poet

unearthly love

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Christ Loved Being Housed
–Linda Gregg
The time of passion is younger than us.
It does not live in memories
or metaphors, but in living things:
quail, bay trees, the sun leaving
and returning. Going and being there.
Dark, rain and colors spreading
through the late sky afterward.
So much like the Apache and Tarahumara
who live differently now, as I do.
But I want to ask you about the nature
of love. Do you think it is unearthly?
I want to tell you it is, and more.
Christ did not want to leave the body.
Love resides entirely in the part of us
that is the least defended or safe.
The part that has no alternative
to loss, defeat and dying.
All else is tested by its flint
in what it strikes upon in the darkness.

Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

exiled tongue

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Exile
–Hilde Domin

The mouth dying,
The mouth twisted
The mouth trying
to say the word right
in a strange language.

Original

Exil

Der sterbende Mund
müht sich
um das richtig gesprochene
Wort
einer fremden
Sprache.

Photo by Catherine Heath on Unsplash

lost fragment

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For a Lost Fragment
–Carol Moldaw

for C.H.

It’s a definite lack, being landlocked, bay-and-ocean-less:
I envy you the lapping ferry, especially on your way home,
as you face the receding city to catch the sunset’s neon sprawl.

Life itself can feel like a sprawl these days, but I’m grateful
emotions no longer roil needlessly inside me, unchecked
as the flash flood that yesterday surged through the Pojoaque,

lifting it beyond its sand-grit bed and churning up a swill
of watered-down mud. When we were young, on the coast
of Spain, it was all I could do to keep my agitations down.

Who knew how to admit to the furious flurry caged inside?
At the overpass, a long line of cars—it looked like a pileup—
had emptied out to spectate the tumult moiling below.

To see the swollen river up close, once home I put on
waders and crossed our field, flooded only in pockets
until near the back V-gate, where suddenly the water rose

knee-high with a pushing force and a continuous roar
like a full-on stampede—the escaped river trampling its bed,
flattening cottonwood, salt cedar, Russian olive, in its wake.

Submerged like a floodplain, the past’s reshaped by brush
and bracken being swept downstream, by the water that,
subsided, reveals corrective contours, blank spaces, scraps

missing, regretted, newly understood. I wish I still had
that unfinished love poem I scrawled in a long-lost ledger.
As if it could ferry us back, redirect one moment’s course.

Photo by Igor Kasalovic on Unsplash

regret

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Regret
–Naomi Shihab Nye
To forgive ourselves for what we didn’t do
Replay a scene over and over in mind
Change it change
Apologizing to our own story handful of soil
I could have planted something better here

To walk without remembering another walk
To wash off the hope of a darkened day
Make a new one

This is normal here, the fathers say
bombs exploding
tourists stepping carefully over grenades
Excuse us this is not the life
we would have made or the way
we would have welcomed you
tear gas billowing over our streets
Regular
Usual
SOS
We are so tired.

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

sex

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What Sex Becomes
–Olivia Gatwood
I remember being a waitress
on Valentine’s Day and loving
the newness on a couple’s face,

how I watched, like the only patron
at a matinee, as they shared
everything they ate.

I would deliver their sundae
with an extra cherry–
the one she would slide into her mouth–
a preview of what was to come.

I felt like a school teacher
who goes home to no children,
a cab driver without a car,

a therapist who cries
in the middle of the night
and can’t figure out why.

Photo by Flavio Shibata on Unsplash

cannibal woman

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Cannibal Woman
–Ada Limón
I’m looking for the right words, but all I can think of is:
parachute or ice water.

There’s nothing, but this sailboat inside me, slowly trying to catch
a wind, maybe there’s an old man on it, maybe a small child,

all I know is they’d like to go somewhere. They’d like to see the sail

straighten go tense and take them some place. But instead they wait,
a little tender wave comes and leaves them
right where they were all along.

How did this happen? No wind I can conjure anymore.

My father told me the story of a woman larger than a mountain,
who crushed redwoods with her feet, who could swim a whole lake

in two strokes—she ate human flesh and terrorized the people.

I loved that story. She was bigger than any monster, or Bigfoot,
or Loch Ness creature—

a woman who was like weather, as enormous as a storm.

He’d tell me how she walked through the woods, each tree
coming down, branch to sawdust, leaf to skeleton, each mountain
pulverized to dust.

Then, they set a trap. A hole so deep she could not climb out of it.

(I have known that trap.)

Then, people set her on fire with torches. So she could not eat them
anymore, could not steal their children or ruin their trees.

I liked this part too. The fire. I imagined how it burned her mouth,
her skin, and how she tried to stand but couldn’t, how it almost felt

good to her—as if something was finally meeting her desire with desire.

The part I didn’t like was the end, how each ash that flew up in the night
became a mosquito, how she is still all around us
in the dark, multiplied.

I’ve worried my whole life that my father told me this because
she is my anger: first comes this hunger, then abyss, then fire,

and then a nearly invisible fly made of ash goes on and on eating mouthful

after mouthful of those I love.

Photo by Divimaris Balayong on Unsplash

 

great thanks

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Thanks
–W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

Photo by Luke Besley on Unsplash