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Diving into the Wreck

by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.

There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it’s a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.

I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.

First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck We dive into the hold. I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

apoemaday

Ash

by Tracy K. Smith

Strange house we must keep and fill. House that eats and pleads and kills. House on legs. House on fire. House infested With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house. House of trick and suck and shrug. Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house. House whose rooms are pooled with blood. House with hands. House of guilt. House That other houses built. House of lies And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone. House like an engine that churns and stalls. House with skin and hair for walls. House the seasons singe and douse. House that believes it is not a house.

violentwavesofemotion-deactivat

Eila Kivikk’aho, tr. by Herbert Lomas, from Contemporary Finnish Poetry: “Recollection,”

awesomepharoah-deactivated20240

Broad Collar, ca. 1479–1425 B.C.E (reign of Thutmose III), 18th Dynasty, New Kingdom *

luthienmuse

Florence + The Arts 23/?

Elenore Abbott’s Drawn

vs Florence Welch at Hyde Park

adelphe

The Red Shoes

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Honor C. Appleton, 1926

Rules for a Body Coming Out of the Water by EMILY SKAJA

#poet: emily skaja #abuse cw #rape cw #subject: I have been her kind #subject: I am not from your tribe #subject: like she's tame #subject: you're in the movie now #flash paper

poem-locker

Lisel Mueller, "Romantics"

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry “how far it went,” their tender friendship. They wonder just what it means when he writes he thinks of her constantly, his guardian angel, beloved friend. The modern biographers ask the rude, irrelevant question of our age, as if the event of two bodies meshing together establishes the degree of love, forgetting how softly Eros walked in the nineteenth-century, how a hand held overlong or a gaze anchored in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart, and nuances of address not known in our egalitarian language could make the redolent air tremble and shimmer with the heat of possibility. Each time I hear the Intermezzi, sad and lavish in their tenderness, I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden among late-blooming roses and dark cascades of leaves, letting the landscape speak for them, leaving us nothing to overhear.

poem-locker

Christina Rothenbeck, “Girl’s Guide to the Apocalypse”

Everywhere: a city waiting to die, and who knows waiting better than you? Just a little push to the bed rock and it’ll buckle, plates shuddering as they shatter against each other. What’s sexier than plate tectonics, really? The hills rolling themselves over, tsunami like a giant tongue. You’d be amazed what steam can do for skin, how it will silver, how it all slides clean from the bone. Don’t be caught dead without your lipstick. What outfit matches your potential for mass chaos? Under your feet, fire always burns to the surface. Put your shoes on. Grab your axe.

#words

[Buffalo Bill ‘s] // e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill's

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

#Poet: E.E. Cummings #subject: all the last answers #subject: a china boy who chips away

Having it Out with Melancholy // Jane Kenyon

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure. A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard 1 FROM THE NURSERY When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore. And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad -- even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib. You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: “We’re here simply to wait for death; the pleasures of earth are overrated.” I only appeared to belong to my mother, to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. I was already yours -- the anti-urge, the mutilator of souls.

#poet: jane kenyon #subject: stunning monochrome #subject: nothing to do but live

from The Spark // Brenda Hillman

Start the memory, bright one, you who let your life be invented though not being invented had been more available

and remember those who lit the abyss. The boys in science fair. You were probably hall monitor at that time weren't you, and you admired them; on their generator, the spark bounced back and forth like baby lightning and you saw them run their fingertips through its danger, two promising loops stuck up to provide a home for the sexual light which was always loose when it wasn't broken, free jot that didn't go anywhere but moved between the wires like a piece of living, in advance -

then later: how much were you supposed to share? The boys sat in front of your house at dusk, the boys who still had parents. Sometimes they held Marlboros out the car windows and even if they didn't, sparks fell from their hands. Showers of sparks between nineteen sixty-eight and the

hands were sleek with asking sleek with asking;-

they had those long intermural after the library type fingers they would later put in you, - ah. When? well, when they had talked you into having a body they could ask into the depths of

#poet: brenda hillman #subject: illegal & brilliant #subject: I am not from your tribe #subject: nsfw

You Can Have It // Philip Levine

My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labors, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds, wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.

#poet: philip levine #subject: so we decided not to cry #subject: ode to my family #subject: take back the city

medeae

Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night—sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful and gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve. Until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, for once, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side— waiting.

Ocean Vuong, Torso of Air (via medeae)

#poet: ocean vuong #subject: nothing to do but live #subject: I have been her kind

Smoke // Dorianne Laux

Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat’s eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe, smoke slipping out between the sill and the glass, sucked into the night you don’t dare enter, its eyes drunk and swimming with stars. Somewhere a Dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws of a black machine. All down the block something inside you opens and shuts. Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze, trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties. You don’t flip on the TV or the radio, they might muffle the sound of car engines backfiring, and in the silence between, streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own, growing lighter and lighter as you inhale. There’s no music for this scarf of smoke wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers crawling the pale stem of your neck, no song light enough, liquid enough, that climbs high enough before it thins and disappears. Death’s shovel scrapes the sidewalk, critches across the man-made cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters, digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves. You can hear him weaving his way down the street, sloshed on the last breath he swirled past his teeth before swallowing breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman’s sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child. You can’t put it out, can’t stamp out the light and let the night enter you, let it burrow through your infinite passages. So you listen and listen and smoke and give thanks, suck deep with the grace of the living, blowing halos and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains linking around your head. Then you pull it in again, the vein-colored smoke, and blow it up toward a ceiling you can’t see where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold, like the ghost the night will become.

#poet: dorianne laux #subject: take back the city #subject: like she's tame #subject: many prayers

Ruins // Anne Love Woodhull

The gods in pieces around me, and me not quite made. Longing, but too young to be tired of anything. Thinking of the tomatoes and olive oil I ate in the evening. The stone phallus outside me. Wanting water all the time. The guide book not telling me who I am. I rub rosemary on my teeth, pick up a white stone and throw it as far as I can. Passion in search of a temple. The sea clean and direct. Goats and donkeys, no birds. Too hot for the snakes to come out.

#poet: anne love woodhull #subject: wild gratitude #subject: living myth #subject: the burning cathedral of the summer

A Man on the Subway // Anele Rubin

A man on the subway is wearing a t-shirt with New York City Mental Institute stenciled on the front. For a moment I think it’s real. Then I realize it’s supposed to be funny. Ha, ha, asshole, I say. He is smugly reading his paper. I am so tired of being sad.

#poet: anele rubin #subject: stunning monochrome

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