Written by
Jorie Graham |
Spring
Up, up you go, you must be introduced.
You must learn belonging to (no-one)
Drenched in the white veil (day)
The circle of minutes pushed gleaming onto your finger.
Gaps pocking the brightness where you try to see
in.
Missing: corners, fields,
completeness: holes growing in it where the eye looks hardest.
Below, his chest, a sacred weightless place
and the small weight of your open hand on it.
And these legs, look, still yours, after all you've done with them.
Explain the six missing seeds.
Explain muzzled.
Explain tongue breaks thin fire in eyes.
Learn what the great garden-(up, up you go)-exteriority,
exhales:
the green never-the-less the green who-did-you-say-you-are
and how it seems to stare all the time, that green,
until night blinds it temporarily.
What is it searching for all the leaves turning towards you.
Breath the emptiest of the freedoms.
When will they notice the hole in your head (they won't).
When will they feel for the hole in your chest
(never).
Up, go. Let being-seen drift over you again, sticky kindness.
Those wet strangely unstill eyes filling their heads-
thinking or sight?-
all waiting for the true story-
your heart, beating its little song: explain. . .
Explain requited
Explain indeed the blood of your lives I will require
explain the strange weight of meanwhile
and there exists another death in regards to which
we are not immortal
variegated dappled spangled intricately wrought
complicated obstruse subtle devious
scintillating with change and ambiguity
Summer
Explain two are
Explain not one
(in theory) (and in practice)
blurry, my love, like a right quotation,
wanting so to sink back down,
you washing me in soil now, my shoulders dust, my rippling dust,
Look I'll scrub the dirt listen.
Up here how will I
(not) hold you.
Where is the dirt packed in again around us between us obliterating difference
Must one leave off Explain edges
(tongue breaks) (thin fire)
(in eyes)
And bless. And blame.
(Moonless night.
Vase in the kitchen)
Fall
Explain duty to remain to the end.
Duty not to run away from the good.
The good.
(Beauty is not an issue.)
A wise man wants?
A master.
Winter
Oh my beloved I speak of the absolute jewels.
Dwelling in place for example.
In fluted listenings.
In panting waters human-skinned to the horizon.
Muzzled the deep.
Fermenting the surface.
Wrecks left at the bottom, yes.
Space birdless.
Light on it a woman on her knees-her having kneeled everywhere
already.
God's laughter unquenchable.
Back there its river ripped into pieces, length gone, buried in parts, in
sand.
Believe me I speak now for the sand.
Here at the front end, the narrator.
At the front end, the meanwhile: God's laughter.
Are you still waiting for the true story? (God's laughter)
The difference between what is and could be? (God's laughter)
In this dance the people do not move.
Deferred defied obstructed hungry,
organized around a radiant absence.
In His dance the people do not move.
|
Written by
Anne Kingsmill Finch |
FOR He, that made, must new create us,
Ere Seneca, or Epictetus,
With all their serious Admonitions,
Can, for the Spleen, prove good Physicians.
The Heart's unruly Palpitation
Will not be laid by a Quotation;
Nor will the Spirits move the lighter
For the most celebrated Writer.
Sweats, Swoonings, and convulsive Motions
Will not be cur'd by Words, and Notions.
Then live, old Brown! with thy Chalybeats,
Which keep us from becoming Idiots.
At Tunbridge let us still be Drinking,
Though 'tis the Antipodes to Thinking:
Such Hurry, whilst the Spirit's flying,
Such Stupefaction, when 'tis dying;
Yet these, and not sententious Papers,
Must brighten Life, and cure the Vapours
|
Written by
Robert Burns |
BY all I lov’d, neglected and forgot,
No friendly face e’er lights my squalid cot;
Shunn’d, hated, wrong’d, unpitied, unredrest,
The mock’d quotation of the scorner’s jest!
Ev’n the poor súpport of my wretched life,
Snatched by the violence of legal strife.
Oft grateful for my very daily bread
To those my family’s once large bounty fed;
A welcome inmate at their homely fare,
My griefs, my woes, my sighs, my tears they share:
(Their vulgar souls unlike the souls refin’d,
The fashioned marble of the polished mind).
In vain would Prudence, with decorous sneer,
Point out a censuring world, and bid me fear;
Above the world, on wings of Love, I rise—
I know its worst, and can that worst despise;
Let Prudence’ direst bodements on me fall,
M[ontgomer]y, rich reward, o’erpays them all!
Mild zephyrs waft thee to life’s farthest shore,
Nor think of me and my distress more,—
Falsehood accurst! No! still I beg a place,
Still near thy heart some little, little trace:
For that dear trace the world I would resign:
O let me live, and die, and think it mine!
“I burn, I burn, as when thro’ ripen’d corn
By driving winds the crackling flames are borne;”
Now raving-wild, I curse that fatal night,
Then bless the hour that charm’d my guilty sight:
In vain the laws their feeble force oppose,
Chain’d at Love’s feet, they groan, his vanquish’d foes.
In vain Religion meets my shrinking eye,
I dare not combat, but I turn and fly:
Conscience in vain upbraids th’ unhallow’d fire,
Love grasps her scorpions—stifled they expire!
Reason drops headlong from his sacred throne,
Your dear idea reigns, and reigns alone;
Each thought intoxicated homage yields,
And riots wanton in forbidden fields.
By all on high adoring mortals know!
By all the conscious villain fears below!
By your dear self!—the last great oath I swear,
Not life, nor soul, were ever half so dear!
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