#peter cooley

[lillyli-74]

And my own darkness illuminates its memory.

~Peter Cooley

[beguines]

Peter Cooley, "The Holy Fool Meets Himself on One of His Highways," published in Image Journal, Issue 83

[allyourprettywords]

“Phoning My Sister at the Nursing Home,” Peter Cooley

“Welcome to Diane’s Consolidated Miseries. Diane is unavailable to take your call but if you would like to leave a message just recall the pitch and timbre and volume of her hostility. Your call is important to us. If you want a tirade against her father and mother, ninety-one and ninety-three, press one; against her brother and his family, press two; against the ‘entire goddamn world,’ press three; against the men who left her, press four; against her body she’s shrunk to eighty-six pounds, press five. The other five numbers are screams, execrations, a witch’s Sabbath hex against you. Remember, phoning her, you asked for it. The machine took down your number. She’ll call you back.”

[lifeinpoetry]

I'm starving for this moment to be mine,

Peter Cooley, from “Poem for Early Morning, Not an Aubade,” published in Bennington Review

[potatoesandsunshine]

[ardent-reflections]

And my own darkness illuminates its memory.

Peter Cooley

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

Daily Poem: Little Allegory ~ Peter Cooley

Little Allegory ~ Peter Cooley

“I’m not the kind of heaven you thought you’d find,” the sky said, spreading itself across the floor

here, in the kitchen, its gold leaf freaked and split as it appeared and disappeared and stained

the morning with its radiance. “And furthermore,

you’re not my idea of a prophet or a sage. But here we are, plain-speaking in blank verse.

Look, I’m all the transcendence you will find today if you’ll just step into my shifting path—

light, shadow, light—chiaroscuro, painters call it.” And this is when the dust motes spin, haloes

each one, around an angel on the air, and this is how my story suspends, there

where I am leaping, dancing, rising as I speak, no difference between my step and the supernal,

every note a grace note, that deep, high music.

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

Another of the Happiness Poems --Peter Cooley

It’s not that we’re not dying. Everything is dying. We hear these rumors of the planet’s end none of us will be around to watch.

It’s not that we’re not ugly. We’re ugly. Look at your feet, now that your shoes are off. You could be a duck,

no, duck-billed platypus, your feet distraction from your ugly nose. It’s not that we’re not traveling, we’re traveling.

But it’s not the broadback Mediterranean carrying us against the world’s current. It’s the imagined sea, imagined street, the winged breakers, the waters we confuse with sky

willingly, so someone out there asks are you flying or swimming? That someone envies mortal happiness like everyone on the other side, the dead

who stand in watch, who would give up their bliss, their low tide eternity rippleless for one day back here, alive again with us. They know the sea and sky I’m walking on

or swimming, flying, they know it’s none of these, this dancing-standing-still, this turning, turning, these constant transformations of the wind I can bring down by singing to myself,

the newborn mornings, these continuals—