

the one with the shimmy, where her hands

dangled at her side and slapped her hips.

And then she’d wave her hand across the air

just as she did every morning when

you’d wake her with an orange for breakfast,

a bowl of milk for her facial, and she’d give

you a word: banana, somehow transformed

by the dissonance of painted lips and baritone.

Truth is you’ll be just fine. Remember a girl

in high heels can still win a race.

You’re just missing the way she knew you—

the way the tree stump loves the ax,

because the blade still sees a use in an old piece

of oak. Drive into town and get drunk,

watch the sole streetlight turn yellow,

sway in the breeze. Wait for someone to ask

about him, then testify. Tell them she was

last seen two-stepping into the dawn, working

the moon for its last bit of butter, the wig

slipping from her head. Because if somebody

goes asking about Mother, seems they need

a happy ending. Go ahead, give it.


- Eric Leigh



On the Day the Last Drag Queen Leaves Town
for Issan


The boys downstairs huff gasoline

off strips of Mother’s emerald gown,

making what joy they can

out of fume and a knockoff Halston.

No note, no explanation, only thing

she left is a hole where reason should be.

You grow a heart and feed it leftovers:

stray earrings, scuffed-out pumps,

the soft pink flame of her first feather boa.

How it curled around her shoulders

when she did the lucky snake dance,

the one with the shimmy, where her hands

dangled at her side and slapped her hips.

And then she’d wave her hand across the air

just as she did every morning when

you’d wake her with an orange for breakfast,

a bowl of milk for her facial, and she’d give

you a word: banana, somehow transformed

by the dissonance of painted lips and baritone.

Truth is you’ll be just fine. Remember a girl

in high heels can still win a race.

You’re just missing the way she knew you—

the way the tree stump loves the ax,

because the blade still sees a use in an old piece

of oak. Drive into town and get drunk,

watch the sole streetlight turn yellow,

sway in the breeze. Wait for someone to ask

about him, then testify. Tell them she was

last seen two-stepping into the dawn, working

the moon for its last bit of butter, the wig

slipping from her head. Because if somebody

goes asking about Mother, seems they need

a happy ending. Go ahead, give it.


- Eric Leigh

Go Deeper Than Love

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.

- D.H. Lawrence