~ December ~

Let the night alone speak before the wind:
only the leaf that hears where the wind is;

only the voice in the birdcage.

Only she, and she alone.
But she stepped toward you on her feer and said to you: Be brave,
be worthy of the stones over you,

stay friends with the beards of the dead,
join flower to worm,

hoist sail over the coffins,

take the beetle of the open field on board,

pass the news to the cloudy ones.

Give them the news two-fold:

from you and from you,

from both plates of the scales,

from darkness, the entrance desires,

from darkness, the entrnce provides.

Give the news to the beetles,
give the news to the cloudy ones,

join flower to worm,

hoist sale over the coffins,
put your heart in your head.

- Paul Celan

translated by Jack Hirchman

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ November ~

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl

themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the

way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-infolding,

entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a

visual current, one that cannot freight of sway by

minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the

dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where

they hit deeper resistance , water that seems to burst into

itself (it has those layers), a real current through mostly

invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing

                                     motion that forces change --

this is freedom. This is the force of faith.  Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing

is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by

each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,

also oblivion, or course, the aftershocks of something

at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through

in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is

what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen

now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only

something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.

I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

- Jorie Graham

from Never (Ecco, 2003)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ October ~

Summer after summer has ended,

balm after violence:

it does me no good

to be good to me now;

violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine

ochre and fire, even the fields shine.
I know what I see: sun that could be

the August sun, returning

everything that was taken away --

You hear this voice? This is my mind's voice;

you can't touch my body now.

It has changed once, it has hardened,

don't ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer.

Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples

nearly mauve on the gravel paths.

And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

It does me no good; violence has changed me.

My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;

now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,

with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;

bounty, balm after violence.

Balm after the leaves had changed, after the fields

have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,

I won't believe you.

Tell me I'm living,

I won't believe you.

- Louise Gluck

from October (Sarabande Books, 2004)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ September ~

Hornets, two hornets buzz over my head;
I'm napping and cannot keep my eyes open.
Do you come from far away? I ask, dozing off.
My gums are dry when I wake. A morning breeze
rakes the treetops. I can smell the earth.
The two hornets are puzzling over
something sticky on my night table,
wiping their gold heads with their arms.
Little things are like symbols. My eyes are watery
and blurred. Then I lose myself again.

I'm walking slowly in a heat haze,
my vision contracting to a tiny porthole<

drawing me to it, like flourishing palms.
I can feel blood draining out of my face.

I can feel my heart beating inside my heart,
the self receding from the center of the picture.
I can taste sugar under my tongue.
All the usual human plots of ascent

and triumph appear disrupted.

Crossing my ankles, I watch the day
vibrate around me, watch the geraniums
climb toward the little mountains

where I was born, watch the black worm

wiggling out of the window box,

hiding its head from the pale sun

that lies down on everything,
purifying it. Lord, teach me to live.

Teach me to love. Lie down on me.

- Henri Cole
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ August ~

Late in the month, late afternoon,
en route or waiting for the train,
spring barely peeking through mild rain:
what does this impatience mean?

Scarlet eruptions on the skin.
We're poised: when will the war begin?
I crane to hear the starting gun.
What does this impatience mean?

Wait for the other shoe to drop.
What now is green will soon be ripe;
what's ripening began as green,
so what does this impatience mean?

Is the best position for the hurt
of life in time to stay alert
or try to sleep to ease the strain,
the rash, the spring, the war, the rain,

oh what does this impatience mean?

- Rachel Hadas

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ July ~

May and the great trees rage,
white sap burned up
into leaves. Turn
and beneath the branches see
the actual air
moving, hesitant, green.
This is when the soul knows
it has a body,
by wanting
to leave it.

In the morning, bowed
under blue rain, geese beat
their heavy way back
to the city-state
of mud. Rising, the wings groan,
trying to fly away
from the body.

Winter
was hard, the cold broke
weak and strong, together. Stay
and watch the robins scream
over scattered barley.

This is how we came to
love this life—
by wanting
the next.

- Mark Conway

from Åny Holy City (Silverfish Review Press 2005)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ June ~

To This May

They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes

- W.S Merwin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ May ~

When you get tired of reading

all the beautiful words

by lousy human beings, and come to

the end of your patience with the voluminous

indeed inexhaustible

mediocrities of goodness,

what to do? I suggest --

I don't know.

Let him think.

And if there are no words

to this place give him back

the illiterate sleep: no need

the haldol needle night-night;

let him go quietly, not

in horror,

not in glory.

- Franz Wright

from The Beforelife (Knopf, 2001)

~ in memoriam, Cliff Becker, 1964-2005 ~
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ April ~

On Our Imperfect Knowledge of Void

History is not continuous--the divorce must occur--
there was no moment of charity. I stepped out
of granite into the rainwashed alley.
I rode the pure bus into the angry buzz of sun.
When did the desert become horizon? When did this roof
open like a cabaret, and out come kicking
your small brilliant foot?
All around me lurks the humid air, the high skirts
of dusk, dusk's improbably long legs. There's a ferret
loose in my chest--he smokes constantly--
he drums his fingers on cheap felt.
I signed the papers. You want me to say
I felt free. What I felt
was like skating on a frozen lake
that giant bass turn slowly.
My head has doubled in size, my tongue's
becoming a silver dollar. You want me to keep saying
how at last I discovered passion, how I moved into a trailer,
drank beer and sang in Spanish every night, all night.
How tears cauterize the face where desire is received.
The divorce did not come through, I still live in the great house.
I take a stroll in evening wear
by the banks of my lagoon. In my mind
you're a plummeting breast--documented
olive trees--bark of the hooked blind bass--
the thinnest wrists of coal. Please accept
this invitation, please sit in that overplush chair.
I speak to you from chlorine: I say it's good to be alone.

- Joshua Corey

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ March ~

I miss things that meant nothing to me
and so much was nothing.
The world begins returning
like a sailor climbing the hill
to his house, lugging a duffle
bulging with what really happened.

As if the leaves aren't falling
in your mind. As if your memories
aren't like bright leaves falling,
so that the sidewalks are there
only because they are remembered
under the leaves, and things not remembered
are reshaped and unsaved.

I labor to defend myself
against the tedium of the telephone
and its cries of uncaring delight.

These dreams, these visions,
what a vulgar way to be released.
But the squeak of my office chair
is not better, the static of admonition
on the public address system.

My co-worker says, the nice thing
about all this is you can't miss
what you can't remember.
Suppose you had Alzheimer's.
You'd stare at the phone
and it would mean less than nothing.

Shame of the insensate rushed hour.
Immobilized in spurts on the way home,
I miss my knitted sweater,
I miss my grandmother.
Then I climb the hill
with leaves layering the driveway
and the structure of maples candidly clear.

- Ron Slate

from The Incentive of the Maggot (Mariner, 2005)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~ February ~

I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.

- William Butler Yeats
from The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Kessinger, 2004)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us? —
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close

- Richard Wilbur
from Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Harcourt Brace, 1961)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------