Patience: In the Mill

     Through a place in the roof the sun came down

Where in a hail of light Mike Cole sat up,

His menial harness broken on his arms.

It shed a circle upon him.

As if he certainly were blessed, to be filling the cockpit with blood

Blushed eagerly from his face,

And laid on the sunburst of dials with glowing hands.

He could not look, but did,

And saw a smear, like egg, on the ragged panel wiped.

It was his other eye, which last had looked 

In seeing his engine die from a vibrant disk

To four great innocent sails.

Through his own incredible sternness

Of pain, he heard the sirens flare

On the gunned dust of the strip,

And motes from the stacks of sugar whirled

And unsupported slept upon the air, beside his props

Like petals carved from the basined floor.

A tooth lodged in his throat.

He did not speak of it, but a loft of children 

In the light he had let in

Were standing piping. He could not sing with them,

And almost wept,

                                but like a child, forgot,

And wandered, lost, among their faces,

Opening the bags, tasting the slanted sugar as he would.

                                                                  James Dickey

Rain Downriver

It has been raining now since
long before dawn, and the windows
of the Arab coffee house of Delray
are steamed over and no one looks
in or out. If I were on my way
home from the great chemical plant
on a bus of sodden men, heads rolling
with each swerve or lurch, I would get
off just here by the pale pink temple
and walk slowly the one block back
and swing open the doors on blue smoke
and that blurred language in which two
plus two means the waters of earth
have no end or beginning. I would sit
down at an empty table and open
a newspaper in which the atoms
of each meaningless lie are weighed
and I would order one bitter cup
and formally salute the ceiling,
which is blue like heaven but is
coming down in long bandages
revealing the wounds of the last rain.
In this state, which is not madness
but Michigan, here in the suburbs
of the City of God, rain brings back
the gasoline we blew in the face
of creation and sulphur which will not
soften iron or even yellow rice.
If the messenger entered now
and called out, You are my people!
the tired waiter would waken and bring
him a coffee and an old newspaper
so that he might read in the wrong words
why the earth gives us each day
and later brings darkness to hide
what we did with it. Rain in winter
began first in the mind of God
as only the smallest thought,
but as the years passed quietly
into each other leaving only
the charred remains of empty hands
and the one glass that never overflowed
it came closer like the cold breath
of someone who has run through snow
to bring you news of a first birth
or to give you his abrupt, wet blessing
on the forehead. So now I go back
out into it. From a sky I can no longer see, the fall of evening
glistens around my shoulders that
also glisten, and the world is mine.

PHILIP LEVINE

At 3 A.M. It's Unfair to Ask

You always ask
"must we mean what we say?"
You speak of bridges, of indeterminacies,
of a lack of universal.
And in some mean sense,
I agree.
But it's late October; the evenings
are far too short for Rorty and discussions of meaning.
What I mean now,
with the cool wind coming over your shoulder
and your hair forgetting its length,
is that we should go down into the park
and pass beneath the pines and the trellising jasmine
to see what the stars smell like in this crisp October air,
to see how the ants rearrange the earth beneath us,
to seek out the lake that moves slightly
leaving its rings around the sand shore
the way a strong red leaves its legs,
begging for sugar, begging for its body back
the way we all do.

If the ants haven't taken the hill to the north of the lake,
if the wine is good, the path silent, and the earth
round enough to land us in a clearing,
maybe we will find some point of perspective
that will allow us to love
the length of the moon falling from apogee.
And if after the dew falls
across our bared bodies
we should submit to saying nothing at all,
submit to the rising and falling of chests on a cold ground,
we will both understand, thick as grammar,
what it is we mean to say to each other and the world and the ants,
as the owls fade to sparrows
and the sun pulls the day over its horizon.

Dust Is 90% Skin

I remembered it a pit,
tall red walls with the water held in.

But today, it's trellised to the east with ivy
swinging like loose promises,
speckled with yellow and red wildflowers
brilliant against the deep ivy,
against the fallen terrain,
against the memory of shooting clay birds
from that peak just to the west.

He would cock back the heavy spring,
trail the string in in his hands light as twigs.
"pull it slowly." In the voice only fathers have
and then release the bird wingless
to be scattered like fog
across the bare walls below.

I remembered it a pit,
and I picked up the tiny box that held his name,
his seed, his fallen hairs, those ten slightly crooked toes
and the nose that found its way back to the mirror
only just this morning
and made my way to the peak
just to the west, where we'd shoot clay birds.

I sifted his fingers
through the damp sprinkling of my palm,
patted him down like a bulb, like a delicate shoot.

I planted his feet like cedars at the base of the gorge,
hoping for water. I climbed to the summit
and planted what was left: his footless legs,
his shoulders too thin for support, his ideas
legless in the upturned soil between my fingers.

And what wouldn't bury
and what clung to me, I carried out of the gorge like a compass,
hands in front, upturned for the reading.

But that was ten years ago.
This Easter the cedars are tall
and the ivy hangs in locks like his.
The entire valley is full of butterflies,
and from the bottom, in the midday wash of sunshine
they flutter like live confetti
through the sweet breath of spring gardenias.

To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives,
then of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch, to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry.
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Marge Piercy

The Resurrection

I'd dared her to go in, and we came on that dare
to the road above Rose Hill Cemetery, and sat for a moment in the cab of my truck,
quiet, not talking, looking down
at the valley of stones, the bone-white
testaments prickling the hills.
All the way out she talked of death, her desire
to be cremated, have her ashes scattered
over Lake Rabun. In the new life she'd return
as a swan or a dove. What did I say?
That I believed in the new life too,
the resurrection of the body, and though I knew
the Lord could mend us ash by ash
I wasn't the sort to put Him to the trouble.
So I wasn't afraid, we were as different
as East and West, and the night was still cool,
not quite the season to fall in love
with the wrong woman. And if she was afraid
of anything, she didn't show it, only took
the flashlight off the seat, zipped her parka.
A bright half-moon, white as marble, hung
over the river, and I followed her
in that light as she edged through the trees
down the hill toward the gardens,
toward the creek, the row of bricked vaults.
I'd dared her to go in. Not into the graveyard,
but into a grave I knew lay open in the side
of a ridge, an old haunt, reputed hangout
of a witches' coven. And I wasn't afraid
until I stopped where the rock garden
bridges the creek, and the wind off the river
seemed the breath of the dead, or whatever
inside me was dying. Let's go, she said,
and pointed up the ridge where I had pointed
to the grave, and we followed the creek
up the valley, past the wrought-iron fences
and chairs, the patios and bedrooms
of the dead, without talking, without touching
or ever having touched, until we came
to the end of the valley, the black mouth
gaping behind branches. She knelt then
by the tree and shined the light----
wine bottles, a sardine can, stubs of iron bars
jagging those jaws with rusty teeth----
and with only a slight shiver against the cold,
we crawled into that belly of earth.
And what had I really expected to find? A pit
of beer cans, a clay chamber of dry roots?
Or that stir in the sudden falling of dark,
like the brush of a cobweb against an ear,
like the silky crawl of the first hungry worm,
the gentlest touch,
that first delicate laying on of hands?


David Bottoms

Working Copies

A misreading implies
a proper reading.
At five AM it is still dark
and I hear no wind,
and the only light in the room comes from the red analog of the clock.
"It smells like rain."
She curls her head over my shoulder
and makes a space for the statement.
I think she's being poetic
and doze back off.
When the alarm goes off at six
it is pouring.
I reach for her to pull her back to that place of clairovoyance--
I want to know sports scores, lotto numbers, chicken or egg
but she just asks
"Can't you smell the weather?"
and pushes her back to me.
Nine minutes later the alarm is going off again.
And the pillow next to me bears long dark strands of thick black hair
in no discernible pattern.

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking;
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later,
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Rita Dove

THE LANGUAGE OF THE BRAG

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to acheive something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.

SHARON OLDS

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

I.

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II.

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III.

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV.

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI.

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII.

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII.

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX.

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X.

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out shraply.

XI.

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII.

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII.

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

WALLACE STEVENS

TRANSIT

A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house-door
At just that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.

What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?

Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Click down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
As a whip maps the countries of the air.

Richard Wilbur

Morning at the Window

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.


T. S. Eliot

Pour Commencer

Take 1 green pepper and 2 tomatoes
and cut them into rings and hearts. Mix those
with olives, black olives, and go for a swim
in a green sea with her (or him).
Then serve your salad on two bellies. Pour
a little sun-warmed olive oil in your
salt navel, some vinegar in hers
(or his), and eat slowly with your fingers.
Empty the bottle. Open a second. Then
lick your plates. You will need them again.

Jon Stallworthy

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable--
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping a bucketfull of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;

And she wept, "God bless you! for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

STARLIGHT

My father stands in the warm evening
on the porch of my first house.
I am four years old and growing tired.
I see his head among the stars, the glow of his cigarette, redder
than the summer moon riding
low over the old neighborhood. We
are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.
"Are you happy?" I cannot answer.
I do not really understand the word,
and the voice, my father's voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since. He bends and passes
a thumb beneath each of my eyes.
The cigarette is gone, but I can smell
the tiredness that hangs on his breath.
He has found nothing, and he smiles
and holds my head with both his hands.
Then he lifts me to his shoulder,
and now I too am there among the stars,
as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.
He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!
And in that new voice he says nothing,
holding my head tight against his head,
his eyes closed up against the starlight,
as though those tiny blinking eyes
of light might find a tall, gaunt child
holding his child against the promises
of autumn, until the boy slept
never to waken in that world again.

Philip Levine

Lawrence

On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D.H. Lawrence,

a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approxiamately that of a tree shredder

to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name

the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
"O Elephant," they say,
"you are not so big and brave today!"

It's a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven't earned,
and it's a sorry thing when certain other people

don't defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,

I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say; "I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,"
or "You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

as to deserve to lift
just one of D.H. Lawrence's urine samples
to your arid pyschobiographic
theory-tainted lips."

Or maybe I'll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven't come that far

in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more

than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.

TONY HOAGLAND

Incident

He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came
back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling past the
shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full halt.

At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead. He died then, there
after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face
and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light.

Pictures of the dead man are everywhere. And his spirit
sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than
his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying

down the stairs.

We have no word

on the killer, except he came back, from somewhere
to do what he did. And shot only once into his victim's
stare, and left him quickly when the blood ran out. We know

the killer was skillful, quick, and silent, and that the victim
probably knew him. Other than that, aside from the caked sourness
of the dead man's expression, and the cool surprise in the fixture

of his hands and fingers, we know nothing.

Imamu Amiri Baraka

PRIVILEGE OF BEING

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstacy --
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed --
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alley of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

Robert Hass

The Shipfitter's Wife

I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I'd go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
The I'd open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me--the ship's
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.

Dorianne Laux

An Attempt at Jealousy

So how is life with your new bloke?
Simpler, I bet. Just one stroke
of his quivering oar and the skin
of the Thames goes into a spin,

eh? How is life with an oarsman? Better?
More in--out? Athletic? Wetter?
When you hear the moan of the rowlocks,
do you urge him on like a cox?

Tell me, is he bright enough to find
that memo-pad you call a mind?
Or has he contrived to bring you out--
given you an in-tray and an out?

How did I ever fall for a paper-clip?
How could I ever listen to office gossip
even in bed and find it so intelligent?
Was it straight biological bent?

I suppose you go jogging together?
Tackle the Ridgeway in nasty weather?
Face force 55 gales and chat about prep
or how you bested that Birmingham rep?

He must be mad with excitement.
So must you. What an incitement
to lust all those press-ups must be.
Or is it just the same? PE?

Tell me, I'm curious. Is it fun
being in love with just anyone?
How do you remember his face
if you meet in a public place?

Perhaps you know him by his shoes?
Or do you sometimes choose
another pinstriped clone
by accident and drag that home

instead? From what you say,
he's perfect. For a Chekhov play.
Tall and dark and brightly dim,
Kulygin's part was made for him.

Imagine your life with a 'beak.'
Week after week after week
like homework or detention
all that standing to attention

whenever his colleagues drop in
for a spot of what's-your-toxin.
Speech Day, matron, tuck-shop, Christ,
you'll find school fees are overpriced

and leave, but not come back to me.
You've done your bit for poetry.
Words, or deeds? You'll stick to youth.
I'm a stickler for the truth---

which makes me wonder what it was
I loved you for. Tell me, because
now I feel nothing--except regret.
What is it, love, I need to forget?

Craig Raine