pas de deux

and when you're gone, I'm godless.

[apoemaday]

Ars Poetica II

by Charles Wright

I find, after all these years, I am a believer — I believe what the thunder and lightning have to say; I believe that dreams are real,                                                       and that death has two reprisals; I believe that dead leaves and black water fill my heart.

I shall die like a cloud, beautiful, white, full of nothingness.

The night sky is an ideogram,                                                       a code card punched with holes. It thinks it’s the word of what’s-to-come. It thinks this, but it’s only The Library of Last Resort, The reflected light of The Great Misunderstanding.

God is the fire my feet are held to.

[women-loving-art]

Audre Lorde, Solstice

[havingapoemwithyou]

Masculinity ode by Ally Ang

[blood-red-roses]

Joanna Klink

[seekingstars]

Rending the Garments - Ronna Bloom

[apoemaday]

Prayer

by Ellen Bass

Once I wore a dress liquid as vodka. My lover watched me ascend from the subway like I was an underground spring breaking through. I want to stop wanting to be wanted like that. I'm tired of the song the rain sings in June, the earth, her ornate crown of trees spiking up from her loamy head. There are things I wanted, like everyone. But to this angel of wishes I've worshiped so long, I ask now to admit the world as it is.

[apoemaday]

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not.

It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness — between you, there is nothing to forgive — but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

[apoemaday]

The Doorway

by Louise Glück

I wanted to stay as I was still as the world is never still, not in midsummer but the moment before the first flower forms, the moment nothing is as yet past –

not midsummer, the intoxicant, but late spring, the grass not yet high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips beginning to open –

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others, the ones who go first, a tense cluster of limbs, alert to the failures of others, the public falterings

with a child’s fierce confidence of imminent power preparing to defeat these weaknesses, to succumb to nothing, the time directly

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery

before the appearance of the gift, before possession.

[violettesiren]

a meadow is a drama laid out to dry, an opera

pressed flat and thin and wide, purple lupine, buttercups and a steep hill, a green wedding gown, (there are such things: my

mother wore one, unfurled on its pink silk hanger, and a feather in her hat.) wind pulls sheep around on an invisible leash, fear-rabbits

freeze in their tracks, as if. eyes flatten like unspent pennies, i walked this meadow as a girl, lavender coat and lavender shoes.

slowly but surely, in my head i created some dumb claim about beauty, i grew up to walk the perimeter, the whole thing glued

itself to my heart like a postage stamp, i carried it, that letter the philosopher said will inevitably reach its destination, i was the lone addressee.

in the envelope, pressed flat as a handkerchief kept in the pages of that old book of German fairy tales, is the meadow beneath every other

word i use to explain myself, rolled out like a green carpet in a towering library in which all the books have been burned, the ash of words flutters

like moths at dusk hovering around the borders of the red clover, then dark eats its way across the meadow like a horse, chewing with its square

teeth, revising, erasing, swallowing. i am at a loss, a meadow attempting to describe a meadow. beneath my description is the real meadow.

a meadow is a drama laid out to dry, an opera by Diane Seuss

[seekingstars]

Poem - Denis Johnson

[lunchboxpoems]

DEAN YOUNG

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jane Hirshfield

[seekingstars]

COLLOQUE SENTIMENTAL - Frank O’Hara

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

It’s like passionate love for a ghost. - Alice Notley

[thanks to Alina Stefanescu :: @aliner]

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[apoemaday]

The Everlasting Staircase

by Jeffrey McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live, my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do, people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while world war II functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature, that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back, hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now -- pupils fixed, chin dangling like the boots of a hanged man --

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats. I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it, the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap off

in your grasp. But when Grandma's last breath waltzed from that room, my heart opened

wide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die. She simply found a silence she could call her own.

[weltenwellen]

Alice Notley, from “I’m Just Rigid Enough”, Mysteries of Small Houses