Don't laugh at me, I love you so

I choke from a dream I wasn't here

[derangedrhythms]

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky.

Angela Carter, from 'Nights at the Circus'

[lifeinpoetry]

I pulled from my throat birdsong like tin- canned lullaby [its vicious cold its hoax of wings] choking on bones at the throat rabbit’s foot for luck arbitrary as a dune grave across a vastness Named the place penni- less motherhood Named the place country of mothers Named the place anywhere but death by self-

— Jennifer Givhan, from "Of Color of Landscape of Tenuous Rope," Belly to the Brutal

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

I walk in the chill of the late autumn night                                                              like Orpheus Thinking my song, anxious to look back, My vanished life an ornament, a drifting cloud, behind me, A soft, ashen transcendence Buried and resurrected once, then time and again.

Charles Wright, from “North American Bear,” North American Bear: Poems (Sutton Hoo Press, 1999)

[poem-today]

A poem by Billy Collins

I Go Back To The House For A Book

I turn around on the gravel and go back to the house for a book, something to read at the doctor’s office, and while I am inside, running the finger of inquisition along a shelf, another me that did not bother to go back to the house for a book heads out on his own, rolls down the driveway, and swings left toward town, a ghost in his ghost car, another knot in the string of time, a good three minutes ahead of me— a spacing that will now continue for the rest of my life. Sometimes I think I see him a few people in front of me on a line or getting up from a table to leave the restaurant just before I do, slipping into his coat on the way out the door. But there is no catching him, no way to slow him down and put us back in synch, unless one day he decides to go back to the house for something, but I cannot imagine for the life of me what that might be. He is out there always before me, blazing my trail, invisible scout, hound that pulls me along, shade I am doomed to follow, my perfect double, only bumped an inch into the future, and not nearly as well-versed as I in the love poems of Ovid— I who went back to the house that fateful winter morning and got the book.

Billy Collins

[mistsdancer]

“No—I don’t write: I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send messages through.

What is this job of writing? To steer by mirror-light in darkness. To imagine a place known only to me. To sing of distances, to hear the living notes of painted birds on Christmas trees.

My nakedness bathed you in light. You pressed against my body to drive away the great black frost of night.

My words demand the silence of a wasteland.”

- Alejandra Pizarnik

[whisperthatruns]

tr. by Cole Heinowitz

[existential-celestial]

“And as the night wears on, The dim allegory of ourselves Unfolds, and we Feel dreamed by someone else, A sleeping counterpart, Who gathers in The darkness of his person Shades of the real world.”

— Mark Strand, “Dreams,” in Collected Poems

[apoemaday]

Afterglow

by Jorge Luis Borges

The sunset is always moving no matter how poor or flashy it is, but still more moving is the last, desperate glow that turns the distant plains to rust when the sun has finally sunk. It hurts us to be with that strange, tense light, that hallucination imposing itself upon space, with our shared fear of shadows and what suddenly ceases when we see our error, as a dream sometimes ceases when we see we are dreaming.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

Back in my room I can’t hear the river passing like time, or the moon emerging from the shadow of earth, but I can see the water that never repeats itself. It’s very difficult to look at the World and into your heart at the same time.

Jim Harrison, from “The Davenport Lunar Eclipse,” Complete Poems, ed. Joseph Bednarik (Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

[crucifiedlovers]

“the words forever bound to certain people, like catchwords, or to a specific spot on the N14 because a passenger happened to say them just as we were driving by, and we cannot pass that place again without the words leaping up like the buried water jets at the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, which spray when you walk across them…”

— Annie Ernaux, The Years (trans. Alison L. Strayer)

[apoemaday]

Late September Song

by Linda Pastan

With the sound of a freight train rushing through the trees, the first strong wind

of autumn makes each leaf sing the song of its own execution.

[endless-unfolding]

There is no sickness of spirit like homesickness When what you are sick for                                             has never been seen or heard In this world, or even remembered                                                      except as a smear of bleached light Opening, closing beyond any alphabet’s Recall

—Charles Wright, from “A Journal of English Days,” in Zone Journals

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

Nights are cold but we drive with the top down for the oxygen. The cypresses on the cliffs high over the sea, dragged sideways by the wind over centuries into permanent blurs, whizzes, smears, seem to be part of a comic strip as we, drunk and dangerous, scream past in the heartstopping blue twilight. Offshore, the small lights of fishing-boats float in the dark: if you let them they'll start symbolizing everything.

– Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

[apoemaday]

At the Pond

by Mary Oliver

One summer I went every morning to the edge of a pond where a huddle of just-hatched geese

would paddle to me and clamber up the marshy slope and over my body,

peeping and staring— such sweetness every day which the grown ones watched, for whatever reason,

serenely. Not there, however, but here is where the story begins. Nature has many mysteries,

some of them severe. Five of the young geese grew heavy of chest and bold of wing

while the sixth waited and waited in its gauze-feathers, its body that would not grow. And then it was fall.

And this is what I think everything is all about: the way I was glad

for those five and two that flew away, and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one that had to stay.

[whisperthatruns]

Twenty-Pound Stone

It nests in the hollow of my pelvis, I carry it with both hands, as if offering my stomach, as if it were pulling me forward. At night the sun leaks from it, it turns cold. I sleep with it beside my head, I breathe for it. Sometimes I dream of hammers. I am hammering it back into the sand, the sand we melt into glass, the glass we blow into bottles. This stone is fifteen green bottles with nothing inside. It never bleeds, it never heals, it is a soup can left on the back shelf, the label worn off. It is the corner of a house, the beginning of a wall. At night it changes shape, it lies on one side, casting jagged shadows. It brightens where my tongue touches it. Richard’s eyes were this color, a pale fruit, honeydew. When I swing it over my head I swear it could lift me. If I jump from a bridge it would drag me down, the current couldn’t carry us, it has no lungs, no pockets of air. If I could walk it to the center of a frozen pond & leave it, in the spring it would be gone.

Nick Flynn

[carnavalmemory]

Here, there are grasses rolled into dry moons, then carted off on trailers to the edge of the rain. Here there is so much sky that even birds get lost. Oh to be loved the way day loves the night. See how slowly they separate? All day long the trees move, each leaf in a different direction, as if by the work of fingers on a body. How many times our bodies imagined by another mind. How many times the day imagined the night. Once I loved a man so much that when he didn’t love me back, I closed my eyes and drank a whole bottle of night. How I felt night rush into my body, then out through my skin as envelopes. At the time, I only felt pain but years later, all I remember is joy, the kind of love that seems grinded off of a moon. Perhaps such love cannot ever be returned, just returned  in the imagination.

excerpt from “Marfa, Texas” by Victoria Chang (The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press, 2022)

[apoemaday]

Moving Forward

by Rainer Maria Rilke

The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. It seems that things are more like me now, that I can see farther into paintings. I feel closer to what language can’t reach. With my sense, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven, out of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the sky my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

[whisperthatruns]

Rainbow

Yes, you know about this natural phenomenon and what it does to the heart.

Like candies and toys in a glass cabinet at the arcade: it breaks it.

The sun catches inside four glass bulbs in a long string of previously unlightable lights.

My neighbor screams when she sees this.

It was once common to scream when a lightbulb lit up, but it’s pretty rare now, so congratulations to her on what is generally considered an antiquated reaction to light.

I want one more week on earth, at least, I think.

But it’s no matter.

I know the great miracles are the ones I don’t think to request.

And anyway how devastating to get what we ask for— a dolphin key chain, more beautiful than an actual dolphin, suddenly extracted, yours.

Chessy Normile, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)