Now that the TV is gone and the music
has been hauled away,
it’s just me here, and the muffling silence
a spider wraps around a living morsel.
And at times, often, the unbearable.
I bear it, though, just like you.
Long ago, I bore a suitcase filled with books,
bore it far on city streets. To sell, I guess, at some
used-books place, one of those doorways down
steps into dankness and darkness. The scent

of mildewed, dog-eared, fingered pages.
The suitcase, big and square and sharp-cornered,
covered in snakeskin, bought at Goodwill
for a dollar, knowing I had some travelling to do,
some lugging, and I was right.
What books I sold I do not know.
Maybe that’s where “Modern Poetry” went.
The cover cherry-red and blossom-white.
I can see its spine in my mind’s eye,
pointing downward beneath the dank

and the dark to the water tunnelling
under the city and making its way to the river.
Poems sliding down the book’s spine
into water, the shock of the cold and dank,
down where my uterine lining, my blood
and cast-off ovulations, cast-off fetal
tissue swims, below the city.
The micro-dead ride modern poems
like swan boats in the park.
From the park to the river to the sea.

I’m thinking now of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.
Balladeers. Lovers. Vita and Virginia.
Frank O’Hara and Vincent Warren. Somehow,
we ride our lost loves out to sea. Or they ride us.
It doesn’t matter. Poet or poem or reader, the same
ectoplasm. The modern, in time, becomes antique,
and the stone faces of the dead convert to symbols,
ripe for smashing. Come to think of it,
symbols are terrible. As the tyrant
shouted to the masses,

part of his brainwashing campaign:
I know it, and you know it, too.
I was twenty-three when I sold off
“Modern Poetry” and sailed to Italy, seeking
Romantic poetry, which was at one time
modern, and found my way to Rome,
and Keats’s death room.
His deathbed, a facsimile.
Everything he touched was burned,
to kill what killed him.

I lifted his death mask from its nail,
cradled it, closed my eyes and kissed his lips
until the plaster warmed,
and stained his face
with the lipstick on my lips. Red
as the cover of “Modern Poetry.”
The color of the droplets of arterial blood
he coughed onto his sheets, and viewed
by candlelight. Then he knew he was done for.
His death warrant, he called it.

After those many kisses over his face and eyes,
and the reticulated eyelashes,
cold and tangled,
my lips were blossom-white,
my face, chalked. Like I’d caught
something from him,
and I don’t just mean consumption,
though my lungs burned for years.
They still burn.
This is the danger of the ecstasy of kissing

the dead or dying poet on the mouth.
The disease you’ll catch—well,
it changes you.
The tingle in the spine,
the erotic charge, will be forever married
to poetry’s previous incarnations.
It’s why marriage itself never worked for me.

I kept wanting to get to the part
where death parts us
and I could find myself again.

Keats made such a compact corpse.
Only five feet tall, shorter than Prince,
and intricately made. Always,
he was working it, working it out,
the meaning of suffering, the world’s,
his own, the encounter with beauty,
nearly synonymous with suffering,
how empathy could extinguish him,
and he could set down the suitcase at last,
or finally deliver him to himself, distinct

as the waves in his hair and the bridge
of his nose. How auspicious,
rare, lush,
bizarre, kinky, transcendent,
romantic, to be young, just twenty-three,
and to cradle him
in my arms, as we listened
to the burbling water
of the Fontana della Barcaccia
from the open window.

Diane Seuss

No one ever grabbed my ass on the stairs down to
the D. But on the stairs up to the El, it happened
all the time. I guess it was anatomically more natural,
like reaching for an apple, but the first time,
I wasn’t sure how to feel. I think I felt warm,
which wasn’t an emotion. It felt like a rite of passage,
though I’d never heard of rites of passage.
Disgusting is what I said when I told my friends.
A grown man. I was twelve then. It felt like flattery.

From the El, I could look into other people’s windows,
but if I saw them at all, what they were doing mostly
were the same kinds of nothings we did in our own
apartment. What I usually saw were their curtains
blowing in and out, ’cause their windows were wide open.
It wasn’t like the High Line, where many years later
I saw two men in a hotel room doing a performance
just for me. The High Line used to be an El. It still is in a way,
though it’s covered with flowers. And I’m the train.

When I turned nineteen and got married, I went to live
up by Mt. Eden. It was cheap and noisy and the El
ran below our window and our daughter died and we were
still in school and took the D train to Manhattan now.
But coming home one night, I looked up and saw curtains
blowing in and out of someone’s window. I was on an El,
I don’t know where, or how I made it home. It wasn’t our El,
but it’s the El I dream about: I’ve just come down the stairs,
and now I’ve got to figure it out. Up on the platform
you could buy peanuts from a dispenser and either
give them to the pigeons or eat them yourself.

Joan Murray

Allegedly the worst is behind us.
Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow,
Halting like a headless hant in our own house,
Waiting to remember exactly
What it is we’re supposed to be doing.

& what exactly are we supposed to be doing?
Penning a letter to the world as a daughter of it.
We are writing with vanishing meaning,
Our words water dragging down a windshield.
The poet’s diagnosis is that what we have lived
Has already warped itself into a fever dream,
The contours of its shape stripped from the murky mind.

To be accountable we must render an account:
Not what was said, but what was meant.
Not the fact, but what was felt.
What was known, even while unnamed.
Our greatest test will be
Our testimony.
This book is a message in a bottle.
This book is a letter.
This book does not let up.
This book is awake.
This book is a wake.
For what is a record but a reckoning?
The capsule captured?
A repository.
An ark articulated?
& the poet, the preserver
Of ghosts & gains,
Our demons & dreams,
Our haunts & hopes.
Here’s to the preservation
Of a light so terrible.

Amanda Gorman

In the construction
of the chest, there is
a heart.

A boat
upon its blood
floats past

and round or down
the stream of life,
the plummeting veins

permit its passage
to admit no gains,
no looking back.

One steps aboard,
one’s off.
The ticket taker

signs the time allotted.
Seated, amorphous persons
see no scenery

but feel
a chill about their knees
and hear a fading cry

as all the many sides of life
whiz by,
a blast at best, a loss

of individual impressions.
Still I sit
with you inside me too—

and us,
the couple thus encoupled,
ride on into the sweetening dark.

Robert Creeley

The prostitutes in Kabul tap their feet
beneath their faded burkas in the heat.
For bread or fifteen cents, they’ll take a man to bed-
their husbands dead, their seven kids unfed-
and thanks to occupation, rents have risen twentyfold,
their chickens, pots, and carpets have been sold
and women’s flesh now worth its weight in tin.
Two years ago, the Talibs favored boys and left the girls alone.
A woman then was worth her weight in stone.

Aliza Griswold

All this work leads to holding both
At once. In the midst of the crowd
A woman services two men, serves

Might be a kinder word but we want this
Precise. Pressing a way through
To some bed or stage or platform is what

We do. And as she rises her body against
Each of them this makes the argument
Of resolution, of unlike moving into like

Until finally everything is the same.
We keep in time; this is not elsewhere.
Nowhere is the center more not the point,

What hand belongs to whom and where.
And to take turns and to bear
That someone goes first, which can never be

Exact or equal, is how faith must come
Into all that touch. Do not be astonished;
She has placed herself to be lost,

To be eaten while eating, a darkening
Bruise of too much, a guide of
Figuring which door to push against,

Already open. We watch for the ending
Not wanting it to end. What to know
That we did not before, save the ungodly

Angles. To do while being done. Polite the mirror
With anything possible; it is not about
Who wants whom more but you cannot help wondering

What happens to she who has been caught
As if between slides of glass—her body so useful.
What comes of each entrance given

Like bread to taste, to begin each day
As if starting over, considering what she has made
Of herself for herself by herself; and how

You could never have been her, until now, quiet
As a church, holy as a trinity, until just
Now the noise of trying to get it right.

Sophie Cabot Black

I am tired.
I am tired of speech and of action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in—but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore. If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.

Tennessee Williams

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and sweet to lose everything.

Donald Hall

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
The handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you’d shift the gear.
We’d find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we’d repair
to where we’ve been before.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.

I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It’s evening; the sun is setting,
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What’s the point of forgetting
if it’s followed by dying?

Joseph Brodsky

There’s a black bear
in the apple tree
and he won’t come down.
I can hear him panting,
like an athlete.
I can smell the stink
of his body.

Come down, black bear.
Can you hear me?

The mind is the most interesting thing to me;
like the sudden death of the sun,
it seems implausible that darkness will swallow it
or that anything is lost forever there,
like a black bear in a fruit tree,
gulping up sour apples
with dry sucking sounds,

or like us at the pier, sombre and tired,
making food from sunlight,
you saying a word, me saying a word, trying hard,
though things were disintegrating.

Still, I wanted you,
your lips on my neck,
your postmodern sexuality.
Forlorn and anonymous:
I didn’t want to be that. I could hear
the great barking monsters of the lower waters
calling me forward.

You see, my mind takes me far,
but my heart dreams of return.

Black bear,
with pale-pink tongue
at the center of his face,
is turning his head,
like the face of Christ from life.
Shaking the apple boughs,
he is stronger than I am
and seems so free of passion—
no fear, no pain, no tenderness. I want to be that.

Come down, black bear,
I want to learn the faith of the indifferent.

Henri Cole