[ Avenue of Plain Trees ; Santiago Rusinol (1916) ]

 

Yellow Goblins

--Fanny Howe

Yellow goblins

and a god I can swallow:

Eyes in the evergreens

under ice.

Interior monologue

and some voice.

Weary fears, the

usual trials and

a place to surmise

blessedness.

 

The Cenotaph

--Fanny Howe

I want to leave this place

unremembered.

The gas stove is leaking

and the door of the refrigerator

stained with rust.

The mugs are ugly

and there are only two forks.

The walls are black

and soft, the bed a balloon

of night-clothing.

The stairwell sloped

to a dragger’s pace.

There are big windows

with blind-slats dusty

and gray. Street life

goes all night and at dawn

freedmen shout and

laugh outside the kitchen.

Where does life begin and end?

In the lamb or the cotton?

My pillow is my friend.

 

Everything

-Fanny Howe

Infinite nesting

pushes all matter

towards emptiness:

child-nodes,

tree-droppings

with a root element of null.

None is always included

in every cluster

of children.

Nothing in nothing

prepares us.

Yet a fresh light was shed

on immortality

for me climbing the stairs

firm foot first.

Everything was in the banister:

crows on branches, crickets,

architects, handsaws and democrats.

Red moon at 3 am.

 

[ October Gold ; Franklin Carmichael (1922) ]

 

This Only

--Czesław Miłosz (transl. by Robert Hass)

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.

A voyager arrives, a map led him here.

Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,

When the first snow fell, riding this way

He felt joy, strong, without reason,

Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm

Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,

Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.

He returns years later, has no demands.

He wants only one, most precious thing:

To see, purely and simply, without name,

Without expectations, fears, or hopes,

At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

 

 

from October

--Louise Glück

4.

The light has changed;

middle C is tuned darker now.

And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. 

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.

The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable

has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says

I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.

This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:

the ideal burns in you like a fever.

Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.

They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them.

The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;

it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be passionately

clinging to what you love;

the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.

Surely it is a privilege to approach the end

still believing in something.

 

Rich Days

--William Henry Davies

Welcome to you rich Autumn days,

Ere comes the cold, leaf-picking wind;

When golden stocks are seen in fields,

All standing arm-in-arm entwined;

And gallons of sweet cider seen

On trees in apples red and green.

With mellow pears that cheat our teeth,

Which melt that tongues may suck them in;

With blue-black damsons, yellow plums,

Now sweet and soft from stone to skin;

And woodnuts rich, to make us go

Into the loneliest lanes we know.

 

[ Autumn ; Hans Richter (1917) ]

 

With a Line

--Norma Cole

measure how silence

sits on the ground

 

the same rills, clay tablets,

gravel and stones, frozen

 

moments measure displacement

consequence the records of

 

common consent, displacement

sugar pills killing time now or

 

how the most euphonious cadence

a reed stylus, rosewater and

 

mint, the slope, distortion

meaning stay safe, tenderness

 

the fleeting constraints, sites

of conscription expanding

 

meeting control at the site

of precipitous inquiry

 

could it take the weight of

a frozen moment

 

Take a Look

--Norma Cole

Take history

Take power

 

At no point sufficient

Accident of memory

 

The common truth

Conditions of visibility

 

Unstable orbits

Explain nothing

 

In the history

Of contestation

 

Truth cure—it’s a start

Unfit for use

 

Nescio, not knowing

Task or matter

 

Insufficient uncertainties

Pose limits of understanding

 

The commission

Memory itself

 

The Matter

--Norma Cole

       The chatter of the world is just a breath

       Dante, Purgatorio

Conditions in the moment

conditions in the present moment

conditions are melting in the present moment

 

loss in different tempi, a striking

concentration of them, in it and

of it, but when the state withdraws

 

from the social contract, a walking dream

the armature a striking concentration

removes system from sound

 

some day will mean these large scale

stained glass windows seem essential

to private time: moon in Scorpio

 

fallen asleep but not where you

wake up: can you place this photo

from the broken old bible? Tell us

 

the end and ruin everything, the pink

cloud, the ridgeline and everything

grassland, aspen groves, stand of

 

redwoods, trees make the light

sense of distance, prospect

everchanging feverish refraction

 

mind not inclined for the story’s

not found here

 

[ Black Grouse ; Theodor Severin Kittelsen (1900) ]

 

So Tell Me How It Ends (excerpt)

--Andrew Hemmert

But stars aren’t cold, no matter the distance, no matter what

we want to believe. The coldest one we’ve yet found is still

warmer than a cup of coffee left sitting for a minute.

There’s an iceberg frigidity we inject into our gods—

something like the Arctic Ocean, something like a parade

of the dismembered bodies of glaciers. I remember

seeing the scattering fleets of ice and thinking churches

floating out into space. So hello universe! My name

is temporary and my bones are made of you, you

with your far mountaining nebulas, you with your fires

that have shown us the way, that show us how there is no way

except where we already dream of going. October

and the nights are growing cold. October and the nights

are full of stars saying there is nowhere left to go.

 

So Long, Oblivion

--Andrew Hemmert

Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time.

Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon 

on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar 

I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam.

Like the earth sometimes in love with turning away from all light 

though never really leaving. Like a beach I have wanted 

to spend years softening though not always wanting the footprints 

which to ghost crabs are craters. Like a paleontologist 

resisting always the impulse to ransack my skeletons  

for drumsticks, though here is the gong, here is the timpani 

like a bird bath full of absinthe before me. So so long 

oblivion with your small dreams of silence. I am going 

to the bank of myself with my pockets hanging out 

like two ruined countries, like two broken and gorgeous wings.

 

What Kind of Bird Changes Its Name

--Andrew Hemmert

was what the search engine recommended before I could

finish my intended question—what kind of bird changes

its song? The bird in the old oak over my parents' pool

goes through phrases in approximately five second

intervals. It is a busy song. It is nothing special

says a hanger full of blinking servers whose thinking requires

a mountain full of coal be dynamited every day.

Some mountains were once considered gods. Some kings were considered

gods, then carved up in the public square. This is progress

towards democracy, which is a name America

has never worn well. The search engines eat what we feed them

and shit out tailored advertisements. These advertisements

perhaps are more evocative of ourselves than our names

though don't we go on saying our names, mockingbird?

 

[ Large Pine and Red Earth ; Paul Cezanne ]

 

 

 

Love's Last

--Christian Wiman

Love's last urgency is earth

and grief is all gravity

and the long fall always

back to earliest hours

that exist nowhere

but in one's brain.

From the hard-packed

pile of old-mown grass,

from boredom, from pain,

a boy's random slash

unlocks a dark ardor

of angry bees

that link the trees

and block his way home.

I like to hold him holding me,

mystery mastering fear,

so young, standing unstung

under what survives of sky.

 

Rhymes for a Watertower

--Christian Wiman

A town so flat a grave's a hill,

            A dusk the color of beer.

A row of schooldesks shadows fill,

            A row of houses near.

A courthouse spreading to its lawn,

            A bank clock's lingering heat.

A gleam of storefronts not quite gone,

            A courthouse in the street.

A different element, almost,

            A dry creek brimming black.

A light to lure the darkness close,

            A light to keep it back.

A time so still a heart's a sound,

            A moon the color of skin.

A pumpjack bowing to the ground,

            Again, again, again.

 

All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs

--Christian Wiman

All my friends are finding new beliefs.

This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.

In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew

God whomps on like a genetic generator.

Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.

Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.

One man marries a woman twenty years younger

and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;

another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles

into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases

like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,

decides to die.

Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,

high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,

sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being ...

All my friends are finding new beliefs

and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track

of the new gods and the new loves,

and the old gods and the old loves,

and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,

and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,

and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,

my beautiful, credible friends.

 

[ On the Earth ; Viktor Vasnetsov ]

 

 

Poem

--Charles Simic

Every morning I forget how it is.

I watch the smoke mount

In great strides above the city.

I belong to no one.

Then, I remember my shoes,

How I have to put them on,

How bending over to tie them up

I will look into the earth.

 

Evening Walk

--Charles Simic

You give the appearance of listening

To my thoughts, O trees,

Bent over the road I am walking

On a late summer evening

When every one of you is a steep staircase

The night is slowly descending.

The high leaves like my mother’s lips

Forever trembling, unable to decide,

For there’s a bit of wind,

And it’s like hearing voices,

Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,

A huge dark mouth we can all fit in

Suddenly covered by a hand.

Everything quiet. Light

Of some other evening strolling ahead,

Long-ago evening of silk dresses,

Bare feet, hair unpinned and falling.

Happy heart, what heavy steps you take

As you follow after them in the shadows.

The sky at the road’s end cloudless and blue.

The night birds like children

Who won’t come to dinner.

Lost children in the darkening woods.

 

Evening

--Charles Simic

The snail gives off stillness.

The weed is blessed.

At the end of a long day

The man finds joy, the water peace.

Let all be simple. Let all stand still

Without a final direction.

That which brings you into the world

To take you away at death

Is one and the same;

The shadow long and pointy

Is its church.

At night some understand what the grass says.

The grass knows a word or two.

It is not much. It repeats the same word

Again and again, but not too loudly.

 

[ Butterflies ; Piroska Szanto ]

 

Haiku - 2025

another bird song

with yet another bird song

and still there's stillness

an old childhood song

from a passing car window

as the ice cream melts

a warm evening breeze,

as good a time as any

to let some things go

 

Shining

Rays of sun countour temperature,

cluster virginia spiderwort color,

follow slumped bends of gravity

to prism the applause of thunder

after the quick miracle of a rainstorm.

Sunlight so basic. Unbinding elements

for forms that merge a continual.

How it shrinks shadows at the height

of solar noon, how it moves beyond 

what was thinking, an energy with all

which is an entirety that's not a day

greater or lesser than offshoots

of wind. Light of eternal forward,

that the world has fall aslant as it backs

away off on the diagonal, returning

to the personal axis of turning,

what makes for the inertia of time,

the toll on life, gravity's relative older

amassed by the heart balanced in orbit,

as you go elsewhere while earth it stays, 

while light it stays ongoing, right here

and there as it is never to be waiting,

never even grasping, and it too, also

always, always weightlessly passing.

 

[ Sunflowers ; Andrew Wyeth (1982) ]

 

Field Guide

--Tony Hoagland

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,

up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather

floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,

like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.

That’s all.

I mention this in the same way

that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,

so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

 

The Window at Night

--Jennifer Grotz

Eyes wide like an owl’s, an aspirin-pale face

foretells in lamplight how it accumulates age.

Somewhat masked, somewhat naked, there’s no way

to know what others see when looking at it.

All five of the body’s senses crowd

on this small planet a weather of hair surrounds.

 

My face is not a democracy—the eyes are tyrants

and the ears are radical dissenters.

In the conversations of eyebrows, mine are whispers.

Like the window at night, the face reflects too,

uncertain how to change when greeting itself

(and is it not cruel when another’s face

won’t reflect acknowledgment of you?).

 

My mother, my father, and my brother are found

in the blurring of feature and expression.

Cynicism finds no purchase here;

the same cannot be said for sadness

(and look deeper—anger hides in the jaw).

And while the nose quietly broods

like an actor rehearsing his soliloquy,

the empty page of the forehead, when I raise my brows,

fills suddenly with questions.