Intimacy

-Jen Levitt

On the morning of the new Q train, we passed

a woman’s body slumped against a wall. 

White liquid poured from her mouth like snow, 

until the paramedics showed up, for which 

everyone was grateful. In my mind I was busy

riding a Palomino through a forest, solving 

an equation in air. My thoughts hard & soft, 

a terrain. All week I wanted to talk to you 

about this small sad thing, the woman’s purse 

at her side, hands trembling like my horse

at the stream while we looked & kept walking, 

these details, which make up a poem, a life, 

& could help you know me. All this time, 

I wanted you to understand the emptying in me, 

below the earth, where someone was singing.

 

[ Ten P.M. ; Jennifer Bartlett (1992) ]

 

Love in A Flat

--Lauren K. Alleyne

 

after Dean Young

Dean in a story about Coltrane:

how one time in a recording, he hit

a wrong note—a real clam.

In the second take, he hit it again,

this time harder, longer.

The third time, it became the heart—

the sound all the other notes wrap themselves around,

a different understanding of the melody—

the song beneath the song: the stubborn beat

holding up the heaviness of flesh.

 

 

Everything Changes

--Bertolt Brecht (tr. John Willett)

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

 

 

In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.

— from “Winter Hours”; Mary Oliver

 

[ Winter Landscape ; Valerius de Saedeleer ]

 

I Saw Winter's Witches

--Tricia Knoll

More than one, those scraggly black locusts

lining the gravel road to the white farmhouse

and a collapsing barn. Barren: winter unveils

twisted fingers of eerie malaise

planted for fenceposts rumored to

last longer than stone. Suckering up

as toxic clones that scratch wicked

turns of withered phrases on pewter sky.

That fence hems the pasture, last

effort to contain the emptiness

of a low sun setting on fallow pasture. If

winter witch seems too fanciful, 

thorns too cruel, wind too stiff to break,

remember locusts’ white droops

beguile honeybees in soft seasons –

witches hide in green leaf-ery. 

 

 

ice and lights

drawing cards

of mid-winter shuffle

--Tricia Knoll

 

Walking on Water

 --Tricia Knoll

      

Wait for ice to paralyze

the pond, for the crackling

thinness to thicken

so the under-water moans.

Scuffle through rice-snow

where slush went solid

around someone else's boot.

Hike around the hockey rink

and the men and children ice fishing

beside coolers of beer and chips.

Let the lake lure you

away from the eyes of cabins,

from smoke signals

fanning from chimneys.

January's water strider,

as small as the lake makes you

hidden in a hooded coat.

 

 

[ Hope ; George Frederick Watts (1886) ]

 

4

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

--from Mayakovsky; Frank O'Hara

 

Thrilling Conclusion

--Robert Wood Lynn

And when the end came it came silent but clear like bird prints on snow

and no one was surprised to see it arrive

and still friends lingered in doorways letting goodbyes go bad

and chirping cats were fed a second time just to be sure

and the family dogs formed a congress in the woods with the coyotes

and someone was careful to leave bubble wrap for children to burst

and the night watchman pretended his glasses fogged over as we passed

and it turned out the trees were unmemorable

and the government a trick of the light

and it was sorry, the ending, but it didn’t know what for

and it was okay at least as much as we were

and we swam with it in whatever we had on under

and we kissed so hard we clanged teeth

and we ate without speaking

and then at last spoke all at once like an unkinked hose

and then it began, the ending, the way all creatures do, small

and angry at its own misunderstandings.

 

I Hate

--C. K. Williams

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,

nor either that other tangle of recall, regret   

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh   

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,

not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,   

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,   

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,

on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,

mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,

cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,

and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,   

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

 

[ Crystal Gradation ; Paul Klee (1921) ]

 

Of all the people born on earth,

only a thin fraction are alive now. So today and everyday

is international ghost day.

When the dirt whispers,

it is simply your mother

calling in the grey light of dawn, tugging you out

from the soft but insistent hands

of a dream that holds you

in the way light is held

by the icicle.

--from My Body Tells Me What to Do; Michael Bazzett

 

Kalsarikänni

--Michael Bazzett

Let’s put on our childhood clothes

and walk the secret streets.

Let’s remember that in Finland

they have a word that means

drinking at home, alone,

in your underwear. Let’s feel

the give in our bones again,

soft and green as flower stems.

You might not be my brother.

But you’re as close as we both

might get. Let’s use the sides

of our hands to scrape forts

out of the road-sand snowplows

left in the gutters, then watch

as they melt in rain. Let’s remember

old songs again. You can tell me

how chessboards lie about

the rules of war, how Mother’s

sigh was a descending note

that sharpened into nothingness.

Then we’ll each go our separate

ways, slip into our humming

houses, and drink one last pull

of starlight straight from the bottle.

 

God

--Michael Bazzett

(for Ada Limon)

Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he

in me. We have moved beyond all that.

I just like having someone there in the dark.

Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing

headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock

stray prayers loose from where they got

stuck on their way out, so many years ago.

It’s almost like finding old piñata candy,

says God, picking one from the floorboards.

He unwraps it, takes a quick taste. Winces.

Nods like he’s just remembered something

for the thousandth, thousandth time.

What is it? I ask. It’s kind of like chewing

tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.

 

 

[ In January ; Werner Berg (1972) ]

 

  

You Learn By Living

--J. Patrick Lewis

                  for Eleanor Roosevelt

Who showed the world the world itself

     Was awkward, shy and plain.

A high-born leader in a long,

     Low decade full of pain.

Poor farmers, blacks, homeless, the least

     Advantaged hoped to see,

Magnificently unarrayed,

     Pure human dignity.

A lady first, the great first lady

     Looked fear in the face,

And said, There is no room for fear

     When courage take its place.

 

Raucous Prayer

--Patrick Rosal

Here, my one raucous prayer

coaxed from this poor drum,

my double heart, under a beat-up slat

of divine light. It’s habit: I evade 

the foreseeable blessing, this thorn

thief, this fiend for deep bass 

and the dynamics of  burning— 

now bird, now furnace, I’m returning

to love itself. Let me face 

the beginning of sound, first horn, 

origin of dirt and song. We are made

by touch, not terror for tat, 

but one humble pulse in a numb 

abyss. Bet, god breathes this air.

 

Banking Coal

--Jean Toomer

Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coal

To start the Fire, did his part well;

Not all wood takes to fire from a match,

Nor coal from wood before it’s burned to charcoal.

The wood and coal in question caught a flame

And flared up beautifully, touching the air

That takes a flame from anything.

Somehow the fire was furnaced,

And then the time was ripe for some to say,

“Right banking of the furnace saves the coal.”

I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way,

Though all with shovels and with ashes,

Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;

Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-caps

Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone

Would die, but like as not spiced tongues

Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up,

Never strong, to anyone who cared to rake for them.

But roaring fires never have been made that way.

I’d like to tell those folks that one grand flare

Transferred to memory tissues of the air

Is worth a like, or, for dull minds that turn in gold,

All money ever saved by banking coal.

 

[ Blotter ; Peter Doig (1993) ]

 

 

Afterlife

--John Burnside

When we are gone

our lives will continue without us

– or so we believe and,

at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled

with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums

from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought

in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion

other than this –

this bungled joy, this inarticulate

conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace

of setting things aside,

of giving up

the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be

while it was passing.

 

Being and Time

--John Burnside

There are times when I think

of the knowledge we had as children:

the patterns we saw in number, or the spells

and recipes we had

for love and fear;

the knowledge we kept in the bones

for wet afternoons,

the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,

or how a lapwing’s egg can tip

the scale of the tongue;

how something was always present in the snow

that fell between our parish and the next,

a perfect thing, not what was always there,

but something we knew without knowing, as we knew

that everything was finite and alive,

cradled in warmth against the ache of space,

marsh-grass and shale, and the bloodroot we dug in the woods

that turned our fingers red, and left a stain

we kept for weeks, through snow and miles of sleep,

as if it was meant to happen, a sliver of fate

unstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in.

 

Amongst ‘livestock’

--John Burnside

Nothing is adapted to the fret

of LED and blockwork, snow-drift

gusted over ice into

the hayricks, scraps

of sackcloth, clagging, bodies scabbed with mud

and bedstraw, blotched eyes

searching: finding

nothing; giving in.

 

We know their names

from catalogues and songs; but these

are nothing like, just weather of a sort,

discarnate, eyeless, waiting for a sign:

run of matter blackening the floor,

the ache of rennet, hoofprints in the stone.

 

[ J. R. R. Tolkien’s illustration for ‘Letter From Father Christmas’ ]

 

 

Vertical

--Linda Pastan

Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal

the verticality of trees which we notice in December

as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms

yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal

ourselves for so long, let us now honor

the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which

to the ant must seem as high as these trees do to us,

silos and telephone poles, stalagmites and skyscrapers.

but most of all these winter oaks, these soft-fleshed poplars,

this birch whose bark is like roughened skin against

which I lean my chilled head, not ready to lie down.

 

December

The white dove of winter

sheds its first

fine feathers;

they melt

as they touch

the warm ground

like notes

of a once familiar

music; the earth

shivers and

turns towards

the solstice.

--from The Months; Linda Pastan

 

December 18: for M

--Linda Pastan

At the waning of the century,

with the weather warming

and even the seasons losing their way

listen to me. It is time

to sit still, to tilt your face

to the light and catch the notes of music

which sweeten the tongue

like snowflakes as they fall and melt

this bare December morning.

Your mouth was shaped for lullaby

or hymn, and your refusal

to sing bewilders

whole octaves of air. Enough

abstinence. Each day

that ends is gone, not a leaf is left

and soon enough it will be

time to sleep under the sway

of all that silence.

 

[ The Magpie ; Claude Monet (1868/69) ]