Death
–Bill KnottGoing to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.They will place my hands like this.It will look as though I am flying into myself.
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death
poetry
encounter
Encounter
–Czeslaw MiloszWe were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.A red wing rose in the darkness.And suddenly a hare ran across the road.One of us pointed to it with his hand.That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.O my love, where are they, where are they goingThe flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
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middle age
Amor Fati
Amor Fati
–Sandra LimInside every world there is another world trying to get out,and there is something in you that would like to discount this world.The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts,and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one.You could claim professional fondness for the world around you;the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive,and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors.Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one—is this the great world, which is whatever is the case?The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matchedby the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning.Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life?Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some,and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.
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sleeping
riddle
Riddle
–Laura KasischkeI am the mirror breathing above the sink.
There is a censored garden inside of me.
Over the worms someone has thrown
a delicately embroidered sheet, and
also the child at the rummage sale—more souvenirs than memories.
I am the cat buried beneath the tangled ivy. And also
the white weightless egg floating over it, which is
the cat’s immortal soul. Snowwhere there were leaves.
Empty plastic cups after the party on the beach.
The ash rising above the fire, like a flame.
The Sphinx with so much sand
blowing vaguely in her face. The last
shadow that passed over the blank
canvas in the empty art museum.I am the impossibility of desiring the person you pity.
The petal of the Easter lily—
O, that ghost of a tongue.
O, that tongue of a ghost.
What would I say if I spoke?I am the old lady in a wheelchair
in the corner of the nursing home, likea star flung up into the infinite, the infinite, cold
silent darkness of this universe. I amthat old woman as a little girl
in brilliant shoes
some beautiful summer afternoon,
laughing bitterly.
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from below
From Below
–Denise LevertovI move among the anklesof forest Elders, tread
their moist rugs of moss,
duff of their soft brown carpets.
Far above, their arms are held
open wide to each other, or waving
what they know, what
perplexities and wisdoms they exchange,
unknown to me as were the thoughtsof grownups when in infancy I wandered
into a roofed clearing amidst
human feet and legs and the massivecarved legs of the table,
the minds of people, the minds of trees
equally remote, my attention thenfilled with sensations, my attention now
caught by leaf and bark at eye level
and by thoughts of my own, but sometimes
drawn to upgazing-up and up: to wonder
about what rises so far above me into the light.
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untitled
Untitled
–Nikita GillTake this as your warning,
This book will pick out the bones
within you as it picked out the bones
within me.We are the closets
we hold our skeletons in.
And now they are knocking,
asking to get out.
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take a left here
Take a Left Here
–Jess Rizkallah
i climb mountains with monasteries
named for the moonand the moon whispers
a secret to the tides There. That’s The Beginning.
givingly
Givingly
–Carl Phillips– So here we are again, one-handedly fingering
the puckered edges of the exit-wounds
memory leaves behind, he said, and he tossed
his leash made of stars, then tightened it,around the antlers it seems I forget, always,
about having. Smell of nightfall when it
hasn’t settled yet. Insatiability and
whatever else hidden behind the partsthat hide it. Surely any victim – sacrificial
or not – deserves better, I thought, him leading me
meanwhile toward the usual place, the branches
grow more givingly apart, there, as if to sayLet pass. The wind was clean. The wind
was a good thing, in his hair, and across our faces.
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