Republic of the Imagination

When you read these lines, think of me and of what I have not written here.-Adrienne Rich

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

Planetarium

By Adrienne Rich

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster a monster i the shape of a woman the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles

in her 98 years to discover 8 comets

she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

'virile, precise and absolutely certain' from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse pouring from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most unstranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

The Way I Learned to Write

By Kate Gale

There were words I had to leave behind, moonlight, backward ponies. Leaving flowers out seemed safest. Trying for something surreal, A trouble free rise of smoke and lavender.

No not lavender. Any shade of purple is best left alone. Perhaps a jaundiced smoke rising in my poetry would be best, although I like violet haze.

Many a summer morning, while other folks are eating bagels, lox, cinnamon rolls, I rummage through old cider houses,

find words like obdurate, bipolar, manic, cold heeled. But writing about love, well, not even searches to junkyards as far away as Peking

turn up the slightest unused vowel. So, I make words up, create my own language. You Chinese me in the roofy mornings. You Japanese my legs in the spidery evenings. Our children are the leggy offspring

of centipede afternoons. Our bedroom is the Acropolis. You temple me backward. I could bless you all the way to shadowland. If we were not already steepled there, our undergarments ruffianed off onto chairs.

You catapulted silence, dogkissed, catlicked my paws held my squeaks and rattles. Where the rest had said, What's this? You said, it's mine.

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

A Short Story of Falling

By Alice Oswald

It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary that from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water's wishes and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass

to find the sunlight hidden at the tip turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

then I might know like water how to balance the weight of hope against the light of patience

water which is so raw so earthy-strong and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along drawn under gravity towards my tongue to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

which is the story of the falling rain that rises to the light and falls again

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

Why Is It Greek Omelet and Not Puerto Rican?

By E. Ethelbert Miller

Every morning I look for you on the menu.

Where are your eyes and lips, my side order of thighs?

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

Most People Would Rather Not

By Hannah Gamble

Most people would rather not, but I indulge, every few weeks, the thought of it. Sometimes

the oily smell of an evening flower appears and hangs in the air, a slightly browner spot.

I think most people had it wrong when they said forget about it and find a fresh patch of grass to lie down in.

There are prayers, though, about that kind of peace.

I have to admit, sometimes I want nothing more than to be lying on the bottom of an unimpressive river.

I can watch all the leaves and sticks skim over my head, and no one will bother me because they're swimming in the more impressive rivers.

The water's not too cold. It doesn't feel like being dead.

It also doesn't feel like being old or fetal.

I came to the humble water to lie down. I did what I set out to do. Now I don't have to tell you anything more about it.

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

A private public space

By Bob Hicok

You can't trust lesbians. You invite them

to your party and they don't come, they're too busy tending vaginal flowers, hating football, walking their golden and chocolate las. X gave me a poem

in which she was in love with a woman and the church but the church couldn't accept four breasts in one bed. When I asked if our coworkers knew,

she dropped her head and I said nothing for years until this morning I realized no one reads poems: my secrets and hers are safe in verse. I knew she'd have enjoyed

the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne, Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice, to protect women who cant stand in a room holding hands because you can't trust heterosexuals to love love, however it comes. So I recorded

the party for her, for them, the mic a bit away from the action to catch the feel of waves touching shore and letting go, the wash of moods across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes were thrown and I breathed the quickening revelation of a cigarette, someone said "I gave up underwear for Lent" and I hope

they play the tappe while making love. As if finally the world's made happy by who they are, laughing with, not at the nipple lick clit kiss hug in bed and after, the on and on of meals and moons and bills and burning days of pretending they don't exist. "Who's she? Just

a friend." And oceans are merely dew upon the land

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

dear love,

By Barbara Jane Reyes

you dream in the language of dodging bullets and artillery fire. new, sexy diagnoses have been added to the lexicon on your behalf ("charlie don't surf," has also een added to the lexicon on your behalf).

in this home that is not our home, we have mutually exiled each other. i walk down your street in the rain, and i do not call you. i walk in the opposite direction of where i know to find you. that we do not speak is louder than bombs.

there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match. let's see this prayer ignite to high heaven.

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention

By Yehuda Amichai Translated by Assia Gutmann

They amputated Your thighs off my hips. As far as I'm concerned They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantle us Each from the other. As far as I'm concerned They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good And loving invention. An aeroplane made from a man and wife. Wings and everything. We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

Landscape Without You

By Cate Marvin

Roofers scrape the scaly lid of an auto shop beside the house where I live. Where I live shirtless men tear at the black

scabs of a roof's old flesh, toss scraps into the back of a truck parked in the lot next to a house where I live. Where I live

a tarp rattles at night, plastic rustles, and trash is kicked along pavement by wind. Roofers curse and shell the tires shop's

peeling lid beside the house where I live. Where I live a tarpshakes all night; cans land on pavement, tossed from

windows of cars that blur by where I live. Where I live windows are ladled red with light your sun leaves me with.

Repairs are made to roofs which will never cover me. As I read the road between us, tire tracks unscroll their tawdry calligraphy.

Any day now you shall arrive, roar into my eye with your mountainside. Where I live when I live where landscape cannot survive you.

From Poetry Foundation

[thelovejournals]

I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you. We’ll talk about kids                              but make plans to travel. I will remember your eyes                              as green when they were gray. Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.               Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better.There will be small things. I will pick up your damp towel from the bed,                                                            and then I won’t. I won’t be as hot as I was                               when I wasn’t yours and your hairline now so               untrustworthy. When we pull up alongside a cattle car                               and hear the frightened lows,                               I will silently judge you                               for not immediately renouncing meat. You will bring me wine                               and notice how much I drink.                                               The garden you plant and I plant                               is tunneled through by voles,                                                               the vowels                                                               we speak aren’t vows,                 but there’s something                               holding me here, for now,                 like your eyes, which I suppose                                                               are brown, after all.

Rebecca Hazelton, You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life (via thelovejournals)

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

This Close

By Dorianne Laux

In the room where we lie, light stains the drawn shades yellow. We sweat and pull at each other, climb with our fingers the slippery ladders of rib. Wherever our bodies touch, the flesh comes alive. Heat and need, like invisible animals, gnaw at my breasts, the soft inside of your thighs. What I want I simply reach out and take, no delicacy now, the dark human bread I eat handful by greedy handful. Eyes, fingers, mouths, sweet leeches of desire. Crazy woman, her brain full of bees, see how her palms curl into fists and beat the pillow senseless. And when my body finally gives in to it then pulls itself away, salt-laced and arched with its final ache, I am so grateful I would give you anything, anything. If I loved you, being this close would kill me.

From Amber Cloverdale Sumrall, ed. Lovers: Stories By Women. The Crossing Press Freedom, 1992. 106.

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

The River-merchant's Wife: An Answer

by Samuel Peralta

I have revisited my parents’ house in Chokan, where we played before we were married.   You would still recognize it, the same long-stemmed vines intertwining the front gate, budding with flowers. So bashful then! I tried to make you laugh, striding with stilts and plucking blue plums to juggle eight feet in the air. I watched as your lips struggled with your eyes.

And I have drifted by the look-out rock, where we pledged a thousand times that we would grow together old, never look back. Weathered now, where your sandals have filed a melancholy pattern on its face.

I have tried to speak to you in your dreams; but yours are always the same: A big storm shakes through the woods of Pa Ling, tearing branches and leaves, turning the whole world black.

I call you, but the wind drowns out my voice. And when you wake up, shivering, I am invisible, your eyes look past me at the moon.

On the walkway, outside, the mosses have taken the steps now.

And so I flow with the wind, whirling with each western gust, lifting the hair from your face as you search the horizon toward Hsiang Tan.

And I flow with the river, swirling with the current, until I reach you, press against the soft skin of your feet, as you wait for me, ankle-deep in the waters past Cho-fu-Sa.

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

From A Survivor

By Adrienne Rich

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were   that our personalities could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know the race had failures of that order and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

  Your body is as vivid to me as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:  I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer the body of a god   or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years and you are wastefully dead who might have made the leap we talked, too late, of making

which I live now not as a leap but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

True Myth

By Heid E. Erdrich

Tell a child she is composed of parts (her Ojibway quarters, her German half-heart) she’ll find the existence of harpies easy to swallow. Storybook children never come close to her mix, but manticores make great uncles, Sphinx a cousin she’ll allow, centaurs better to love than boys—the horse part, at least, she can ride. With a bestiary for a family album she’s proud. Her heap of blankets, her garbage grin, prove she’s descended of bears, her totem, it’s true. And that German witch with the candy roof, that was her ancestor too. If swans can rain white rape from heaven, then what is a girl to do? Believe her Indian eyes, her sly French smile, her breast with its veins skim milk blue— She is the myth that is true.

From Poetry Foundation.org

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

Psychomachia

by Joanne Diaz

At the Mind Museum, you can walk to the back, step on several large butons on the ground,

and watch parts of the brain light up: the frontal lobe for decision and memory, the temporal lobe

for smell and sound, the occipital for sight. I try to make my toddler son laugh by hopping

from one button to the next, watching each lobe light up along the way, but he will not leave the prison

of his melancholy. My son: how he loves to revisit the most difficult point of conflict in a picture book,

or the moment at which his favorite car heaves a difficult sigh at the pinnacle of a movie’s emotional

arc, or the promise of injury if I take a fall. My son, so distant from other children in his sadness.

Just the other day, at the pool, he gazed at the boys and girls splashing and shrieking

and said, Look. The children are having fun, as if he were an anthropologist in a foreign land.

If these are his musings at age two, one can only imagine the life that must follow. Through a dark channel

he was born; to darkness he is most drawn. Easier to write than say the guilt I feel for giving him

the sharp pain of melancholy. My son, always in the world without hust or shell, it is as if his heart

throbs on the outside of his body, as if his brain has no skull to absorb the assaults that strike it.

Today, I watched him writhe in the pain of a tantrum– a typical kid, this is what they do, everyone assures

me–and usually I rush in, unwittingly increasing his sense of emergency. Instead, today, I stand back,

relinquish the role of skull and skin, watch his mind unfurl like a medieval tapestry. In that moment

of my feigned disinterest, his head is no longer head but battlefield where Wrath wages of fierce war

against Patience. He is no longer a little boy screaming on the ground and throwing plastic trucks;

instead he is a creature engaged in a struggle to free his enslaved heart from the monsters

whose foaming mouths and hot fumes and clots of foul bloodbesiege him

as he gathers his thoughts from the unraveling of his universe. Prudentius says that fiery Wrath

in her frenzy slays herself and dies by her own weapons. I will watch and wait

for my son to close his mind from the anger and sorrow that fester in him, but if the mind

does not close, I hope I can hide the weapons before, one day, it is too late.

From Poetry Foundation

[republicoftheimagination-blog]

Men

by Dorianne Laux

It's tough being a guy, having to be gruff and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh it off--pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal--or leave in a huff and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof when you love something or someone, scuffing a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff used in casual conversation--wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy Lube--gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It's rough, yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self isn't an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof of something difficult to define or defenf. Chief or chef, thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof. Son, brother , husband, lover, father, they are different from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

From Laux, Dorianne. "Men." The Book of Men. 2011. Poetry Foundation.

[avanlenten]

Could Have

It could have happened. It had to happen. It happened earlier. Later. Nearer. Farther off. It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. Alone. With others. On the right. On the left. Because it was raining. Because of the shade. Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck - there was a forest. You were in luck - there were no trees. You were in luck - a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant…

So you’re here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve? One hole in the net and you slipped through? I couldn’t be more shocked or speechless. Listen, how your heart pounds inside me.

~ Wislawa Szymborska. Poem about Holocaust survivors–but really about any survivor. Posted in memory of Tim Hetherington who was killed in Libya April 20, 2011.

http://www.timhetherington.com/