I drank,
my arteries filled with fat;
the ventricle went lax
and a clot stopped my heart.
Now I sit
in St. Petersburg sunshine.
No whiskey;
wearing a girl’s heart.
My blood has adopted a child
who shuffles through my chest
carrying a doll.
J.D. Reed
She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical, your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission—
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound—
for the burying of her small red wound alive—
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call—
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off
Anne Sexton
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting
Secondhand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same; that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled;
the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little, and listen—
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
Galway Kinnell
Another morning.
The trees always look the same.
I am different. Each day,
I am greedier.
How do trees refuse evening?
Once, I fell in love
with the music, not the man.
When the music played,
my heart moved like paper boats.
When it stopped, I was eighty.
My whole life, I thought
to mourn leaves falling. Now I
marvel at all the splitting.
Someone is turning
the earth with wrenches, each turn
a bit closer to the end.
The earth is warmer.
The crickets are still singing,
rehearsing for the last day.
We make tools to fix
everything-hammers, nails, wires
that we twist to hold
down or bend into beauty.
We make a small tree
into the shape we want,
to be slanted, silent.
The wire on my wrists cut in,
I take the shape of desire.
Victoria Chang
Last night we ended up on the couch
trying to remember
all of the friends who had died so far,
and this morning I wrote them down
in alphabetical order
on the flip side of a shopping list
you had left on the kitchen table.
So many of them had been swept away
as if by a hand from the sky,
it was good to recall them,
I was thinking
under the cold lights of a supermarket
as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel
up and down the long strident aisles.
I was on the lookout for blueberries,
English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,
light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,
and whatever else was on the list,
which I managed to keep grocery side up,
until I had passed through the electric doors,
where I stopped to realize,
as I turned the list over,
that I had forgotten Terry O’Shea
as well as the bananas and the bread.
It was pouring by then,
spilling, as they say in Ireland,
people splashing across the lot to their cars.
And that is when I set out,
walking slowly and precisely,
a soaking-wet man
bearing bags of groceries,
walking as if in a procession honoring the dead.
I felt I owed this to Terry,
who was such a strong painter,
for almost forgetting him
and to all the others who had formed
a circle around him on the screen in my head.
I was walking more slowly now
in the presence of the compassion
the dead were extending to a comrade,
plus I was in no hurry to return
to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you
all about Terry and the bananas and the bread.
Billy Collins
Thinking of how much my father loved flowering plants
And how much my mother still does.
And of how unfathomably hard it must have been
To clothe and feed ten children
With the most meagre of salaries for tending to citrus orchards—
For shovelling and irrigating and shovelling again.
How he groaned when I removed his work boots
At day’s end, an exhaustion deeper than any well.
Mom says his boss was a jerk, nothing ever good enough.
On top of everything, that empathy of her for him
Who’d never listened to her pleas because the priest said
All the children God will allow, the priest
Who never saw her afternoons slumped by the kitchen table,
A blank stare into somewhere
My voice could never reach.
Nothing to do but walk away. I swear
This is not about the unwanted child,
Or what a therapist called embodiment of the violation,
But about the strength and will to cradle the plants
Outside—the pruning, the watering, the sheltering
In found tarps and twine against the coldest nights.
To lean into the day’s hard edge,
And still find that reserve of tenderness
For the bougainvillea, the hibiscus, the blue morning.
José Antonio Rodgríguez
She brings us water, not intending harm,
And now a drier throat cannot confess
My praises for the motions of this waitress
And for the oneness of her uniform.
I know already that I lack the charm
For that; with her, there’s nothing counts for less
Than thoughts which fall as readily as a dress
And yet as finally as a severed arm.
The truckers at the other table try
A CB raunchy line to make her stay,
But I can only smile and order pie
To slow her in the cession of her tray,
Until I’ve tasted all that I could say
And swinging doors have swallowed our goodbye.
Anthony Lombardy
i drank a lot. i lost my job.
i lived like nothing mattered.
then you stopped, and came across
my little bridge of fallen answers.
i don’t recall what happened next.
i kept you at a distance.
but tangled in the knot of sex
my punishment was lifted.
and lifted on a single breath—
no coming and no going—
o G-d, you are the only friend
i never thought of knowing.
your remedies beneath my hand
your fingers in my hair
the kisses on our lips began
that ended everywhere.
and now our sins are all confessed
our strategies forgiven
it’s written that the law must rest
before the law is written.
and not because of what i’d lost
and not for what i’d mastered
you stopped for me, and came across
the bridge of fallen answers.
tho’ mercy has no point of view
and no one’s here to suffer
we cry aloud, as humans do:
we cry to one another.
And now it’s one, and now it’s two, A
nd now the whole disaster.
We cry for help, as humans do—
Before the truth, and after.
And Every Guiding Light Was Gone
And Every Teacher Lying—
There Was No Truth In Moving On—
There Was No Truth In Dying.
And Then The Night Commanded Me
To Enter In Her Side—
And Be As Adam Was To Eve
Before The Great Divide.
her remedies beneath my hand
her fingers in my hair—
and every mouth of hunger glad—
and deeply unaware.
and here i cannot lift a hand
to trace the lines of beauty,
but lines are traced, and beauty’s glad
to come and go so freely.
and from the wall a grazing wind,
weightless and routine—
it wounds us as i part your lips
it wounds us in between.
and every guiding light was gone
and every sweet direction—
the book of love i read was wrong
it had a happy ending.
And Now There Is No Point Of View—
And Now There Is No Other—
We Spread And Drown As Lilies Do—
We Spread And Drown Forever.
You are my tongue, you are my eye,
My coming and my going.
O G-d, you let your sailor die
So he could be the ocean.
And when I’m at my hungriest
She takes away my tongue
And holds me here where hungers rest
Before the world is born.
And fastened here we cannot move
We cannot move forever
We spread and drown as lilies do—
From nowhere to the center.
Escaping through a secret gate
I made it to the border
And call it luck—or call it fate—
I left my house in order.
And now there is no point of view—
And now there is no other—
We spread and drown as lilies do—
We spread and drown forever.
Disguised as one who lived in peace
I made it to the border
Though every atom of my heart
Was burning with desire.
Leonard Cohen
What would a grown woman do?
She’d tug off an earring
when the phone rang, drop it to the desk
for the clatter and roll. You’d hear
in this the ice, tangling in the glass;
in her voice, low on the line, the drink
being poured. All night awake,
I heard its fruity murmur of disease
and cure. I heard the sweet word “sleep,”
which made me thirstier. Did I say it,
or did you? And will I learn
to wave the drink with a goodbye wrist
in conversation, toss it off all bracelet-bare
like more small talk about a small affair?
To begin, I’ll claim what I want
is small: the childish hand
of a dream to smooth me over,
a cold sip of water in bed,
your one kiss, never again.
I’ll claim I was a girl before this gin,
then beg you for another.
Deborah Garrison
First I was born and it was tough on Mom.
Dad felt left out. There’s much I can’t recall.
I seethed my way to speech and said a lot
of things: some were deemed cute. I was so small
my likely chance was growth, and so I grew.
Long days in school I filled, like a spring creek,
with boredom. Sex I discovered soon
enough, I now think. Sweet misery!
There’s not enough room in a poem so curt
to get me out of adolescence, yet
I’m nearing fifty with a limp, and dread
the way the dead get tacked up like a cord
of wood. Not much of a story, is it?
The life that matter’s not the one I’ve led.
William Matthews