I Am Vertical


"But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."

by Sylvia Plath





The Breather






"Just as in the horror movies
when someone discovers that the phone calls
are coming from inside the house


so too, I realized   
that our tender overlapping
has been taking place only inside me.


All that sweetness, the love and desire—
it’s just been me dialing myself
then following the ringing to another room


to find no one on the line,
well, sometimes a little breathing
but more often than not, nothing.


To think that all this time—
which would include the boat rides,
the airport embraces, and all the drinks—


it’s been only me and the two telephones,
the one on the wall in the kitchen
and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs."

Source: Poetry (July/August 2008).

Consciousness


Consciousness

BY JOANIE MACKOWSKI
"How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander


the halls of the skull with the fluorescents
softly flickering. It rests on the head


like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel
and awkward as soon as one stops to look.
That pile of fallen leaves drifting from


the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove,


to the grooves in that man’s voice
as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves


of books with moonlit opossums
and Chevrolets easing down the roads
of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single


tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet


itself is a swarm, a pulse with no
indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo.


Our compacted galaxy, its constellations
trembling like flies caught in a spider web,
until we die, and then the flies


buzz away—while another accidental


coherence counts to three to pass the time
or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine


strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped
in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself
like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds


a fraying map from the pocket of the day."
Source: Poetry (February 2012).

What the Bones Know 




What the Bones Know 

BY CAROLYN KIZER
Remembering the past
And gloating at it now,
I know the frozen brow
And shaking sides of lust
Will dog me at my death
To catch my ghostly breath.
 
          I think that Yeats was right,
          That lust and love are one.
          The body of this night
          May beggar me to death,
          But we are not undone
          Who love with all our breath.
 
                     I know that Proust was wrong,
                     His wheeze: love, to survive,
                     Needs jealousy, and death
                     And lust, to make it strong
                     Or goose it back alive.
                     Proust took away my breath.


                                  The later Yeats was right
                                 To think of sex and death
                                 And nothing else. Why wait
                                 Till we are turning old?
                                 My thoughts are hot and cold.
                                 I do not waste my breath.
 

Of beetles, sweetbreads and shards


"I looked for a sign and found myself no where." 



Blue Moles

1
They're out of the dark's ragbag, these two
Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart ---
Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
Little victim unearthed by some large creature
From his orbit under the elm root.
The second carcass makes a duel of the affair:
Blind twins bitten by bad nature.

The sky's far dome is sane a clear.
Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
Between the road and the lake water,
Bare no sinister spaces. Already
The moles look neutral as the stones.
Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
Difficult to imagine how fury struck ---
Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.
2
Nightly the battle-snouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light's death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while I sleep,
Palming the earth aside, grubbers 
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there one is alone.

Outsize hands prepare a path,
They go before: opening the veins,
Delving for the appendages
Of beetles, sweetbreads, shards -- to be eaten
Over and over. And still the heaven
Of final surfeit is just as far
From the door as ever. What happens between us
Happens in darkness, vanishes
Easy and often as each breath.

By Sylvia Plath

late September


A SOFT-EDGED REED OF LIGHT

"That was the house where you asked me to remain
on the eve of my planned departure. Do you remember?
The house remembers it – the deal table
with the late September sun stretched on its back.
As long as you like, you said, and the chairs, the clock,
the diamond leaded lights in the pine-clad alcove
of that 1960s breakfast-room were our witnesses.
I had only meant to stay for a week
but you reached out a hand, the soft white cuff of your shirt
open at the wrist, and out in the yard,
the walls of the house considered themselves
in the murk of the lily-pond, and it was done.

Done. Whatever gods had bent to us then to whisper,
Here is your remedy – take it – here, your future,
either they lied or we misheard.
How changed we are now, how superior
after the end of it – the unborn children,
the mornings that came with a soft-edged reed of light
over and over, the empty rooms we woke to.
And yet if that same dark-haired boy
were to lean towards me now, with one shy hand
bathed in September sun, as if to say,
All things are possible – then why not this?

I’d take it still, praying it might be so."

© 2008, Julia Copus
Publisher: The Spectator, London, 2008

releasing to the sound of keys

"A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That's how I hold your voice." 
— Rumi



"It is a way of saying
I want to be left without words,
to lose without comment.

How long am I going to talk
about what no longer is.

About her, who no longer is
seeing me write about her.
And with those eyes!

I too open them at night
and look at the silence
in the dark
where the portrait ends
without her getting to see it

and I think
and I think
and I think

about things like you
that appear to have
no date of expiration,

about your wanting to get home:
with the key prepared,
clinging to the taxi door,
letting yourself fall through your door
almost with the unsteady will
of an autumn leaf,

this kind of expiration,

and these eyes to golden tending
the ones you said in descriptions
were green. To look
at every occasion with kindly eyes
that no longer look at me,
though I remember them.

And now
I want to be left
without words. To know how to lose
what is being lost..." 
*
"It was perfect pain:
speaking of her,
they spoke of themselves..."


Passages from a  Portrait Ended by Mirta Rosenburg.


© 1998, Mirta Rosenberg
From: El Arte de Perder
Publisher: Bajo La Luna Nueva, Buenos Aires, 1998
© Translation: 2008, Julie Wark

she was only a fraud


hiding behind her many devices
and
quite witchy after all


it's an unattractive trait this self loathing
one that should not
be put on
others
this much I know



The Starry Night



The Starry Night

by Anne Sexton


That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.


It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons   
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how   
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,   
sucked up by that great dragon, to split   
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

YouInventedMe - Poet

between the moss lies my other side of  midnight

Sea of Tears

by `YouInventedMe in a collaboration with for Winds

"A sailboat drifting among humdrum doldrums
rocks silently through nighttime fire,
as the void hunger laps tenaciously at her sides.
She sees silhouettes and seizes the shadows.

She wears them like a second-skin;
her former self,
a secret spine.

You carved beauty into my eyes and
branded me a damn fool, but not since
then have you stopped staring at the diamonds
placed just out of reach.

Now, I am dark,
and buried deep,
anticipating
proper pressure.
Only pure hypocrisy can ever
show me how not to be someone I
never really was, and truly be someone
I hate (to regret).

And now that the eastern horizon
is the only place I can go,
[and now that dusk is the only time I realize
just how much I pale in comparison
to the lucid black sea]
it’s time for us to leave.

You'll be down
below the carved earth
left by falling
dusk.

I'll be waiting
on the echoes
of the evening."


For more literature by YouInventedMe  and for Winds please go to:
http://youinventedme.deviantart.com/
http://forwinds.deviantart.com/

Numbers





"I get magic
     (sometimes I get more
        than I bargain for)

but I don’t get
     numbers.

Numbers do worse
than humiliate
     or elude me

they don’t add up.

I am no algebra tart
     ravished
by the meretricious music
      of the spheres.

My eyes and nose
never streamed
  with incontinent ecstasy
    through geometry classes
as my disastrous triangles
    collapsed in a cacophony
        around me.

Perhaps it’s a failing
          to grasp
             or even want
the utterly perfect number
        burning through my retina
like the utterly perfect  morning.

Instead I peer
        with nauseating vertigo
into the deep dark pitch
        of numbers
like an exhausted mammoth
        dangerously tottering
            on the edge
               of a bottomless mystery."








Written by Dorothy Porter.