The Magi

by William Butler Yeats

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

When the Body

When the body
promises itself
and fulfills its promise
desiring with voices
that spill into the garden and stick to the branches
like resin
when the body in its exaltation announces
"In chaos I exist absolutely"
and under the bare light of the bulb
splits in two
so that one half sinks into
the other half
when its word becomes
a perpendicular line
connecting it to the heavens
when the body
poisoned by juices
swaddled by touches
reveals itself to be all alone
and bedazzled
when it swallows what it gives out
when it gives in to what presses in
when its measured surface
has been measured countless times
by the eye, the mouth
the exacting lens of time
down to the last pimple, pore
when the beautiful proportions
curl up out of breath
and the argument
I am in love therefore I exist
is exhausted
the voices come back to the roots of the kidney
and a bird hidden
untouched by all the saliva and kisses
flies away, flies over
the desert space
sown with the teeth and hair
left behind by the body
when the body ...

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck

6. News Will Arrive From Far Away

by Dana Gioia

News will arrive from far away: the phone
rings unexpectedly at night,
and a voice you almost recognize
will speak. Soft and familiar,
it mentions names you haven't heard for years,
names of another place, another time,
that street by street restore
the lost geography of childhood.
Half asleep you listen in the dark
gradually remembering where you are.
You start to speak. Then silence.
A dial tone. An intervening voice.
Or nothing. The call is finished.
Not even time to turn the lights on.
Now just the ticking of the clock,
the cold disorder of the bed.

Our Fathers

So we'll never hear Sinatra
the way our fathers did, who wander the rooms
in their pajamas wondering where in the world,
where? And someone says, No,
no thank you, sick of listening to strangers
in the street, sick of coming home in doubt
or in time for the familiar meal, the usual
complaints, fingers extended as the polish dries.
Our fathers. Alone or together alone
with the new wives that never took.
And the coffee by the window. And the neighbor's
dogs chasing deer down the driveway.
The arrival of mail and the afternoon light, a bruise
in the birches crowding the house.
Our fathers, for whom the days cannot pass
slowly enough, who find their old hats
behind the shoe boxes and photo albums
and say, Why not? For Frank before Las Vegas,
for DiMaggio and Bogart. They say, The evening
is wider than a mile, though of course nothing
is waiting on the other side,
nothing but night.

James Harms

Fifteen

by William Stafford

South of the bridge on Seventeenth
I found back of the willows one summer
day a motorcycle with engine running
as it lay on its side, ticking over
slowly in the high grass. I was fifteen.

I admired all that pulsing gleam, the
shiny flanks, the demure headlights
fringed where it lay; I led it gently
to the road and stood with that
companion, ready and friendly. I was fifteen.

We could find the end of a road, meet
the sky on out Seventeenth. I thought about
hills, and patting the handle got back a
confident opinion. On the bridge we indulged
a forward feeling, a tremble. I was fifteen.

Thinking, back farther in the grass I found
the owner, just coming to, where he had flipped
over the rail. He had blood on his hand, was pale—
I helped him walk to his machine. He ran his hand
over it, called me good man, roared away.

I stood there, fifteen.

Admission Requirements of U.S. and Canadian Dental Schools

by Ron Koertge

Is your furniture in mint condition?
Has the loathing settled down?
Do you have many commemorative coins?
Do you know what the lighthouse stands for
in poetry?
Do you regard "uppers" and "lowers" as versions
of the class struggle?
If you could snow, would you?
Could you wear a red hunting shirt rather than
the traditional white smock?
When someone murmurs, "But my first love
is the oboe," are you disheartened?
If you were a bird. what would be your wingspan?
If someone said. his gums were clandestine, would
you look forward to the drilling?
Do you know what makes bipeds wild with joy?
Could you be specific?

Cy Twombly, "Beyond (A System for Passing)"

by H. L. Hix

To say how much I've missed you, I offer this,

at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists,

numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you

last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on,

to some next place, but last listened for your voice

last night, these long years after, will listen next

when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now,

as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.

Self-Portrait as a Bear

by Donald Hall

Here is a fat animal, a bear
that is partly a dodo.
Ridiculous wings hang at his shoulders
as if they were collarbones
while he plods in the bad brickyards
at the edge of the city, smiling
and eating flowers. He eats them
because he loves them
because they are beautiful
because they love him.
It is eating flowers which makes him so fat.
He carries his huge stomach
over the gutters of damp leaves
in the parking lots in October,
but inside that paunch
he knows there are fields of lupine
and meadows of mustard and poppy.
He encloses sunshine.
Winds bend the flowers
in combers across the valley,
birds hang on the stiff wind,
at night there are showers, and the sun
lifts through a haze every morning
of the summer in the stomach.

A Noun Sentence
by Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Fady Joudah
A noun sentence, no verb to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed after making love ... a salty perfume or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy like the sunset at your strange windows. My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding my need, hesitant between two doors: entry a joke, and exit a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall, chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows. Wishing for the present tense a foothold for walking behind me or ahead of me, barefoot. Where is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where is futility? Where is the road to the road? And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam of speech the dots on the letters, wishing for the present tense a foothold on the pavement ...

The Heart Under Your Heart

Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart
under his heart.
—James Richardson

The heart under your heart
is not the one you share
so readily so full of pleasantry
& tenderness

it is a single blackberry
at the heart of a bramble
or else some larger fruit
heavy the size of a fist

it is full of things
you have never shared with me
broken engagements bruises
& baking dishes

the scars on top of scars
of sixteen thousand pinpricks
the melody you want so much to carry
& always fear black fear

or so I imagine you have never shown me
& how could I expect you to
I also have a heart beneath my heart
perhaps you have seen or guessed

it is a beach at night
where the waves lap & the wind hisses
over a bank of thin
translucent orange & yellow jingle shells

on the far side of the harbor
the lighthouse beacon
shivers across the black water
& someone stands there waiting

Craig Arnold

Two Aunts

by Thomas James

When I feel the old hunger coming on,

I think of my two great-aunts,

A farmer’s daughters,

Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota.

I imagine the dark baron

Riding out of their mouths,

Thick-skinned and girded

Against disaster, swathed

In cuirass and chainmail and a curse.

My hunger was theirs

Too long ago. It swims in my blood,

Groping for a foothold.

It is the dark I thrust my tongue against,

The wine and the delicate symphony

That makes my head tick so exquisitely

Tonight. My ladies,

My dusky girls, I see you

With your bustles puffed up like life preservers,

Your needlepoint rose garden,

Your George Eliot coiffures,

Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine.

You both took heroin.

Your father never noticed.

You sprinkled it in your oatmeal,

Embroidered doilies with it,

Ate it like a last supper

At midnight. I know what you meant.

There was always the hunger,

The death of small things

Somewhere in your body,

The children that would never

Take place in either of you.

You were a garden of lost letters.

A lust inhabited your veins.

My addicts,

The village spoke of you.

Under your parasols, two rose windows,

The world swam with color.

Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak,

You escaped the indecisions

Your blood has handed down

To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses

As if they might have ferried you

Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance.

I see you ride the black hills of my mind,

Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,

Galloping

In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware

Of something I inherited,

The doubt,

The fear,

The needle point of speech,

The hunger you passed down that I

Possess.

The Bible Belt

by David Shumate

It's a vast and fertile land. Soybeans and corn grow in this soil.
Wheat and tobacco. A little sorghum. It's not dramatic terrain
with ocean waves crashing against the cliffs. It's mostly gently
rolling plains. Long stretches of prairie. You know you've entered
it when the signs along the highway begin telling you what God
wants you to do. Those who live here regard it as their duty to
make these things known. Otherwise the rest of the country
would be left in the dark. The bibles in this region are larger than
elsewhere. Most weigh over a hundred pounds. It takes two strong
men to lift them into a pickup truck to haul off to church. All the
women dress up on Sundays. And all the white men shake hands.

Cherishing What Isn't

by Jack Gilbert

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this
long life, along with the few others.
And the four I may have loved, or stopped short
of loving. I wander through these woods
making songs of you. Some of regret, some
of longing, and a terrible one of death.
I carry the privacy of your bodies
and hearts in me. The shameful ardor
and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds
of happiness and the walled-up childhoods.
I carol loudly of you among trees emptied
of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.
A score of women if you count love both large
and small, real ones that were brief
and those that lasted. Gentle love and some
almost like an animal with its prey.
What is left is what's alive in me. The failing
of your beauty and its remaining.
You are like countries in which my love
took place. Like a bell in the trees
that makes your music in each wind that moves.
A music composed of what you have forgotten.
That will end with my ending.

Not To Trouble You

by Leonard Nathan

Not to trouble you with love, I mean
those adolescent dreams of great, of greater,
or of greatest loving, let alone
the crumbly personal kind—compared with, say,
the public good or harder thoughts of death
obliterating thoughts of love, or after-
thoughts of love outgrown or love undone;
and not to be ironic either, not
to forget we come into the world alone
and leave it so; and not to be claiming more
than you can give, uncertain as I am
what I require: something like love, I guess,
whatever it is we've done without so long,
so faithfully and with such tenderness.

A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn't last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother's china.

Don't fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?
The one from which you'll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don't know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.

Li-Young Lee

Behind My Eyes
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Student Theme

by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.