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I have a dream to fill the golden sheath of a remembered day . . . . (Air heavy and massed and blue as the vapor of opium . . . domes fired in sulphurous mist . . . sea quiescent as a gray seal . . . and the emerging sun spurting up gold over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay . . . . ) But the day is an up-turned cup and its sun a junk of red iron guttering in sluggish-green water where shall I pour my dream?

Lola Ridge, “The Dream”

I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed. I know you are reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide while you wait for the newscast from the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers. I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Adrienne Rich, “From an Atlas of the Difficult World”

Images of blood are all around us, everywhere in our modern urbanized society blood is depicted, spoken of, displayed: The blood of wound, of death and to a tiny extent birth, is part of daily viewing in television and films; we are completely familiar with the bloodlines of kinship, and with the blood of violence, of murder and vengeance, of sacrifice, suffering, and of IV drug users; the blood of warning, of wounding, of threat; the danger attached to the blood of AIDS; the blood of life, of transfusions, of redemption; the blood of Christ; the blood of martyrdom, of St. Sebastian, of the prize fighter depicted in the movies. Blood is genealogy in bloodlines, family blood, the blood that is thicker than water. Blood is in name and in common expression, in the blood of the lamb, in the blood of blood, sweat and tears, in the blood of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, in the blood of blood brothers, the blood of the stigmata, the blood on the moon, the blood that cannot be squeezed from turnips, the blood dripping from the mouth of the vampire, the bloodstain on Lady Macbeth's hands, the blood gurgling down the shower drain in horror films. Real blood is everywhere in our society, Saturday- night blood, drive-by-shooting blood, the blood he was covered in after he was shot, or stabbed or blown up; the pencil- thin line like a necklace across her throat, the great spread of it when she was chopped up, the bloody nose, the bleeding ulcer, the sting of hemorrhoids, the blood on the surgeon's gown and the butcher's apron, the many rivers of battle and massacre that have run with blood, the battlefield soaked, the sand reddened, the blood on the child's ear and the wife's mouth and the young man's cheek. In the cities the gutters are streaming and sidewalks pooled and car seats puddled and emergency rooms smeared and police clubs stained. When gangster John Dillinger's body fell on the street shot by the FBI and spouting from numerous holes passersby instantly leaped as though to a holy stream, to dip a handkerchief, newspaper, even a sleeve into the blood of his wounds, to take a bit home with them. Blood is magic Blood is holy And wholly riveting of our attention. Menstrual blood is the only source of blood that is not traumatically induced. Yet in modern society, this is the most hidden blood, the one rarely spoken of and almost never seen except privately by women, who shut themselves in little rooms to quickly and perhaps disgustedly change their pads and tampons, wrapping the bloodied cotton so it won't be seen by others, wrinkling their faces at the odor, flushing or hiding the evidence away. Blood is everywhere and yet the one the only the single name it has not had publicly for many centuries is menstrual blood. Menstrual blood, like water just flows. Its fountain existed long before knives or flint. Menstruation is the original source of blood. Menstrual is blood's secret name.

“All blood is menstrual blood,” Judy Grahn

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

Anne Carson, “Could 1,” from Candor

My body of work is very similar to my corporal body. I often employ traditional forms (Spanx/dieting) but just as often revert to a more copious mode (cake/lazy afternoons). In that I wear little makeup (sensitive skin/feminist stance) I use few purely poetic flourishes except for rhyme—both internal and end line (lipstick/nail polish) conceding to self-conscious artifice. Perhaps because I grew up Catholic, I am drawn to acrostics (crosses) and punitive syllable counting (the rosary). I am interested in bodies seen and not seen (bikinis, muumuus, the dead and not-yet-born), poems written and yet-to-be-written. Holy ghost poems that cannot be read but only felt.

Denise Duhamel, “Artistic Statement”

1. A cardinal hurls itself at my window all morning long, trying so hard to penetrate its own reflection I almost let it in myself, though once I saw another red bird, crazed by the walls of a room, spatter its feathers all over the house. 2. My whole childhood is coming apart, the last stitches about to be ripped out with your death, and I will be left—ridiculous, to write condolence letters to myself. 3. The deathwatch beetle earned its name not from its ugliness or our terror of insects but simply because of the sound it makes, ticking. 4. When your spirit perfects itself, will it escape out of a nostril, or through the spiral passage of an ear? Or is it even now battering against your thin skull, wild to get through, blood brother to this crimson bird?

Linda Pastan, "The Deathwatch Beetle" from The Imperfect Paradise, published by W. W. Norton & Company.

Hunched in the bath, four ibuprofen gulped too late to dull the muscle cramping to sate a god who thirsts monthly for his slake of iron, I am just a body bleeding in bad light. But after an hour, as the wrenching wanes, I run more water in, remembering when I was a girl my mother knew one cure for this pain and, while I cried, carried me mugs of tea and whiskey clouded with sugar cubes. In a palm of pinkish water, I scoop up a burl of my flesh, almond-sized. The tissues settle, livid red to nearly black as I tilt my hand against the light to see it glistening like a ruby cabochon, appealing as it appalls, recalling one future, years ago, that would have borne itself on my blood had I allowed. The question swims into view: would I harbor another life now?

V. Penelope Pelizzon, from “Blood memory,” Poetry (January 2010)

He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair near his navel, swaying. And now he saw his other hairs rise up. He felt a hectic current in his veins. Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood. He cursed his fever, saying: “It is the chemistry of prayer. It increases in frequency, seeding panic to all my being. My cells swell with the liquid of guilt they fabricate, juices of hatred eat my belly my corpuscles make war in me as they devour each other. My head heats in the combustion of anxiety, I am polluted by the secretions of my soul’s decay, while my brain wears away with the scratching night and day on the encephalograph of prayer. I grow monstrous with the leukemia of the world.” And he heard the hair say: “Hear me.” And he saw it grow gray as it waved. All his hairs he saw whiten, and, numberless, wilt from their erect electric listening. He saw them topple from their roots. “How dare you!” he cursed them. There surged a brief resuscitation to his body. His heart took heart and pounded twice with the health of fear But then the plague of prayer redoubled and overwhelmed him. In his feebleness he raged, and said: “I will tear out this evil and free it.” With his withered hands he tore the remaining hairs from his body and head. With his nails he opened his breast, and with his fist he exploded his heart, which erupted, a black and red volcano. As his brain tasted, for the first time, the birth of his doom, he came a rolling tide, a floating mountain of ecstasy. “I see you! I love you!” his eyes cried, overflowing with his bright blood. “You were the light of the world that are now my gushing tears— the kind and fiery tears of chaos, that wash my eyes with the cure of oblivion.” “He hears us!” cried his sick blood pouring from his ears. “Even as of old he heard our hair before it perished.” With his last strength, the chemistry of prayer, a few drops of his blood coagulated. That clot whirled out, free, in the vortex of the universe.

May Swenson, “His Suicide”

What happens between us Happens in darkness, vanishes Easy and often as each breath.

Sylvia Plath, “Blue Moles”

At night the Universe grows lean, sober- faced, of intoxication, The shadow of the half-sphere curtains down closely against my world, like a doorless cage, and the stillness chained by wrinkled darkness strains throughout the Uni- verse to be free. Listen, frogs in the pond, (the world is a pond itself) cry out for the light, for the truth! The curtains rattle ghostlily along, bloodily biting my soul, the winds knocking on my cabin door with their shadowy hands.

Yone Noguchi, “At Night”

It’s all good, I would say, it’s all fucked. And then I would breathe. And then, again, it’s all good; it’s all fucked. Again, breathe. And then, it’s all good; it’s all fucked. Breathe again. I might do this while walking. Or while driving in the car. Or while lying down, before taking a nap.

Juliana Spahr, from “Non-Revolution,” Lana Turner Journal.

showstudio

I was born without a skin. I dreamed once that I stood naked in a garden and that it was carefully and neatly peeled, like a fruit. Not an inch of skin left on my body. It was all gently pulled off, all of it, and then I was told to walk, to live, to run. I walked slowly at first, and the garden was very soft, and I felt the softness of the garden so acutely, not on the surface of my body, but all through it, the soft warm air and the perfumes penetrated me like needles through every open bleeding pore. All the pores open and breathing the softness, the warmth, and the smells. The whole body invaded, penetrated, responding, every tiny cell and pore active and breathing and trembling and enjoying. I shrieked with pain. I ran. And as I ran the wind lashed me, and then the voices of people like whips on me. Being touched! Do you know what it is to be touched by a human being!

Anais Nin, House of Incest (via imhavingacrisis)

Before they lay down, the men of the city circled the park Circled the park circled the park the park the park Stood before the door holding the wrapped infant and I was writing a poem in the alley, a woman came, hovered near, asked for my pen, I gave it up Consumed in inequity, consumed: give me a child or I will die, she cried Shrugs away our hands, our mother in the bath in the garden The music is not great because she said because of the sadness she said Primate and psyche umbrage and rag It can refer only to itself or to the objects which surround it: lamp, table, It would be absurd to imagine the absent person in the margins of the book Red couch, red wall behind The birds are inside the trees now the first one and the second one Giraffe and guest and honor and hunt Then she gave up her spirit but couldn’t get out

Julie Carr, from “Landlocked Lines”

Made guardians of these places; Etherial human shapes, perhaps the souls Of poets and poetic women, staying To have their fill of pipes and leafy playing -- You finer people of the earth, Nymphs of all names, and woodland Geniuses, I see you, here and there, among the trees.

Leigh Hunt, from Nymphs

So we shoveled it. Climbed over it. When a boy’s loved he is loved. We kissed him at the countdown then we went to bed. Then I woke and on the screen an executioner whose wife for him was worried. Both on and off the screen there was still a lot of snow. I went out and stuck my hand in it, felt around for a handle. None. So I picked myself up and walked to the bank. Does it seem I am alone? No, not alone. The wind was a friend. Dying and down. I bent over, I listened to the flow. Home, yes, but leaving. Home, sure, fine, but, where’s the bathroom? Where’s the light? Anyway, the soft swell said, lisping its S’s, Anyway, if you’re at home here, you’re a guest. So I bowed. I said I’m sorry if I bore you. Broad, the river belled in a thud of sun. I climbed aboard, I rowed. A border flew open like a cough. I leaned back to balance my heavy brown oars as they dipped to green and red furrows of light between water mounds. My boat rocked, steady, un-steady. Was I welcomed? It seemed I was as I gripped and privately beheld. The night soon lost its head. I said, I’m here. Pulling up now, parking, looking for something to eat, to redeem. The wind shook the seedpod but the seedpod wasn’t moved. And though I thought I’d done the damage I was born for, there was still so much to step through, so much to mar.

Julie Carr, “House / Boat,” from Equivocal.

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag. He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it, peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood. He took a step back and gestured toward it with his arms and open palms — It’s the ark, he said. You mean Noah’s ark? I asked. What other ark is there? he answered. Read the inscription, he told me, it tells what’s going to happen at the end. What end? I wanted to know. He laughed, What do you mean, “what end”? The end end. Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled. His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters. He held the jagged piece of wood so gently. I had forgotten my brother could be gentle. He set it on the table the way people on television set things when they’re afraid those things might blow-up or go-off — he set it right next to my empty coffee cup. It was no ark — it was the broken end of a picture frame with a floral design carved into its surface. He put his head in his hands — I shouldn’t show you this — God, why did I show her this? It’s ancient — O, God, this is so old. Fine, I gave in, Where did you get it? The girl, he said. O, the girl. What girl? I asked. You’ll wish you never knew, he told me. I watched him drag his wrecked fingers over the chipped flower-work of the wood — You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it — no matter how many books you’ve read. He was wrong. I could take the ark. I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers. The way they almost glittered. It was the animals — the animals I could not take — they came up the walkway into my house, cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips, marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother, tails snaking across my feet before disappearing like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls, reaching out for him — wildebeests, pigs, the oryxes with their black matching horns, javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat. So many kinds of creature. I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it, but my brother stopped me — This is serious, he said. You have to understand. It can save you. So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that, and two-by-two the fantastical beasts parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles, built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup before floating it away from the table. My brother — teeming with shadows — a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air.

Natalie Diaz, “it was the animals,” Poetry (March 2014).

Jorie Graham:

“ . . . I often teach a painting of Caravaggio’s, Supper at Emmaus. Christ is sitting before us in an alcove against the “back wall” of the painting. We face into a dinner table covered with things for the meal. We are quite sure that the edge of this table is identical with the absolute front of the canvas. But then one undergoes a troubling sensation. The basket of fruit, the edge of the wicker basket, sticks out into our “actual” space, our here and now. The host suddenly recognizes the stranger at his table as Christ and throws open his arms, like this. [Gestures.] His left hand comes out, beyond the border—further than the sacramental grapes in their wicker—out here into the same air that you (and I) are breathing in the National Gallery. At the same time, his right hand penetrates the crucial illusionistic space, the alcove in which Christ sits. What he does, by going like this, is enact what it is to be “taken” by surprise, to be, suddenly, in that spiritual place where the otherness of the world, of possibility, “turns” one’s soul—taking one off the path of mere “ongoingness” onto the other path of “journey.” At any rate, the host’s gesture connects that immortal-because-imaginary space Christ occupies, with the mortal one of the gallery in which I am standing breathing my minutes—and you suddenly realize Caravaggio has activated what I call the “sensation of real time”: the time of the painting’s represented action has crossed over into the time in which my only days are taking place. So you cannot read the painting without being inside the terms of the painting, which are these graduating degrees of temporality: mortal time, immortal time, represented time, actual time, the “time” of process. The activity of the painting is to do that. The host is crucified in this position—a position the artist is also in—saying, You reader and you subject (God, Christ), I have put you two together. It’s my job. That’s what the meal is. That’s what we eat.”

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