Written by
Czeslaw Milosz |
Maidenly lake, fathomless lake,
Stay as you were once, overgrown with rushes,
Idling with a reflected cloud, for my sake
Whom your shore no longer touches.
Your girl was always real to me.
Her bones lie in a city by the sea.
Everything occurs too normally.
A unique love simply wears away.
Girl, hey, girl, we repose in an abyss.
The base of a skull, a rib, a pelvis,
Is it you? me? We are more than this.
No clock counts hours and years for us.
How could a creature, ephemeral, eternal,
Measure for me necessity and fate?
You are locked with me in a letter-crystal.
No matter that you're not a living maid.
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Written by
Nick Flynn |
It nests in the hollow of my pelvis, I carry it with both hands, as if
offering my stomach, as if it were pulling me forward.
At night the sun leaks from it, it turns cold, I sleep with it
beside my head, I breath for it.
Sometimes I dream of hammers.
I am hammering it back into sand, the sand we melt into glass,
the glass we blow into bottles.
This stone is fifteen green bottles with nothing inside.
It never bleeds, it never heals, it is a soup can left on the back shelf,
the label worn off.
It is the corner of a house, the beginning of a wall.
At night it changes shape, it lies on one side, casting jagged shadows.
It brightens where my tongue touches it.
Richard's eyes were this color, a pale fruit, honeydew.
When I swing it over my head I swear it could lift me.
If I jump from a bridge it would drag me down, the current couldn't
carry us, it has no lungs, no pockets of air.
If I could walk it to the center of a frozen pond & leave it,
in the spring it would be gone.
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Written by
Rg Gregory |
stylised tulips – this is what the card says
and they have that nineteen-twenties’ feel
of those bright young things a decade before us
who had a way of walking with their legs
bent back and their pelvis forward as if
inviting a kind of sexual depravity
with the no touch signs fervently displayed
stylised tulips – could be snakes though lurking
in the undergrowth good for a wriggle or two
tulips however keep their heads held high
disdainfully pretending the whole world
is beneath them - and what colours my dear
(or lack of colour or subtle colours
whichever the fashion aptly hissed by men)
stylised tulips – hardly the sobriquet
to be pinned on us of a different plumage
(children advancing to and not away from war)
we were the rough-and-ready class (the twerps)
the ignorance is innocence brigade
style was a cheap thing out of woolworths
(we had never heard of the pelvis anyway)
and all our lives our feet on the ground
however much we have let our noses roam
into the shenanigans our part of the world
has happily let itself be wrapped in
at heart we have never been able to accept
the lah-di-dahs of pretending what we’re not
appalled by all the effort it would take to be
stylised tulips
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