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The first thing you know
She's lost,
A runaway with a dark man
And an attitude.
I look in every Greyhound station
Filled with the blue and silver paranoia
Of small town lives.
She's missing,
Her finger on the amber lip
Of a beer bottle,
Its sour malt confused
With the smell of my thighs.
Have you seen her?
My friends say I'm too good to my children,
Too hard on myself.
Every six months I look for her
While she moves in the tactless hallways
Of hard sleep.
Somewhere she eats cold chili
In a flimsy slip,
Ignoring the dreams of wallpaper.
-Natalie Kenvin
from Bruise Theory (BOA Editions, 1995)
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Here we go again,
up the narrow stair
of fall, and I'm full of nerve,
have to have you, I'm looking for you
everywhere. It's true
I like men too much, and when
I see one in the street
I used to know -- starting to be
bald, in a raincoat eight years old,
worry a lit fish swimming across
his face -- I could nearly wrap myself
around him, I'm all too ready....
But I'm sorry! It was for you
I meant to do these things, for you
to unbutton my blouse without a care--
Not so difficult, now the sun is tart,
the river the very color of cold,
November on her way to winter.
-Deborah Garrison
from A Working Girl Can't Win (Random House, 1998)
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The fish float in the aquarium of dreams.
Below, the house asleep, a refrigerator hums
its intermittent melody; the cat,
curled on the couch in a dark ball;
all in darkness.
The wind plays beneath the eaves, along the roof.
Above, the sharp leaves of an oak
scratch against the shingles; a car,
its dark tires hissing on the wet road.
The stairs creak beneath their own weight.
Throughout the house a single fly,
leftover from the afternoon, puzzled;
and the gentle fall of old embers ending.
The dark fog rolls in between the stars.
He lies on his back in bed, listening for the wind,
the woman beside him breathing, her warm body
folded in a dream, his eyes open;
motionless.
The house empties itself into the night.
the dark trees ascend into the ocean,
worlds diminish and disappear; the wind,
separated from the sea,
returns over and over again.
-Michael Sykes
from From an Island in Time
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and in the chokeberry this year:
the first leaves turn ugly, there --
by the open gate.
I grab the sweater you left on a chair,
wrap it around my shoulders, and --
as I did for days last year until
I couldn't keep up with the season --
I pick every rusting leaf from the bush,
each wrinkled thing from our yard
and crush them in my apron pocket.
It's a simple gift for you -- for us --
such an easy thing to do
for a few more days of summer.
- Laure-Anne Bosselaar
from The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997)
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What struck me first was their panic.
Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars --
and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that -- dead --
their own feathers blowing, clotting
in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some --
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
She had pushed her head through the space
between bars -- to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back
of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she's being taken along.
She craned her neck.
She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car -- strained
to see what happened beyond.
That is the chicken I want to be.
- Jane Mead
from The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996)
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By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-gray as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children's father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at birth.
then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when it's found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.
- Sharon Olds
from The Gold Cell (Knopf, 1987)
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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems (Beacon, 1992)
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