The Sky at Night

A belated excursion to
the stone collection
of our feelings

Little left here
worth showing
alas

Is there
from an anthropological perspective
a need for love

Or merely for
yearnings easy
to disappoint

Which stars
go down
as white dwarfs

What relation
does a heavy heart bear
to the art of comedy

Does the hunter
Orion have answers
to such questions

Or are they
too closely guarded
by the Dog Star 

W.G Sebald

Reunion

           As the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of our stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise
medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
           I came to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more boy
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn't remember us.
           It's not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves' faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.



BRUCE WEIGL

The Abundance of Nothing 

Confidence Trick

Caught in a world of wrong intentions she trips over a man next to the curb reading an outdated paper about a war that never ceased. She tries to tell him it’s no longer true gives up right after he kisses her. The next day she believes the news too rolls up her truths and follows him to an alley where everyone lies dead.  She curls up beside them knows nothing about the fact that his war was never hers at all. Against the curb he lies waiting for another victim to trip across his graceless world.  In the alley, bodies steam into a cold April morning.

Hospital 1 - Flew Over the Ku's Nest

outside blooms green inside grimy windows collapsed veins plume smell of purple cabbage

REALLY?!

http://news.sympatico.ca/unusualnews/five_charged_after_chinese_teen_sells_kidney_to_buy_iphone/9e2b2845

Not Beyond All Conjectur3

John Ashbery

Oblivion scattereth her poppy, and besides
it’s time to go inside now,
feed the aggressive pets, forgive our trespasses
for trespassing against us.
                          Other times
monotony is like a cave, the air is fresh,
tedium tonic.
             We lie in a museum of helpful objects,
leaning toward the accomplishment of a small,
complicated task, like sailors in rigging.
Something no American has yet achieved.

Murmurs Of The Earth From This Land

Muriel Rukeyser

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters,
       from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our
       dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot.
We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down
        where water has not run for sixty years.
Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of
        the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from
        the abandoned iron-black mill.
Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten
        colors.
Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the
        murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock.
Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots.
You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat.
You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green;
The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of
        accretions
A beach of dream before the smoking mirror.
You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and
        the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea
Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes
        of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon,
Everywhere, you own silence, who drink from the crater, the
        nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

— from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. 

I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus

I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus
Adrienne Rich

I am walking rapidy through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her deat poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell's Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror

Dreamwood

Dreamwood
Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child's older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. lt would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn't revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from thc Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.

Vasko Popa

Give Me Back My Rags

Just pop into my head

My thoughts the better to claw your cheek
Just step in front of me
My eyes the better to snap at you
Just open your big mouth
My silence the better to crack your jaws
just remind me of what you are
My memory the better to dig a hole beneath your feet
That’s how things stand between us

1

Give me back my rags

My raglets of pure dream

Of silken smiles

Striped premonition

And my lace-like sinews

My raglets of polka-dot hope

Of filigreed lust

Calico glances

And the skin off my face

Give me back my rags

I’m asking you nicely

2

Listen you freak

Off with your white kerchief

Don’t we know each other

Together from childhood

Lapping at the same bowl

Snoozing in the same bed

With you evil-eyed knife

Walking this strange world

With you snake in the shirt

Listen double-crosser

Off with your white kerchief

Why lie to each other

3

I won’t carry you piggyback

I won’t take you where you tell me

Even if I were shod in gold

Even if I were harnessed to three wheels

On the cart of the wind

Even if I were bridled to a rainbow

Don’t try to grease my palm

I won’t even with my feet in my pocket

Threaded through a needle tied into a knot

Or whittled into a simple stick

Don’t try to scare me

I won’t even roasted or overroasted

Raw or salted

Not even in a dream

Don’t go on kidding yourself

It doesn’t work I won’t

4

Get out of my walled-in infinity

The dancing ring of stars around my heart

Out of my morsel of sunlight

The rollicking sea of my blood

My flow my ebb

Out of my marooned silence

Get out I said get out

Out of my living pit

The bare father-tree within me

Get out how long do I have to shout

Out of my head bursting into pieces

Out out just get out

5

You get kewpie doll notions

I bathe them in my blood

Dress them in the rags of my skin

Make swings out of my hair for them

Toy carts from my vertebrae

Gliders from my eyebrows

I make them butterflies from my smiles

Wild beasts from my teeth

To hunt to kill time

What kind of game is this anyway

6

Damn your root blood and crown

And everything else in your life

Every dried up image in your brain

Every shifty eye burning on your fingertips

And every step you take

May you sink into three kettles of grumpy water

Into three stoves of omen-fire

Into three pits without name or milk

An icy breath against your throat

The pebble beneath your left tit

And the bird-razor in that pebble

Swoop the blackest of blackbirds to the lair of nothing

To the hungry scissors of beginnings

To the womb of heaven I know so well

Damn your seed sap and glitter

Darkness and dot at my life’s end

And everything else in the world too

7

What happened to my raglets

You won’t give them back you won’t

I’ll scorch your eyebrows

You won’t be invisible forever

I’ll mix day and night in your skull

You’ll come beating your head on my back door yet

I’ll pare your screeching fingernails

You won’t chalk hopscotch through my brain anymore

I’ll hound the fog out of your bones

Slurp the hemlock off your tongue

You’ll see what I’ll do

8

So you want us to love each other

You can make me out of ashes

The trash of my belly laughs

Out of what’s left of my boredom

You can doll-face

You can grab me by the hair of my short memory

Hug my night in its empty shirt

Kiss and kiss my echo

And you don’t even know how to love

9

Run freak

Our footprints bite one another

In the dust behind us

We’re not meant for each other

I see through your iciness

Pace your extremities

This is not much of a game

Why did we ever mix our rags

Hand them over what do you want with them

They are just fading on your shoulders

Hand them over scram into your nowhere

Run freak from a freak

Don’t you have eyes

There’s a freak here too

10

May your tongue blacken

Your noon your hope

Everything black only my chill white

My wolf at your throat

May the storm be your bed

My fear your pillow

Wide the meadow of your sleeplessness

May your every morsel be fiery

Your teeth of wax

Come on glutton chew all you want

Dumb your wind your water your flowers

Everything tongue-tied

Only my grinding teeth still loud

My hawk at your throat

One less horror for your mother

11

I wiped your face off my face

Tore your shadow off my shadow

Levelled the hills within you

Crumpled your plains into hills

Made your seasons quarrel

Kicked the earth’s corners from you

Tied the path of my life around you

My overgrown my impossible path

Now just try to meet me

12

Enough of your sweet-talking immortelles

Of your candied trifles

I don’t want to hear to know

Enough enough of everything

I’ll say my final enough

Stuff my mouth with earth

Grind my teeth

I’ll shut up skull-lapper

Shut up once and for all

I’ll stand just as I am

Without root branch or crown

I’ll lean on myself

On my own bumps

I’ll be the stake driven into you

Into you party-pooper

Into you muddle-head

That’s all I can do

May you never come back

13

Don’t fool with me freak

You hid a knife under your scarf

Stepped over the line tripped me up

You spoiled the game

You wanted my heavens to turn over

The sun to break my head

My rags to be scattered

Never fool with another freak

just give back my rags

And I’ll give back yours