Katie Ford Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that, *She was nothing*. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last. It wasn’t a year I could argue against that kind of talk, so I cut the …
Rabindranath Tagore – Clouds And Waves
Rabindranath Tagore (May 07, 1861 – August 07, 1941) Mother, the folk who live up in the clouds call out to me- "We play from the time we wake till the day ends. We play with the golden dawn, we play with the silver moon." I ask, "But how am I to get up to …
Henri Cole – Sphere
Henri Cole (May 09, 1956 -) Sir, I don’t have no black tea, the waitress replied, so I ordered Black Label instead. It was summer and the fragrant white flowers of the black locusts had awakened, like faeries or obscure matter. A black bear clothed in thorns made a mess of the bird feeder where …
CK Williams – Exhaust
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams (November 4, 1936 – September 20, 2015) My grandson wants a Ferrari. I buy one for him. Why not? The second a Mercedes. The third a Porsche. Why not? How things change—my grandfather wanted only the pickup one icy Rochester night the year before I was born he skidded through …
Donald Hall – The Things
When I walk in my house I see pictures, bought long ago, framed and hanging —de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore— that I’ve cherished and stared at for years, yet my eyes keep returning to the masters of the trivial: a white stone perfectly round, tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell, a broken …
Jane Hirshfield – Jasmine
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) Almost the twenty-first century — how quickly the thought will grow dated, even quaint. Our hopes, our future, will pass like the hopes and futures of others. And all our anxieties and terrors, nights of sleeplessness, griefs, will appear then as they truly are — Stumbling, delirious bees in …
Paul Kane – Time Was
Paul Kane (March 23, 1950 -) Still, I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. — Blanchot When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo circulated like breezes through the immovable heat, time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down. In the emptying out, the vacating of routine, the …
May Sarton – Rinsing The Eye
May Sarton pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) Between me and everything I see. The glass is pain. How to slide it away, Unblur my vision? “We must rinse the eye,” My old friend, the poet, Used to say. But that was in Belgium Many years ago. Raymond …
Dorianne Laux – Mother’s Day
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1952 -) I passed through the narrow hills of my mother’s hips one cold morning and never looked back, until now, clipping her tough toenails, sitting on the bed's edge combing out the tuft of hair at the crown where it ratted up while she slept, her thumbs locked into her …
Joy Harjo – Remember
Joy Harjo (May 09, 1951 -) Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star's stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled …
Marie Howe – Singularity
Marie Howe (1950 -) *— after Stephen Hawking* Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money — nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to …
Jane Ebihara – Last Kiss
Jane Ebihara First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who count such things say an average person kisses for a total of two weeks in a lifetime. And you realize your two weeks was up some time ago. Suddenly there is kissing everywhere you look. And you learn that cows kiss and …
Gil Broxson – After Fifty Years
Gil Broxson I walked among the Grave Markers, Near my old home town, And I saw a number of Old friends. John: Killed in world war two, Buckey, Tooter, And Teenie. All were childhood pals. There was Ann's mother, And Verna Karhryn's Mother and father. Uncle Levi, Aunt Sally, And Mr.Smith. I saw Uncle Charlie—And …
Alan Harawitz – Born Too Late
Alan Harawitz You could never be my girlfriend. I was only fourteen and you were a young woman, seventeen years old. But we were friends, maybe even more. You would sing "Born Too Late" over and over again as if it were a refrain and not just the title of a hit song by The …
Vijay Seshadri – Thought Problem
Vijay Seshadri (February 13, 1954 -) How strange would it be if you met yourself on the street? How strange if you liked yourself, took yourself in your arms, married your own self, propagated by techniques known only to you, and then populated the world? Replicas of you are everywhere. Some are Arabs. Some are …
Pablo Neruda – Keeping Quiet
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language; let's stop for one second, …
Philip Levine – Belle Isle, 1949
Philip Levine (January 10, 1928 - February 14, 2015) We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish high school girl I'd never seen …
