fragments of contemporary poetry

from the collection "Sleek for the Long Flight" ... SCORPIO

You are unpredictable, obsessed by sex and death, eager to assert your individuality. You

can be devious, but charming. You will not be invited to the party. You carry your young

on your back, because your tail cannot reach there and, instictively, they know that. You

wish they would get off. If you were born today, you would have been a great basketball

player except for the accident. Today's Scorpio daughter will be beautiful and intense:

when her wishes are granted, she's in trouble. When two of you are gathered in my name,

your tails will snarl in the air like incestuous lariats. You should take care of that

pressing financial obligation today. You have forgotten something. What do you think it

is? You are a spine whose legs have failed to evolve into ribs. Your conversation is

only about you: you never mention me. I am the one who made you what you are. It is my

fault. Tonight should be devoted to romantic pursuits. Whom shall we chase? We will not

be invited to the party. You ought to forget about me. You tend to be careless of others.

You are the only one I have ever loved.

THE ASIANS DYING

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight


Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything


{excerpt}

THE WAY TO THE RIVER

The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor


I lay your name by my voice
As I go


The way to the river leads past the late
Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards
They play that they are broken glass
The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds
Call
From windows
They play that they are old they are putting the horizon
Into baskets they are escaping they are
Hiding


I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars
My voice turns to you


I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow
Windows gallery
Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all
In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing
Sort of poker with somebody’s


Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose
The rivers one
After the other I begin to know where I am
I am home


Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
To your name and the hour remembers
Its one word
Now


Be here what can we
Do for the dead the footsteps full of money
I offer you what I have my
Poverty ...{excerpt}

ONE OF THE LIVES



If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
{excerpt} {an article about Merwin... http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...n/pdmerwin.htm }

Lines of Refusal



Nothing here, just the sound of the heat, the sound of the cars,
nothing, nothing

Sweet unrest

To the oldest son a scythe, to the second a ****, to the third a cat

Must avoid rivers, strivers, and voyeurs

Not gather, not tether, not tie

The young brother came to a town that was completely hung
with black crepe

Wrote his autobiography in exactly thirty-seven words

Crawled into a crawlspace and pulled shut the door

No friend, no grammar, no end

Later, he too will become an imposing statue

No wish, no fission, no sign

Then hurrying across the avenue

Snow and so on

A young red fox and so on

Face and hair and hands and so on

Each with the incomparable taste of its own life in its mouth

=really good collection of heart touching poetry .

THE WAY TO THE RIVER

The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor


I lay your name by my voice
As I go


The way to the river leads past the late
Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards
They play that they are broken glass
The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds
Call
From windows
They play that they are old they are putting the horizon
Into baskets they are escaping they are
Hiding


I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars
My voice turns to you


I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow
Windows gallery
Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all
In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing
Sort of poker with somebody’s


Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose
The rivers one
After the other I begin to know where I am
I am home


Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
To your name and the hour remembers
Its one word
Now ...{excerpt}

Rebecca Gould interviews the descendants of Titsian Tabidze, August 2010 --- http://www.guernicamag.com/interview...abidze_8_1_10/

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star


Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
...{excerpt}

TERM

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do

ONLINE SOURCE: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/p...erwin/term.htm

RAIN LIGHT All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

ONLINE SOURCE:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06...anscript1.html

The Lovers


The lovers say nothing.
Love is the finest of the silences,
the one that trembles most and is hardest to bear.
The lovers are looking for something.
The lovers are the ones who abandon,
the ones who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that they will never find.
They don't find, they're looking.

The lovers wander around like crazy people
because they're alone, alone,
surrendering, giving themselves to each moment,
crying because they don't save love.
They worry about love. The lovers
live for the day, it's the best they can do, it's all they know.
They're going away all the time,
all the time, going somewhere else.
They hope,
not for anything in particular, they just hope.
They know that whatever it is they will not find it.
Love is the perpetual deferment,
always the next step, the other, the other.
The lovers are the insatiable ones,
the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone.

The lovers are the serpent in the story.
They have snakes instead of arms.
The veins in their necks swell
like snakes too, suffocating them.
The lovers can't sleep
because if they do the worms ear them.

They open their eyes in the dark
and terror falls into them.

They find scorpions under the sheet
and their bed floats as though on a lake.

The lovers are crazy, only crazy
with no God and no devil.

The lovers come out of their caves
trembling, starving,
chasing phantoms.
They laugh at those who know all about it,
who love forever, truly,
at those who believe in love as an inexhaustible lamp.

The lovers play at picking up water,
tattooing smoke, at staying where they are.
They play the long sad game of love.
None of them will give up.
The lovers are ashamed to reach any agreement. ...{excerpt}

(translated by W. S. Merwin)

from GREGORY COWLES" review... "Hayes’s work is terrific, and characteristic of a certain strain in contemporary poetry: it’s grounded in narrative even as it’s linguistically dense and playful, with allusions to formal verse traditions and to pop culture new and old."
--- November 18, 2010, 3:15 pm ‘Lighthead,’ by Terrance Hayes: A.D.D. Poet Wins N.B.A. Poetry Award
By GREGORY COWLES --- http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2...rd/?ref=review

TOUCH ME Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour

WHEN SHE WOULDN'T


When her recorded voice on the phone
said who she was again and again to the piles
of newspapers and magazines and the clothes


in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail
and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.


When she could no longer walk
through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody-
to-help-me way of walking, with her head


bent down to her knees as if she were searching
for a dime that had rolled into a crack


on the floor, though it was impossible to see
the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed
to no one was so bad she could not stand


at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
to find what was edible. When she could hardly


even sit as she loved to sit, all night
on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers
hanging nearby on the curtainless bar


of the shower stall, and the shoes lined up
in the tub, falling asleep and waking up


while she cut out newspaper clippings
and listened to the late-night talk
on her crackling radio about alien landings


and why the government had denied them.
When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing


ache of her foot trying over and over to wash
the black from her big toe and could not
because it was gangrene.


When at last they came to carry my mother
out of the wilderness of that house ...{excerpt}