Franz Wright

Cloudless Snowfall

Great big flakes like white ashes

at nightfall descending

abruptly everywhere

and vanishing

in this hand like the host

on somebody’s put-out tongue, she

turns the crucifix over

to me, still warm

from her touch two years later

and thank you,

I say all alone—

Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats

awakens me and I look up

at a minute-long string of black geese

following low past the moon the white

course of the snow-covered river and

by the way thank You for

keeping Your face hidden, I

can hardly bear the beauty of this world.

Louise Gluck

Hyacinth

Is that an attitude for a flower, to stand 
like a club at the walk; poor slain boy, 
is that a way to show 
gratitude to the gods? White 
with colored hearts, the tall flowers 
sway around you, all the other boys, 
in the cold spring, as the violets open. 

2 
There were no flowers in antiquity 
but boys' bodies, pale, perfectly imagined. 
So the gods sank to human shape with longing. 
In the field, in the willow grove, 
Apollo sent the courtiers away. 

3 
And from the blood of the wound 
a flower sprang, lilylike, more brilliant 
than the purples of Tyre. 
Then the god wept: his vital grief 
flooded the earth. 

4 
Beauty dies: that is the source 
of creation. Outside the ring of trees 
the courtiers could hear 
the dove's call transmit 
its uniform, its inborn sorrow— 
They stood listening, among the rustling willows. 
Was this the god's lament? 
They listened carefully. And for a short time 
all sound was sad. 

5 
There is no other immortality: 
in the cold spring, the purple violets open. 
And yet, the heart is black, 
there is its violence frankly exposed. 
Or is it not the heart at the center 
but some other word? 
And now someone is bending over them, 
meaning to gather them— 

6 
They could not wait 
in exile forever. 
Through the glittering grove 
the courtiers ran 
calling the name 
of their companion 
over the birds' noise, 
over the willows' aimless sadness. 
Well into the night they wept, 
their clear tears 
altering no earthly color.

Louise Gluck

The Triumph Of Achilles

     In the story of Patroclus 

no one survives, not even Achilles 
who was nearly a god. 
Patroclus resembled him; they wore 
the same armor. 

Always in these friendships 
one serves the other, one is less than the other: 
the hierarchy 
is always apparant, though the legends 
cannot be trusted-- 
their source is the survivor, 
the one who has been abandoned. 

What were the Greek ships on fire 
compared to this loss? 

In his tent, Achilles 
grieved with his whole being 
and the gods saw 
he was a man already dead, a victim 
of the part that loved, 
the part that was mortal. 

Louise Gluck

Telemachus’ Detachment

 

When I was a child looking 

at my parents’ lives, you know 

what I thought? I thought 

heartbreaking. Now I think 

heartbreaking, but also 

insane. Also 

very funny.

 

Ange Mlinko

Boston Flower Market

Transformation vs. Encryption — a browning banana is aging the flowers in the vase, a transformation of five bucks into dying daisies (I’ll be the rose, you be the pansy).

Mnemosyne vs. Treasury — beyond the marble balustrade of the Bourse (stained glass with scenes of the stations of the exchange) a vault where gold in the form of ink is stored in books of metaphors, which exponentially increases the value of the gold (you be poesy, I’ll be the proxy).

Loiterer vs. Flaneur — ‘Miss, this train must be goin somewhere a young lady like you must want to go / I see you sittin here each day like it takes you farther than your bike.’ ‘I go downtown / walk around / then I return.’ ‘Girl / viz. Ms. // you don’t just reject, you contravene a kiss!’

Ornament vs. Accident — Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that writing is an unnecessary luxury trade like goldsmithing. The goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini never wrote about nature and solitude — he didn’t have the luxury.

‘Miss this train / scenes of the station / increases the value
Solitude he didn’t have / five bucks / treasury beyond the / May day’

As even collage has an organizing principle to skirt, it’s Sanity vs. Ambition, a psychological thriller. Or, if you prefer, it’s a May day, 80 degrees, an unusually early summer. You be eros, I’ll be pensée.

Ange Mlinko

 

Keys & Scales 

Back when maps were dangerous it was seditious
To give one to a foreigner; feeling so perfectly calligraphic that,
Implying the limp like an iamb superseded what was said of one
By the words themselves, one slyly wrote across the desert,

Allaying the panic took a device to craft a presence.
To say, in search of a role, that a double bend in the river
Was a perimeter of reparation,
We tried that of believers, like quoted back to itself

The wilderness took shape; the stars were of where
Two had met, in honeydew shadow, and made maps praise.

Ange Mlinko

 

Kouign Amann

I went to make kouign amann. It sounded Irish
and/or Maghrebi. But it’s Breton, as I can swear
by the blue hydrangea like a cloudy iris
 
I photographed near Finistère.
And now I’m here in Croton-on-Hudson
trying to remember what was sinister
 
about the asymmetrical cruets,
swan and cygnet, I thought I heard
—listening under a sweet duvet—
 
duet. (But do swans vocalize?
Strengthening the pair-bond
while their two pasts together caramelize
 
the present?) Sinister like Croton’s
name, derived either from a Kitchawanc chief
or Calabria, source of stonemasons
 
for the dam. The former translates as
“Big Wind,” the second is known
as the birthplace of the school of Pythagoras.
 
Sinister not knowing if silent esoterics filter
down to our little dam, dreamt of under
sweet sweet down duvets. Bretagne’s off-kilter
 
menhirs call to our bric-a-brac rock
like names orphaned after the glaciers’ retreat
from Briquebec to Wequetequock.

Ange Mlinko

 

Bees in Cider

It was a bouffant bee, almost as big as the rose it lit on –
and that’s the point: so late in the season was it, that
‘remontant’ – reblooming through the summer –
any blossom now was a shrunken simulacrum. So I lit on
the issue of all this sunshine leading to overproduction:
the roses I had counted in their furibund overproduction
showing diminishing returns. Something was out of joint
about the whole project, the projection of éclat
out of proportion to the product, which the bee imbibes,
the bouffant bee, with its understated point,
and those waxen wings that soften like a Roman tablet –
those waxen wings dissolving in light – whereas in Sumer
it was wet clay with its right-to-left writing,
and Greece, stone with its left-to-right writing
(like characters driving to or back from the sea), on lit,
depending on the home ground of farflung scribes
deriving a style or stylus or maillot or mallet –
but now it is late for a bee to be supping at the last ember
of an evening somersaulting from sepia to auburn
and the rose to be remontant as rain makes a sweep
(water tutoring me, or tutoyant, as they say in Dieppe:
on intimate terms), so late in the day that lodgers
leaving their rentals shrink to traces in beermakers’ ledgers.

Joshua Clover

 

Haecceity

If what you want is calm
to be restored you are still the enemy
you have not thought thru clearly
what that means

if what you want is a national
moment of silence the indictment
of a single police officer
or two or three you are still
the enemy you have chosen the reverie
of law for you and your friends if you want

another review panel a Justice Dept
study a return to democracy rather than
for riot and looting to leap beyond
itself from county to county
rift to rift until it becomes general
you have not understood
what a revolution is it's just this

it's coming out again night after night more of us
than there are of them it's saying no
to every deal remember nothing
belongs to you because nothing
belongs to anyone

Joshua Clover

What's American about American Poetry?

They basically grow it out of sand. 

This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic. 
Welcome to the desert of the real, 
I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen. 
I do not think the revolution is finished. 
So during these years, I lived in a country where I was little known, 
With the thunder of the Gods that protect the Icelandic tundra from advertising, 
Great red gods, great yellow gods, great green gods, planted at the edges of the speculative tracks along which the mind speeds from one feeling to another, from one idea to its consequence 
Past the proud apartment houses, fat as a fat money bag. I wish that I might stay in this pleasant, conventional city, 
A placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure, 
And then vanish in the fogs of hypnoLondon. 
All are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries, 
The swan-winged horses of the skies with summer's music in their manes, 
The basic Los Angeles Dingbat, 
A housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night. 
Every Sunday is too little Sunday, 
A living grave, the true grave of the head. 
In one shout desire rises and dies. 
Composed while I was asleep on horseback 
I drift, mainly I drift.

Joshua Clover

 

The Map Room

We moved into a house with 6 rooms: the Bedroom, 
the Map Room, the Vegas Room, Cities 
in the Flood Plains, the West, & the Room Which Contains All 
of Mexico.We honeymooned in the Vegas Room where 
lounge acts wasted our precious time.Then there was the junta's 
high command, sick dogs of the Map Room, heel- 
prints everywhere, pushing model armies into the unfurnished 
West.At night: stories of their abandoned homes in the Cities 
in the Flood Plains, how they had loved each other 
mercilessly, in rusting cars, until the drive-in went under. 
From the Bedroom we called the decorator & demanded 
a figurehead... the one true diva to be had 
in All of Mexico: Maria Felix [star of The Devourer, star 
of The Lady General].Nightly in Vegas, "It's Not Unusual" 
or the Sex Pistols medley.Nothing ever comes back 
from the West, it's a one-way door, a one-shot deal,-- 
the one room we never slept in together.My wife 
wants to rename it The Ugly Truth.I love my wife for her 
wonderful, light, creamy, highly reflective skin; 
if there's an illumination from the submerged Cities, 
that's her.She suspects me of certain acts involving Maria Felix, 
the gambling debts mount...but when she sends the junta off to Bed 
we rendezvous in the Map Room & sprawl across the New World 
with our heads to the West. I sing her romantic melodies from the Room 
Which Contains All of Mexico, tunes which keep arriving 
like heaven, in waves of raw data, & though I wrote 
none of the songs myself & can't pronounce them, these are my 
greatest hits

Richie Hofmann

Philosophical Flowers

 

The streets are named for German poets

in my huge provincial Midwestern city.

Dust whirls up from the tires of passing cars,

lifting a veil over me, like Romantic longing. On Goethe, I want nothing 

more than to reach down and feel a lover’s big skull

in my hands. On Schiller, lust subsides, among the wrought iron

doors and grand steps, lined with hundreds of dollars of candles. 

Inside, patricians mingle in the high-minded friendships

I desire for myself. About this, as so much else,

the flowers in the window-boxes on Schiller are philosophical.

Their arguments are convoluted, but concern the beauty of simplicity, freedom from need,

and, even more often, the depredations of time.

One fat peony speaks as if she were the Sybil:

“Live with your century but do not be its creature.”

Fady Joudah

 

Dimoprphism

The first time I ate a crab sandwich I was a boy and loved it

it wasn’t for another ten years that I found out it was imitation crab

Soluble salty rubber

two waters at the confluence of their steady eddy synapse

my triceps fat pressed to your triceps fat

on a bench inside a museum’s dark room

video installation of two bodies dancing

Me in my stillness

you in your movement

what the moving know about stillness

the still don’t know and vice versa

The Greek Myth professor lectured to us

in his voice of reading children stories to children

And docked me points when I remembered the tales

but couldn’t spell the names

Fady Joudah

 

IT’S NOT BLOOD’S FAULT IT’S RED

Skin strikes skin over plate and within
the frame whose borders are laser-hung
by players who render umpires surplus

What I propose insists on return:
I return you to you you return me to me
or me to me and you to you
return is only to the stranger

Otherwise this thing between our nipples
and knees will mar life for life
what is reflex what is fasciculation
my boredom which you call my loneliness
our pose as entries in the glossary of vision

Our error was mutual:
I did not want to be someone else’s dream
and you have enough of what incinerates
for the light inside you to shine
free of soot

Our bodies blend as alibis
and your cherries are black
as long we as are bodies on screen

Fady Joudah

 

from 

A Spider, an Arab, and a Muslim Walk into a Cave

The prophet and his closest disciple, Abu Bakr, were hiding in a cave in Jabal Thawr before heading north to Medina. When Mecca’s rulers sent their best trackers to follow the two men to the exact spot where they hid, one of the “invisible soldiers” who God enlisted to aid his messenger was a spider. As the bounty hunters approached the cave, the spider wove a web obstructing the entrance. The bounty hunters paused: surely, they thought, too little time had elapsed for a spider to have spun such intricate work. They turned back to Mecca empty handed. And schoolchildren today learn about the holy spider and her miraculous, protective web.

Fady Joudah

The Outer Rings of Saturn

Is disease a longing as acceleration is gravity?
This weekend the beaches are empty,

the weather perfect, you’re caught
between the pristine
and the poor having time to frolic.

Studies show that the jasmine
can’t let go of the rose bush

in your backyard but can do without the thorns.
Whatever your mourning, it’s an animal

not a constellation. If anything, you’re jubilee,
coffee in the morning, kids to school,

yoga, zumba, a paycheck sustained
on the rungs of payback. This afternoon,

you’d like to focus your gratitude
on the mailwoman who didn’t deliver

any news. And on the doctor
who complied with your demands.

Kaveh Akbar

Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler

 

visiting a past self. Being anywhere makes me thirsty.

When I wake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.

As a boy, I spit a peach pit onto my father’s prayer rug and immediately

 

it turned into a locust. Its charge: devour the vast fields of my ignorance.

The Prophet Muhammad described a full stomach as containing

one-third food, one-third liquid, and one-third air.

 

For years, I kept a two-fists-long beard and opened my mouth only to push air out.

One day I stopped in a lobby for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres

and ever since, the life of this world has seemed still. Every night,

 

the moon unpeels itself without affection. It’s exhausting, remaining

humble amidst the vicissitudes of fortune. It’s difficult

to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having.

Philip B. Williams

Of Contour, of Cadence

 

Resist, don’t: the difference between what one thinks

the magnolias say—branches applauding

some animal act below—and what

they actually say…nothing

 

between us can

we prepare for, only postpone. I’ve learned

 

to plead and to please, another difference.

 

~

 

Turn your face that way where light no more

transfigures you than darkness makes a need for

transfiguration. Yes, the scar above your eye.

 

Blood had dropped from the wound, a curtain.

 

But I believe we are, inside, all blue, you said.

Listen, neither we nor blue make sky.

The earth spins and we, utterly, are spun.

   

Fady Joudah

Carousel

 

All you have been and all 

you have experienced has happened to me.

I travel from my future to our past to lose 

my origins. What’s the beginning?

Where? There was a loophole, and I was the camel 

that went through. One hump or two?

The answers to my questions are beyond me 

but I only ask questions with answers I can believe.

I have seen the world without you in it 

and it’s not what you think.

In the future you will see 

that it was me who gave you the order to ruin my past.

In my past you will seem wicked.

I will not accept your innocence.

Dan Chiasson

from Poetry Society of America Statement

I won't bore you with my theories about why poets my age tend not to like Robert Lowell. I'll just say a few things about why I find his late, little-known poem "Suburban Surf" to be sublime, almost bottomlessly inspiring, inexhaustible as a source for the idiom I need, the key I need, when I intend to write. I know no poem of comparable linguistic constriction that nevertheless reaches for and attains such breadths of lyric beauty. In its alternating civility and fear it seems equal parts compass and wilderness. The intelligence governing this poem is so severe as to find speech itself somehow miscarrying, misleading. Sentences begin and trail off; insights are sketched and abandoned. The poem is about a couple in bed, but its sense of genre is so canny and natural that to call it an aubade feels foolish. Lowell knows the value of grammatical and lexical waywardness: he describes the cars outside his window as "always very loud enough to hear" and that misplaced "very," for me, is worth ten thousand words placed properly. The penultimate stanza implies myth, history, philosophy, ethics, and several other discourses it feels no need to include explicitly. It is more interesting to me than entire careers of more obviously or programmatically "post-modern" poets, because of its authentic traffic in these discourses. Here it is: "In noonday light,/ the cars are tin, stereotype and bright,/ a farce/ of their former selves at night--/ invisible as exhaust,/ personal as animals." My own poems resemble Lowell not at all; our temperaments differ, our experiences differ, and his project is so thoroughly realized that imitation feels seriously dangerous. But if I am able to write something even half so beautiful, so wised-up about the world, so simultaneously severe and delicate in its relation to language and person, I will die a happy man.

Elizabeth Willis

Rosicrucian Machinery

 

Scudding past fancy lights, I’m writing toward your face. If pages enter, they do it with my blessing. There’s no limit to the boy car, its floating night. Noise is noise. Such a you, buying dynamite, rustling in gauze. Don’t speak till sound has eclipsed its idea, your thoughts are on the phone. Sure I’d like a lake, but do we need all ten thousand? The mind can fit just one, well placed among its cabins. How big is our room if we can’t see its edges? Steer that boat toward me like you hope to arrive.