from The Active Reader

Reading a used book on evolution I wonder
about fingerprints, how  long they live.
Were the fingers licked before the pages

were turned, did the owner

of the book, of the fingerprints,

read in the bathroom, [...]

did he hold the book between his face

and his wife, is it how he asked

for a divorce, by not speaking, by saying

the name Leaky over and over to himself

by letting the pages stand in for his face?

Will I become everyone who read this book,

did their eyes change the letters,

is reading a sexual act, is there congress

between the text and my gaze,

is there no mirror left me but words,

why am I afraid of people, why do I talk

behind them to the edge of their shadows,

why did the continents drift, why didn't

the thumb stay put, is fear what it means

to be human, am I what it means to be human

why did the brain randsom the heart

to the mouth, why did we ever come down

from the trees?

 - Bob Hicok

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The End Of The Weekend

 A dying firelight slides along the quirt

 Of the cast-iron cowboy where he leans

 Against my father's books. The lariat

 Whirls into darkness. My girl, in skin-tight jeans,

 Fingers a page of Captain Marryat,

 Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

 We rise together to the second floor.

 Outside, across the lake, an endless wind

 Whips at the headstones of the dead and wails

 In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.

 She rubs against me and I feel her nails.

 Although we are alone, I lock the door.

 The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers,

 This dark, the cabin of loose imaginings,

 Wind, lake, lip, everything awaits

 The slow loosening of her underthings.

 And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates

 Against the attic beams.

 I climb the stairs,

 Armed with a belt.

 A long magnesium strip

 Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path

 Among the shattered skeletons of mice.

 A great black presence beats its wings in wrath

 Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.

 Some small gray fur is pulsing in its grip.

 - Anthony Hecht

 from The Hard Hours (Knopf, 1967)

~ in memoriam, Anthony Hecht, 1923-2004 ~

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from Leaves

 Every October it becomes important, no, necessary

 to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded

 by leaves turning; it's not just the symbolism,

 to confront in the death of the year your death,

 one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony

 isn't lost on you that nature is most seductive

 when it is about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its

 incipient exit, an ending that at least so far

 the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)

 have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe

 is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception

 because of course nature is always renewing itself --

 the trees don't die, they just pretend,

 go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

 You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly

 a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through

 and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably

 won't last. But for a moment the whole world

 comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives --

 red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,

 gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations

 of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.

 It won't last. You don't want it to last. You

 can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.

 It's what you've come for. It's what you'll

 come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll

 remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt,

 or something you've felt that also didn't last.

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Conscience

 In how many of the miserable little life dramas I play out in my mind am I unforgivable,

 despicable, with everything, love, kin, companionship, negotiable, marketable, for sale,

 and yet I do forgive myself, hardly marking it, although I still remember those fierce

 if innocently violent fantasies of my eternal adolescence which could nearly knock me down

 and send me howling through myself for caves of simple silence, blackness, oblivion.

 The bubble hardens, the opacities perfected: no one in here anymore to bring accusation,

 no sob of shame to catch us in the throat, no omniscient angel, either, poor angel, child,

 tremulous, aghast, covering its eyes and ears, compulsively washing out its mouth with soap.

 -C.K. Williams

 from Flesh and Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987)

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from Blossoms

 From blossoms comes

 this brown bag of peaches

 we bought from the boy

 at the bend in the road where we turned toward

 signs painted PEACHES.

 From laden boughs, from hands,

 from sweet fellowship in the bins,

 comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

 peaches we devour, dusty skin and all

 comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

 O, to take what we love inside,

 to carry within us an orchard, to eat

 not only the skin, but the shade,

 not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

 the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

 the round jubilance of peach.

 There are days we live

 as if death were nowhere

 in the background, from joy

 to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

 from blossom to blossom to

 impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

 -Li-Young Lee

 from Rose (BOA Editions).

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1 is the point, 2 the line, 3 the triangle, 4 the pyramid

 5 is the praying mantis,

 6 the sunning cat stretched across a sidewalk.

 7 is where the cat was

 That disappeared before you looked back.

 8 is the tiny piece

 Of another world in the mirror of a passing car,

 9 the same cat somewhere else

 Eyes closed, tongue stroking and stroking its fur.

 10 is the end of summer:

 The way leaves in the wind sound when they are brittle,

 That they turn black in the gutter,

 What the sun warms from its new angle,

 How crushed crabapples clutter

 The sidewalks with their bloodstains and sweet rotting smell.

 - Harvey Hix

Perfect Hell, (Gibbs Smith, 1996)

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A Prayer For My Son
 
Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning's back.
That his mother may not lack
Her fill of sleep.

Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
Some there are, for I avow
Such devilish things exist,
Who have planned his murder, for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days,
And would through hatred of the bays
Bring that to nought.

Though You can fashion everything
From nothing every day, and teach
The morning stars to sing,
You have lacked articulate speech
To tell Your simplest want, and known,
Wailing upon a woman's knee,
All of that worst ignominy
Of flesh and bone;

And when through all the town there ran
The servants of Your enemy,
A woman and a man,
Unless the Holy Writings lie,
Hurried through the smooth and rough
And through the fertile and waste,
protecting, till the danger past,
With human love.

- William Butler Yeats
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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
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Tamer and Hawk

I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.

Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds?
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.

As formerly, I wheel
I hover and I twist,
But only want the feel,
In my possessive thought,
Of catcher and of caught
Upon your wrist.

You but half civilize,
Taming me in this way.
Through having only eyes
For you I fear to lose,
I lose to keep, and choose
Tamer as prey

- Thom Gunn

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Someone
is breathing 
into the air
inhaling lilacs

I steal the first touch
of a soundless hum
that brushes past my cheek
softer than the dream
that won't let you leave

And you're stunned by your own sweetness
which you decide to keep a secret
and the morning's spilling over
like an alcoholic's gin
while you hide under the covers
with a cat instead of lovers
and you spend all of the day
licking honey off your skin

- Toni Raben
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~ February ~

It was as if he had wings, and the wind
behind him. Even uphill the rock
seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried;
he'd come to depend on his burden,
wasn't sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange.
He stopped to pet a dog.
Yet he kept going forward, afraid
of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized
the gods must be gone, that his wings
were nothing more than a perception
of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him

- Stephen Dunn
from Local Visitations (Harper Collins, 2004)
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Sleepless, sleepless, sleepless. Not again, again;
Sleepless, again.  Sleepless for the fifth night running.  I get up, throw
Myself into the day, stopping at the kitchen sink to paint my face with icy
Froth. Each day, in the mirror, that face smeared a bit more brutally
Across the glass.  Why bother anymore? It's the new, the broken, the shattered,
The Cubist me I'll carry out into the world.  All those pieces shifting across
The field of vision, the sloping plane of my skull.  The day itself shattering
As a single cardinal in the bare pyracantha shrub cocks his head
Suspiciously as I approach, no doubt guessing
I'm some raw beast out of Picasso-ville.  So, I ask you, Why bother
At all? Those pieces of the self -- night after night -- shaken in the silver
Martini moonlight of insomnia, dream-terror, rage electric along the bones,
Stomach twisted like a rag (twisted, twisted, twisted) in Athena's wet hands...
So, why? she'd ask me, looking up across the breakfast table, every day before
She left. So why even bother at all?

- David St. John
from The Face (Harper Collins, 2004)
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