poet

remembering

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Remembering
–P.K. Page

Remembering you and reviewing
our structural love
the past re-arises alive
from its smothering dust.
For memory, which is only decadent
in hands like a miser’s
loving the thing for its thingness,
or in the eyes of collectors who assess
the size, the incredible size, of their collection,
can, in the living head, create and make
new the sometimes appallingly ancient present
and sting the sleeping thing
to a sudden seeing.
And as a tree with all its leaves relaxed
can shiver at the memory of wind
or the still waters of a pool recall
their springing origin and rise and fall
suddenly over the encircling basin’s lip—
so I, remembering from now to then,
can know and see and feel again, as jewels
must when held in a brilliant branch of sun.

the day

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The Day
–James Schuyler

Photo by Ari Apple on Unsplash

monroeville

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Monroeville, PA
–Ed Ochester
One day a kid yelled
“Hey Asshole!”
and everybody on the street
turned around.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

try

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Try
–Maggie Anderson
To move the language toward happiness,
or failing that, toward love. Like this:
the trees have undone their sandals and silk saris,
thrown light scarves down onto the brickwork.
One red thread is caught mid-air on an updraft,
held by a spider web. Remember the way
he described the green soup he moved through
coming out of surgery? A swift current
of warm water, swirling and turning among
floating cylinders, friends inside them talking.
Next door the little boy swings higher and higher.
His half-scream is also half-laugh — more, more.
Follow the vowels; laudanum, potpourri, chrysanthemum.
Trust the verbs: to meander, to sashay, to bear up.

Photo by Pedro Vit on Unsplash 

today, another universe

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Today, Another Universe
–Jane Hirshfield

The arborist has determined:
senescence         beetles       canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable     not treatable     not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty foot playground.

The bark  cambium    pine-sap    cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns       the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

after your death

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After Your Death
–Natasha Trethewey

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash

stills

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Stills
–A.R. Ammons
I have nowhere
to go and

nowhere to go

when I get
back from there.

Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash

the joke

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The Joke
–Ron Padgett

Photo by Hoach Le Dinh on Unsplash

 

 

flew by us

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I Don’t Know How a Day Flew By Us
–Anna Kamieńska

 

Photo by Sophia Müller on Unsplash 

intelligence

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Intelligence
–Jenny George
How easily the deer move between
the field and the woods.
Only we know a thing by its periphery:
the meadow edged with trees.
Or happiness with its horizon of pain.
From inside the house I watch them grazing,
their pooled memory guiding them
into the shade, then into the grass again.

Photo by Scott Carroll on Unsplash