Zero

by George Bilgere

First it was five above, then two,
then one morning just plain zero.
There was a strange thrill in saying it.
It's zero,
I said when you got up.

I was pouring your coffee
and suddenly the whole house made sense:
the roof, the walls, the little heat registers
rattling on the floor. Even the mortgage. Zero,
you said, still in your robe.

And you walked to the window and looked out
at the blanket of snow on the garden
where last summer you planted carrots
and radishes, sweet peas and onions,
and a tiny rainforest of tomatoes
in the hot delirium of June.

Yes, I said, with a certain grim finality,
staring at the white cap of snow on the barbecue grill
I'd neglected to put in the garage for winter.
And the radio says it could go lower.

I like that robe, it's white and shimmery,
and has a habit of falling open
unless you tie it just right.

This wasn't the barbarians at the gate.
It wasn't Carthage in flames, or even
the Donner Party. But it was zero, by God,
and the robe fell open.

Wait

by C. K. Williams

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—

not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,

time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,

one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,

another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was

for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.

It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,

relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.

Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,

you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,

my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,

trying to heave itself back to its other way with you.

But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran

as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you?

Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds?

Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it,

a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,

not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve?

Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,

how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.

Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over

the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn,

to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?

We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

Bridal Shower

by George Bilgere

Perhaps, in a distant café,
four or five people are talking
with the four or five people
who are chatting on their cell phones this morning
in my favorite café.

And perhaps someone there,
someone like me, is watching them as they frown,
or smile, or shrug
at their invisible friends or lovers,
jabbing the air for emphasis.

And, like me, he misses the old days,
when talking to yourself
meant you were crazy,
back when being crazy was a big deal,
not just an acronym
or something you could take a pill for.

I liked it
when people who were talking to themselves
might actually have been talking to God
or an angel.
You respected people like that.

You didn't want to kill them,
as I want to kill the woman at the next table
with the little blue light on her ear
who has been telling the emptiness in front of her
about her daughter's bridal shower
in astonishing detail
for the past thirty minutes.

O person like me,
phoneless in your distant café,
I wish we could meet to discuss this,
and perhaps you would help me
murder this woman on her cell phone,

after which we could have a cup of coffee,
maybe a bagel, and talk to each other,
face to face.

Optimism

by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and
over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the
light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs—
all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Vestibule

By Chase Twichell

What etiquette holds us back
from more intimate speech,
especially now, at the end of the world?
Can’t we begin a conversation
here in the vestibule,
then gradually move it inside?
What holds us back
from saying things outright?
We’ve killed the earth.
Yet we speak of other things.
Our words should cauterize
all wounds to the truth.

Rite of Passage

by Sharon Olds

As the guests arrive at our son’s party

they gather in the living room—

short men, men in first grade

with smooth jaws and chins.

Hands in pockets, they stand around

jostling, jockeying for place, small fights

breaking out and calming. One says to another

How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?

They eye each other, seeing themselves

tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their

throats a lot, a room of small bankers,

they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you

up, a seven says to a six,

the midnight cake, round and heavy as a

turret behind them on the table. My son,

freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,

chest narrow as the balsa keel of a

model boat, long hands

cool and thin as the day they guided him

out of me, speaks up as a host

for the sake of the group.

We could easily kill a two-year-old,

he says in his clear voice. The other

men agree, they clear their throats

like Generals, they relax and get down to

playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

What She Was Wearing

by Denver Butson

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves

so you don't set fire to something?
he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I'd like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I'm wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don't get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

Boil

By Alicia Ostriker

Boil over—it’s what the nerves do,
Watch them seethe when stimulated,

Murmurs the man at the stove
To the one at the fridge—

Watch that electric impulse that finally makes them
Fume and fizz at either

Frayed end. If you could grasp a bundle
Of nerves in your fist like a jumper cable, and sense that

Python’s writhe, or a garden hose when the pressure’s
High and it wilfully weaves about

Trying its best to get away from you—
You’d see how nothing is passive,

We’re all—I mean from our elephant sun, ejaculant
Great-grandfather, cascading down

To weightless
Unstoppable neutrinos

Leaving their silvery trace
In vacuum chambers, in

Effervescent lines, twisted
Madly in our madhouse jackets,

Rules, laws, which we are seething to break
Though to rupture them might be of course to die,

Or, possibly,
To change:

Boil, it’s what water
And everything else teaches.

Doesn't Matter What It Looks Like

by Hal Sirowitz

"When you have blown your nose,
you should not open your handkerchief
and inspect it, as though pearls or rubies
had dropped out of your skull."
The Book of Manners (1958)

After you have blown your nose,
Father said, it's not polite to look inside
your handkerchief to see what it looks like.
You're not a doctor. What's more important
is getting the handkerchief back into your pocket
without staining your pants. There are some things
it's better not to look at. It should be left
to your imagination, but if you have
a strong desire to look you can always
find pictures of it in a medical book.

Congratulating Wedge

By Alice Notley

All things belie me, I think, but I
look at them though. Well boys, at
least you’re not dead, right? What’s
the date today? Until something. What?
Of the lady of the whitening blow.
I’m ashamed to keep on babbling
as if I’ve always been oneself,
diamond flow through. Humble
flannel skeleton. Grin, laugh unbecoming
Living at the bottom of the water may
have been obvious all the time. But
I forget. What’s my plot? Hand
of a child, paw of an animal. Paint
it red & make a pawprint in the psalter.
Protect her & give her back her hat
Entangle her dreams in demotic and
Warm her feet; cheat the judge
& protect the tree from which he was carved.


*

And now that I’ve explained the situation
Jesus my frame hurts, you say.
Fucking pain. Hey come & empty my ashtray
once more & don’t get so excited. A
gentle heart was broken. Whose? No one’s
It’s a figure like a frame among
medlars & briars. Hand me that piece of
that, just that, yeah. I don’t mean it,
I’ve never meant anything because that’s
not what I do, in the mountains I call home
How can I tell you of my wound? it’s
round & silver & headstrong, it’s
nothing more than temperament born
of a custom involving a circuitous journey
This is all wrong. It rains today, my
son’s singing love songs of this
country, already being ten.


*

And if to withstand this nocturnal pollution of the tiny
wanton stars with bent hook clauses of misprision
I’m supposed to sing the melody of an unexpecting part. . .
Hey a pretty honey come a listen to me
while I evening, darling, your messages,
what would you think then? But I
wouldn’t do that. Light surrounded oranges
towels clouds. You don’t think you’re my you.
Not here not you. You still think you’re he. she.
Because I wouldn’t “you” you, would I? I only
“you” some other he. she. I
who write poems. When she writes them,
it’s different. . .A world of words, right?
It’s only my version of The Entertainer
Nothing truly personal, I’m way above that.
I’ve learned about it for a lot of days. I’ve
been to see the doctor & you have to have shots
for it. 17 balls of yarn & a sewing machine.


*

No I wouldn’t know why anyone would
want to write like that. I should never
have had to do it. We were used to this
other thing we always know like when we’re
here. And you have this clear head & you’re
seeing things & there they are. You don’t
notice they’re spelled. That’s how you
know you’re alive. I never saw you

The Landing

by J. D. McClatchy

Through the blinds, it must have been the searchlight I saw

That silvered the woodwork. Step by step, its shadow was

Measuring out tonight. The climb itself has become a cloud

That thickens with the effort. I’d look up if I could.

Three lines erased in the address book. The thumbed pages

Of those last weeks through which the half lit end still gapes,

Unwritten. And what I miss goes without saying. Has

The explanation even there been brief as a flame and its ash?

I speak to the air that takes these things finally as its own.

Tell me who that is beyond the stairwell’s next turning now.

Tossing and Turning

by John Updike

The spirit has infinite facets, but the body
confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh's sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross
your ankles. Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.

History of Desire

by Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

Clear Night

By Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

Her Name is Rose

By Peter Pereira

With a boil the size of an egg
protruding from her right hip,
she knows what I must do,
and to stall me has locked herself
inside the bathroom, bargaining
for a way out.

But it’s too late: I’ve seen
the oozing wounds stopped up with bits
of toilet paper and tape, the scarified
pockets that crater the surface
of her arms, buttocks, thighs.

A mean fix torched her last vein
years ago, and she’s been banging the dope
ever since, puncturing her body
like a juju doll. She wants to kick,
but not now.

I’m not gonna lie to you, she says
in a velvet voice. I already know what she’s after:
something stronger than local, a few Percocet, a shot of Demerol
before she’ll let me begin.

All I can tell you is, when the abscess finally drains
the odor is so foul it’s evil.

And I’m not sure, driving home
later that night, still smelling the pallid citrus,
whether it’s merely hallucination, the way
her memory inhabits me; or if being
in that same room, inhaling
that same air, made some of her
part of me.

And whose veins
are these, beginning to twitch?

The Curtain

by Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.

We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.

But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window

We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,

We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees

So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost

With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,

We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet

Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom

Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months

Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs

In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives

Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.

We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.

For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,

The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,

Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,

We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.

No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never

Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,

Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,

May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.

Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

Love Poem

by Donald Hall

When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.

You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

Benzene

By Donald Revell

It is the right time for hallucinations.
Drowning in a sty, the sailor
feels the ocean’s buoyancy.
Dying in a web, the moth
discards its wings and falls free.

I wish something would put its hands on me,
give me stronger poison and then stronger.
The beautiful flotillas do not stop.
Undying love drifts and delays.
I am capsizing.

Great joy lingers still.
Nothing can be said for suffering.
It is legible only to strangers
and at great distances. It detests
survivors. It drapes gun-carriages

with flowers, lampposts with hanging boys.
It is the right time for hallucinations,
most nakedly of inmost west.
Her death would be less tender now,
dusted over with charity,

a web of useless wings, a shallow sty.
She gave me stronger poison and then stronger.
I miss her.
In the back seat of the taxi,
dark breathlessness says “Hurry, hurry.”

They Flee From Me

by Sir Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Rain on Tin

By Rodney Jones

If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain,
of waiting under the eaves of an old house
at that moment
when it takes a form like fog.
It makes the mountain vanish.
Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up,
only condensed and refined.
Almost fifty years since thunder rolled
and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.
Brazil is where I wanted to live.
The border is not far from here.
Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,
and something for the pain please,
a little purity to sand the rough edges,
a slow downpour from the Dark Ages,
a drizzle from the Pleistocene.
As I dream of the rain’s long body,
I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes
and then I will be primed to study rain’s power,
the first drops lightly hallowing,
but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain
or an explosion of orange-green light.
A simple radiance, it requires no discipline.
Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain.
The mist and then the clearing.
I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow,
and my whole life flowing
until I have no choice, only the rain,
and I step into it

Flirtation

by Rita Dove

After all, there’s no need

to say anything

at first. An orange, peeled

and quartered, flares

like a tulip on a wedgewood plate

Anything can happen.

Outside the sun

has rolled up her rugs

and night strewn salt

across the sky. My heart

is humming a tune

I haven’t heard in years!

Quiet’s cool flesh—

let’s sniff and eat it.

There are ways

to make of the moment

a topiary

so the pleasure’s in

walking through.

Coming Home

by Mary Oliver

When we're driving, in the dark,
on the long road
to Provincetown, which lies empty
for miles, when we're weary,
when the buildings
and the scrub pines lose
their familiar look,
I imagine us rising
from the speeding car,
I imagine us seeing
everything from another place — the top
of one of the pale dunes
or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea —
and what we see is the world
that cannot cherish us
but which we cherish,
and what we see is our life
moving like that,
along the dark edges
of everything — the headlights
like lanterns
sweeping the blackness —
believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.

Written with a Pencil Found in Lorine Niedecker’s Front Yard

By David Trinidad

Bewitched
the boys were out
in force

Drunken-
ness and lust

—and full moon
bouncing back
and forth that
black

above the bars

*

Last night
it burned
cigarette

tip
thru old
blanket

hole-punched
gray paper
sky

Tonight it
outright
blinded

One headlight
or drive-in sci-fi
eye

*

I’ve been
alone
long enough

Even the moon
wears a ring

and is full

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Boil

by Alicia Ostriker

Boil over—it’s what the nerves do,

Watch them seethe when stimulated,

Murmurs the man at the stove

To the one at the fridge—

Watch that electric impulse that finally makes them

Fume and fizz at either

Frayed end. If you could grasp a bundle

Of nerves in your fist like a jumper cable, and sense that

Python’s writhe, or a garden hose when the pressure’s

High and it wilfully weaves about

Trying its best to get away from you—

You’d see how nothing is passive,

We’re all—I mean from our elephant sun, ejaculant

Great-grandfather, cascading down

To weightless

Unstoppable neutrinos

Leaving their silvery trace

In vacuum chambers, in

Effervescent lines, twisted

Madly in our madhouse jackets,

Rules, laws, which we are seething to break

Though to rupture them might be of course to die,

Or, possibly,

To change:

Boil, it’s what water

And everything else teaches.

Alien vs. Predator

by Michael Robbins

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.

We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s

berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys

for a living, you’d pray to me, too.

I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree

making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.

I set the controls, I pioneer

the seeding of the ionosphere.

I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,

but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?

I fight the comets, lick the moon,

pave its lonely streets.

The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.

I go by many names: Buju Banton,

Camel Light, the New York Times.

Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.

I have few legs. I sleep on meat.

I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

To Have a Friend

By Tomaz Salamun

I see the devil’s head, people, I see his whole body
I never thought he could come so close
he longs for innocence, as we do, I have the sensation
he was crammed into the wall for a long time

I have the feeling that his hands ache, that he is tender
and absorbed in thoughts, he licks everything before killing it,
he bursts into tears, scraping meat, he is blessed
he has no friends, he is walking alone in the world

I have the feeling he is saying something to me
that he is watching me with regret
he knows I could never sleep with him
we are both humiliated

he reminds me of the English teacher
when he was pensioned off, and young secret-police recruits,
it seems his beatitude is failing
the souls squeal when he tortures them

he doesn’t drink them, as I imagined
it seems he derives no benefit from them
I think he would like to have a friend
to share goods and pleasure

he steps in the river and wets his head in it
he doesn’t know how to speak with it
he splashes on the surface
I will leave him as he is, I will not talk to him

Uncle Jim

by Peter Meinke

What the children remember about Uncle Jim
is that on the train to Reno to get divorced
so he could marry again
he met another woman and woke up in California.
It took him seven years to untangle that dream
but a man who could sing like Uncle Jim
was bound to get in scrapes now and then:
he expected it and we expected it.

Mother said, It's because he was the middle child,
and Father said, Yeah, where there's trouble
Jim's in the middle.

When he lost his voice he lost all of it
to the surgeon's knife and refused the voice box
they wanted to insert. In fact he refused
almost everything. Look, they said,
it's up to you. How many years
do you want to live? and Uncle Jim
held up one finger.
The middle one.

The Answering Machine

by Linda Pastan

I call and hear your voice

on the answering machine

weeks after your death,

a fledgling ghost still longing

for human messages.

Shall I leave one, telling

how the fabric of our lives

has been ripped before

but that this sudden tear will not

be mended soon or easily?

In your emptying house, others

roll up rugs, pack books,

drink coffee at your antique table,

and listen to messages left

on a machine haunted

by the timbre of your voice,

more palpable than photographs

or fingerprints. On this first day

of this first fall without you,

ashamed and resisting

but compelled, I dial again

the number I know by heart,

thankful in a diminished world

for the accidental mercy of machines,

then listen and hang up.

During the War

By Philip Levine

When my brother came home from war
he carried his left arm in a black sling
but assured us most of it was still there.
Spring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out.

I stood in a long line waiting for bread.
The woman behind me said it was shameless,
someone as strong as I still home, still intact
while her Michael was burning to death.

Yes, she could feel the fire, could smell
his pain all the way from Tarawa–
or was it Midway?–and he so young,
younger than I, who was only fourteen,

taller, more handsome in his white uniform
turning slowly gray the way unprimed wood
grays slowly in the grate when the flames
sputter and die. “I think I’m going mad,”

she said when I turned to face her. She placed
both hands on my shoulders, kissed each eyelid,
hugged me to her breasts and whispered wetly
in my bad ear words I’d never heard before.

When I got home my brother ate the bread
carefully one slice at a time until
nothing was left but a blank plate. “Did you see her,”
he asked, “the woman in hell, Michael’s wife?”

That afternoon I walked the crowded streets
looking for something I couldn’t name,
something familiar, a face or a voice or less,
but not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.

Human Beauty

By Albert Goldbarth

If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

Self-Portrait

by Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.

His arms, his skin,

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.