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Music | This painting of a barn and barnyard near sundown May be enough to suggest we don’t have to turn From the visible world to the invisible In order to grasp the truth of things. We don’t always have to distrust appearances. Not if we’re patient. Not if we’re willing To wait for the sun to reach |
Music | This place previously in a vision Wet pen drawn at the lineA place religiously tied religiously religiouslyA person, place or thingBring thy pebble or thy flowers or thy inscriptionBring bring bringeth your loveDear ones bringeth your loveAshes to treesThe trees! |
Music | Through predictive analytics I understood the inevitability of the caged-up babies They keep coffins at the border for when the refugees get too far from home How many thousands of bodies can we fit in a tent or a swimming pool We can live without the unknown in front of |
Music | Today I woke up in my bodyand wasn’t that body anymore. It’s more like my dog—for the most part obedient,warming to mewhen I slip it goldfish or toast, but it sheds.Can’t get past a simple sit,stay, turn over. House-trained, but not entirely. This doesn’t mean it’s time to say goodbye. I’ve realized the estrangementis |
Music | Too soon, perhaps, for fruit. And the broad branches,ice-sheathed early, may bear none. But still the womanwaits, with her ladder and sack, for something to break.A gold, a lengthening of light. For the greens to burstinto something not unlike flame: the pale fruitblushing over weeks through the furred cleft creases:a |
Music | Turns out lots of lines prove blurry I once thought sharp. Some blur from further away, some from closer in. Plant/animal, for instance. On which side, and why, the sessile polyps, corals and sea anemones? Same problem saying why my self must be internal.Where do I see those finches glinting at the feeder? To experience |
Music | We bank sneaks do it for the back- jumping buzz and for the poetry of course, iamb after iamb of ka- klink in our birdcage coffers. The beard-jammer (that shitty shirtrabbit) dropped from the eaves after a whole lot of listening and squashed my swagger in seconds. So here I am on yonder Ponder Island, forced to forgo the |
Music | We pay to enter the dirty pen. We buy small bags of feed to feed the well-fed animals. We are guests in their home, our feet on their sawdust floor. We pretend not to notice the stench. Theirs is a predictable life. Better, I guess, than the slaughter, is the many-handed god. Me? I’m going to leave here, eat a |
Music | We should not have produced all this life.Let’s say I amin a state of heightened attentiveness.Is this my gift? Do I take your head in my handsand swivel it, or cast marbles around our feet, make a line I bring you behind?Now: see the man on wire, taste the papery |
Music | We walk through clouds wrapped in ancient symbolsWe descend the hill wearing water Maybe we are deadand don’t know itMaybe we are violet flowers and those we long for love onlyour unmade heartsOn attend, on attendWait for Duras and Eminescuto tell us in French then Romanianlight has wounds slow down— memory is |
Music | Well, I guess no one can have everything. I must learn to celebrate when I fail. Inner growth and fortitude follow the sting, right? Won't I rise with holy wind in my sails? Yet they always seem to get what I want, door after door flung open. Why are the keepers of doors, who haunt the hopeful |
Music | What can I say to cheer you up? This afternoon the sky is like five portholes between the clouds. The unidentifiable weeds are tall and still unidentifiable and I miss the cows in the field, where have they gone? Sometimes one would wander then stand in the middle of the |
Music | What is a wound but a flower dying on its descent to the earth, bag of scent filled with war, forest, torches, some trouble that befell now over and done. A wound is a fire sinking into itself. The tinder serves only so long, the log holds on and still it gives up, collapses into its bed of |
Music | What is it you feel I asked Kurt when you listen toRavel’s String Quartet in F-major, his face was so lit upand I wondered, “the music is unlike the world I liveor think in, it’s from somewhere else, unfamiliar and unknown,not because it is relevant to the familiar and comfortable,but |
Music | What is the point of travel For a DeafBlind person Other than the food the people the shops And all that* Part one young Question mother father Know right name Work some day*The mutant four-fingered carrot Is in the pot and growing Sweeter as it relaxes Its grip*When we say good morning In Japanese Sign Language We pull down a string To |
Music | What words can you wrap arounda dying brother, still dying, even now.A man who has not eaten for a monthsips at water and says, even thirst is a gift.He asks what other gifts God has given him.I’m your gift, his daughter says from a corner.And he smiles and rasps—you can |
Music | Whatever her story is, today and every day that I’m here, she’s here in her long, quilted green coat, her companion—a beagle?— nose to the ground, its tail a shimmy. Unlidded to lidded trash can they go, and all along the fence lining the stream, looking, I think, for whatever salvageable cast-offs can be found. By all |
Music | When did I know that I’d have to carry it around in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be added to, handful by handful if necessary, untilthe way my mother would sit all night in a room without the |
Music | When glaciers trapped a third of Earth’s water and drained the Bering Strait, humans journeyed to this land where wind swept the steppes of snow, exposing grass that would be plucked by mammoth trunks and ground by washboard teeth. Up to thirteen feet, their tusks curved helically and would intertwine if they went |
Music | when I dropped my 12-year-old off at her first homecoming dance, I tried not to look her newly-developed breasts, all surprise and alert in their uncertainty. I tried not to imagine her mashed between a young man's curiousness and the gym's sweaty wall. I tried not picture her grinding off beat/on time to |
Music | When I rose into the cradle of my mother’s mind, she was but a girl, fighting her sisters over a flimsy doll. It’s easy to forget how noiseless I could be spying from behind my mother’s eyes as her mother, bulging with a baby, a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed the doorway with a moon. We all fell silent. My |
Music | When I tell it, the first time I saw hail, I say it was in a desert and knocked a man unconscious then drove a woman into my arms because she thought the end was near but I assured her this wasn’t the case. When he tells it, he smiles, says the first winter after their exodus was |
Music | When I woke for school the next day the sky was uniform & less than infinite |
Music | When it comes at me in the mirror with its meaningramping up until it passes and lowers in pitch, I’m onthe bit of the M1 where it bisects the Ring of Gullion and I switch lanes, and let my right foot alleviateits weight on the accelerator of |
Music | When the dead returnthey will come to you in dreamand in waking, will be the birdknocking, knocking against glass, seekinga way in, will masqueradeas the wind, its voice made audibleby the tongues of leaves, greedilylapping, as the waves’ self-made fugueis a turning |
Music | When they first glimpsed Creation, it was only |
Music | When, at the end, the children wantedto add glitter to their valentines, I said no. I said nope, no, no glitter, and then,when they started to fuss, I found myself saying something my brother’s football coachused to bark from the sidelines when one of his players showed |
Music | white-throat sparrows/full of note/netted in the eventide/voices sawing the trees/fragile little bodies/tracing frantic circlesnot understanding/what we must all come to accept/not one day |
Music | Why don’t more animals pass through here? Dale asked There were none But sounds shifting in thick oil behind the cement wall that kept precisely those animals out the moon was rising a bruise was rakish on the moon’s right brain A coyote to the southwest on |
Music | Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone.The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spineand built you on a dark day. You are still missingsome parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shellsin your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal’s yolk, live seawater,my |
Music | Yoked to what? To whom? Calibration. Checkmate.Thunderous blowhard, tiny tea kettle. Boom.Bastion at the market, flashlight mimicry.Look at my phrase making, batting eyes.Whose hand do you hold? Whose hand do you want?Enough of this, ruiner. What’s the gift of talk,talk, talk. Where’re your minions, battle stations.Take out your troubled photocopies and burnthe Pilgrim’s kiss. There’s only one story. It |
Music | You ask me again this evening at what priceDoes wisdom finally come in any lifeOr at any age & now I think I |
Music | you cannot read what you do not collect the rain came in algidity after suffocating heat still the ravaging of marow is worth it tendons swollen & seasoned with need madness is always a hunger |
Music | You know how it pretendsto have a broken wing tolure predators away from itsnest, how it staggers just outof reach . . . if, at this moment, you’re feeling metaphorical,nest can be the whateverinside us that we think needsprotection, the whatever that issmall |
Music | You might say fear is a predictable emotion & I might agree. Whenever my husband leaves for his graveyard shift, when he prepares to walk out into the abyss of black sky, I am afraid tonight will be the night I become a widow. I don't want to love like this. But here we are: walking hand in hand in our parkas down the |
Music | You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain. —Kenkō, Essays in Idleness Consider that the insects might be metaphor. That the antlers’ wet velvet scent might be Proust’s madeleine dipped into a cup of |
Music | You, who have bowed your head, shed another season of antlers at my feet, for yearsyou fall asleep to the lullabies of dolls, cotton-stuffed and frayed, ears damp with sleepand saliva, scalps knotted with yarn, milk-breath, and yawns. Birth is a torn ticket stub, a sugarcone wrapped in a paper sleeve, the blackest ice. |
Music | you’re embarrassed by your own om you say—planning your funeral considering deep drones only a limited number of patterns exist for such a song played in one breath a prayer for a pregnant woman’s easy delivery a tender preamble for a new instrument a piece played for expressing gratitude a state of mind resembling moonlight a lighter |
Music | You’re used to it, the way,in the first wide-eyedminutes, climbing from parking lotto fire trail, or rifling throughcupboards in a rented kitchen,I can’t help but tell youwe should visit here again,my reverie insertinga variation in the season,or giving friends the roomnext door, in stubborn panicto fix this happiness in placeby |
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Death | in memory of Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, and Tyler ClementiThere are those who suffer in plain sight, there are those who suffer in private. Nothing but secondhand details: a last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak.There are those who suffer in private. The one in Tehachapi, aged 13. A |
Death | “Seldom we find,” says Solomon Don Dunce,“Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.Through all the flimsy things we see at onceAs easily as through a Naples |
Death | (For Alden March)With dropping sail and pennant That never a wind may reach, They float in sunless waters Beside a sunless beach. Their mighty masts and funnels Are white as driven snow, And with a |
Death | After Shiloh, with smoke still scumbling the air, the Harper’s artist paced away from the sunken road where a full brigade had been strafed and decimated. The flies had begun to swarm, lighting on the eyes and open wounds of the fallen, the stench already gut-wrenching, heartrending, as were the groans of injured pack animals weighted down by |
Death | filaments of her gift persistent mysteriespalpable consciousness a world of naming of ablutions in time fighter instinct action, the pressing in, closing |
Death | GEORGEAUGUSTUSCLOUGH A NATIVE OF LIVERPOOL, |
Death | i.m. Mark StrandMark came into the room and said, Tom, you have the face of a dog. Alan, you have the face of a horse. And me, I have the face |
Death | LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNIThe everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters,—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook |
Death | Lo! Death has reared himself a throneIn a strange city lying aloneFar down within the dim West,Wherethe good and the bad and the worst and the best |
Death | The deep wine of it risen tall abovethe buried |
Death | —after Donne's "Meditation XII"What won’t end a life if a vapor will?If this poem were a violent shaking ofThe air by thunder or by cannon, inThat case the air would be condensed aboveThe thickness of water, of water bakedInto |
Death | ‘Oh whence do you come, my dear friend, to me,With your golden hair all fallen below your knee,And your face as white as snowdrops on the lea,And your voice as hollow as the hollow sea?’‘From the other world I come back to you:My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew,You |
Death | ‘There’s a footstep coming: look out and see,’ ‘The leaves are falling, the wind is calling;No one cometh across the lea.’—‘There’s a footstep coming: O sister, look.’— ‘The ripple flashes, the white foam dashes;No one cometh across the brook.’—‘But he promised that he would come: To-night, to-morrow, in joy or |
Death | "I am come—I am come! once again from the tomb,In return for the ring which you gave;That I am thine, and that thou art mine,This nuptial pledge receive."He lay like a corse 'neath the Demon's force, |
Death | “Lights out" along the land, “Lights out” upon the sea. The night must put her hiding hand O’er peaceful towns where children sleep, And peaceful ships that darkly creep Across the waves, as if they were not free.The dragons of the air, The hell-hounds of the deep, Lurking and prowling everywhere, Go forth to seek their helpless prey, Not |
Death | “the tongues of dying men/enforce attention like deep harmony.” |
Death | (For Edward J. Wheeler)Within the Jersey City shed The engine coughs and shakes its head. The smoke, a plume of red and white, Waves madly in the face of night. And now the grave incurious stars Gleam on the groaning hurrying |
Death | {on the occasion of Martin Puryear’s Noblesse O’ (red cedar and aluminum paint) at the Dallas Museum of Art}Perfect for picking up marbles, For finding, lifting, a favoriteBlade of grass, O’ magic elastic straw of the watering hole,Perfected for sucking, water, up, Then miraculously aiming back Around, into the mouth, mod implement |
Death | 1 in my father's tomb the gods have been buried for millennia in Crete Mycenae Mexico or Babylon and your task, young ephebe, is radically changed we're not talking about singing in chorus by the light of the moon nor pretending to the warmth of a bonfire shepherding a metallic herd we're talking about carefully observing |
Death | 1Before he left for combat, he took care of everything: someone to plow the driveway, cut the grass. And the letter he wrote me, just in case, sealed, somewhere, in a drawer; can't be opened, must be opened if he doesn't return. I feel for my keys,hear his voice: Less is better. Late for work, still, I linger at the window of the |
Death | 47. I want to make a dark mirror out of writing: one child facing the other, like Dora and little Hans. I want to write, for example, about the violence done to my father's body as a child. In this re-telling, India is blue, green, black and yellow like the |
Death | A cloud has lowered that shall not soon pass o’er.The world takes sides: whether for impious aimsWith Tyranny whose bloody toll enflamesA generous people to heroic war;Whether with Freedom, stretched in her own gore,Whose pleading hands and suppliant distressStill offer hearts that thirst for RighteousnessA glorious cause to strike or |
Death | A De Chirico head aslant on a coverlet, body mostly flown, the dazed prayers dumb.The ritual cigarette, the ritual drink: incense, holy water. No ambivalence, the woman inside fled, the whispers I make of tenderness—hers—she sleeps through.She's in that corridor, tunnel, the light is left on— shut if off. But the nurse has to |
Death | A second ago my heart thump went and I thought, "This would be a bad time to have a heart attack and die, in the middle of a poem," then took comfort in the idea that no one I have ever heardof has ever died in the middle of writinga poem, just |
Death | A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish |
Death | A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,To drink there.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob treeI came down the steps with my pitcherAnd must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before |
Death | A woman tattoos Malik’s name aboveher breast & talks about the conspiracyto destroy blacks. This is all a fancy wayto say that someone kirked out, emptiedfive or six or seven shots into a still warm body.No indictment follows Malik’s death,follows smoke running from a fired pistol.An old quarrel: crimson against |
Death | Adam lay ibounden,Bounden in a bond; Four thousand winterThoght he not too long; And all was for an appil,An appil that he tok, As clerkes findenWreten in here book. Ne hadde the appil take |
Death | Admit it— you wanted the end with a serpentinegreed. How to negotiatethat stranglingmist, the fibrous whisper?To cease to existand to dieare two different things entirely. But you knew this,didn't you?Some days you knelt on coinsin those yellow hours. You lit a flameto your shadowand atescorpions |
Death | after five times the poem of thy remembrance surprises with refrainof unreasoning summer that by responding ways cloaked with renewal my body turns towardthee againfor the stars have been finished in the nobler trees and the language of leaves repeatseventual perfection while east deserves of dawn, i lie at length,breathing with shut eyesthe sweet earth where |
Death | After he died, my father madewhole, I could see him nextto my mother as she smokedon the couch, his face more alivethan at Christmas, the last timeI saw him, struggling to lift his cup. I knew beyond my body, now he’d died,he could show off a row of teeth, wryand silly, |
Death | After I've goosed up the fire in the stove with Starter Loggso that it burns like fire on amphetamines; after it's imprisoned,screaming and thrashing, behind the stove door; after I'velistened to the dead composers and watched the brown-plus-graydeer compose into Cubism the trees whose name I |
Death | after the news of the deadwhether or not we knew them we are saying thank you |
Death | after Yusef KomunyakaaMy black face fades, hiding inside black smoke.I knew they'd use it, dammit: tear gas.I'm grown. I'm fresh.Their clouded assumption eyes me like a runaway, guilty as night, chasing morning. I run this way—the street |
Death | All the hills and vales alongEarth is bursting into song,And the singers are the chapsWho are going to die perhaps. O sing, marching men, Till the valleys ring again. Give your gladness to earth’s keeping, So be glad, when you are sleeping. |
Death | Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!They too are on the road—they are the swift and majestic men— they are the greatest women,Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,Habituès of many distant countries, habituès of |
Death | Always before your voice my soulhalf-beautiful and wholly drollis as some smooth and awkward foal,whereof young moons beginthe newness of his skin, so of my stupid sincere youththe exquisite failure uncouthdiscovers a trembling and smoothUnstrength,against the strongsilences of your song; or as |
Death | Ambition—died on August 3, 2015, asudden death. I buried ambition in theforest, next to distress. They used totake walks together until ambitionpushed distress off the embankment.Now, they put a bracelet around myfather’s ankle. The alarm rings whenhe gets too close to the door. Hisambitious nature makes him walk tothe door |
Death | An away of practice the other is Like a river out of acts the other is Hapless, unheard, with marks upon him Having dallied in tarrying unwisely Backlit at an undecidable remove In a house of marks the other is Useless deciding whether to go Or wait in best practices like a child A hapless river filled with |
Death | And after the black boy is strangled by police, after the protests where the man, his Rottweiler on an iron leash yells, let's go mash up dis city and another crowd bulks, the parents of the murdered beg us not to become the monsters some think we already are—even when the barista shakes |
Death | and in each for such as fall to board reduced to liquid dispute over sight the term means and the term means territory the term me- island budget, its sole discretion reports instrument pursuant to paragraph or subsection session the public powers by section data in the sunshine code; the board shall secure a metadata government, document electric |
Death | Animals come down through stars to reach the valley. A coyote with its nose pressed in a rabbit hole. Two Sandhill cranes as tall as rain, and listening north. And when a cougar screams its human scream, I’m suddenly a child again, awake, the parched air raked by drumfire blasts, window panes all gleam and vast, animals angling through |
Death | Any day now you will have the ability to feed the nameOf anyone into an engine & your long lost half brotherAs well as whoever else possesses a version of his nameWill appear before your face in bits of pixels & dataDisplaying his monikers (like Gitmo for trapping, BangBang for |
Death | As in green, vert, a royal demesne stocked with deer. Invert as in tippedas a snow globe, going nowhere in circlesbut not lost, not bereft as the woodwithout deer, waiting for the white antleredbuck, or his does, or any slim yearlingto step along the berm, return. Vertigoas in whirling round, |
Death | August sauntered down the mountain-side, Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay. The air was like an old priest Disrobing without embarrassment Before the dark and candid gaze of night. But these things brought no pause To the saucily determined squirrel. His eyes were hungrily upturned To where the stars hung—icily clustered nuts Dotting trees of solitude. He saw the stars |
Death | Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable starsI have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will, and in the meantime neglect, Love,the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,instead, to this tale, for a river burns |
Death | Behind the cornfield, we scaled the mountainside looking for a foothold among the crags,rooting out weeds, trampling on trash, the trek as if it were a holy crusade:bodies armored, mounted on horses, banners fluttering in the air.Then one morning, we |
Death | Bone-spur, stirrup of veins—white colt a tree, sapling bone again, worn to a splinter, a steeple, the birch agroundin its ravine of leaves. Abide with me, arrive at its skinned branches, its arms pulled from the sapling, your wrist taut,each ganglion a gash in the tree's rent trunk, a child's hackwork, love plus love, my palms |
Death | Brother, today I sit on the brick bench outside the house,where you make a bottomless emptiness. I remember we used to play at this hour of the day, and mamawould calm us: "There now, boys..." Now I go hide as before, from all these eveningprayers, and I hope that you |
Death | Caretakers—died in 2009, 2010, 2011,2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017,one after another. One didn’t show upbecause her husband was arrested. Most others watched the clock. Timebreaks for the living eventually and wecan walk out of doors. The handle oftime’s door is hot for the dying. Whatuse is a door if you |
Death | Cashel, Ireland, 2,000 B.C. In ancient Ireland, bogs were sacred areas; a cool wetland mirage metersdeep of peat during demoralizingdrought. Greenish-brown landscapeof mystery, insufferably slow plantgrowth. What must a farmer have thought as his wife offered a vessel of golden butter to appease a mercilessdeity? He plunges his hand |
Death | Daphne was known within these doors And to these streets. Lovely her humor and lovely her smile We tear our garments and sit on low boxes Let's see who can sing the best story.Amaryllis I will praise as best I can Taking my turn to raise our Daphne up Among the stars, Daphne shall be high Among |
Death | Death, I say, my heart is bowedUnto thine, O mother! This red gown will make a shroudGood as any other.(I, that would not wait to wearMy own bridal things, In a dress dark as my hairMade my answerings.I, to-night, that |
Death | Do not pretend that you don't like it when we threaten you.We see you getting pheromone stink under the collar, moaning, baldly. Motionless, picturing decay.When we creak your step, when we crack your glass, when we tap tap tap,that is a bonethat is all we havethough we are very shiny, and filled with beetles.We are |
Death | Elizabeth it is in vain you say"Love not" — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:In vain those words from thee or L.E.L.Zantippe's talents had enforced so well:Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,Breath it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.Endymion, recollect, when Luna triedTo cure |
Death | Every day you sink into her To make room for me. When I die, I sink into you, When Xing dies, she sinks Into me, her child dies & Sinks into Xing & the Earth, Who is always ravenous, Swallows us. I don’t know where you’re buried. I don’t know your sons’ names, Only their numbers & fates: #2 was murdered, |
Death | Everybody is doing trigger warnings now, so To Whom It May Concern, I hated God when my sister died. I didn’t know it was coming, but we were at the hospital in a private room for family, and our pastor was there, the one who baptized me, andhe said Let us pray, and I |
Death | Everything in the beginning is the same. Clouds let us look at the sun. Words let us watch a man about to be killed. The eye-hollows of his skull see home. When they stone him,he knows what a stone is—each word, a stone:The hole of his nose as dark as the door |
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