Table of Contents (in order that should be read)

1. Graham Foust - In the Space Provided

2. Mark Halliday - Summer Perdu

3. John Gallaher - And Generally the Future is Uncertain

4. Christine Garren - Love Poem

5. Graham Foust - Of What Seems Like My Father

6. Franz Wright - Old Story

7. Joel Brouwer - Aesthetics

8. Ted Kooser - Shooting A Farmhouse

9. Franz Wright - How You Will Know Me

10. Graham Foust - Country and Western

11. Norman Dubie - Aciident

12. Zachary Schomburg - Islands in the Black Night

13. Christine Garren - Christmas

14. Mark Levine - Counting the Forests

15. Ralph Angel - In Every Direction

16. Mark Halliday - My Moral Life

17-18. Patrick Lawler - That Was Another Patrick Lawler

19-20. Samuel Coleridge - Kubla Khan

21. Franz Wright - Bild, 1959

22. Zachary Schomberg - Experiments in Invisibility

23. Charles Simic - Old Couple

24. Ted Kooser - Turkey Vultures

25. Keith Waldrop - Proposition 1

26. Wallace Stevens - Disillusionment of 10 O'Clock

27. John Gallaher - It's Any Move, It's That People Are Places

28. Ashley Capps - April

29. Rae Armantrout - Form

30. Michael Burkard - Told Some Realisms and Truisms

31. Ralph Angel - Even Because

32. Joel Brouwer - Lesser Evils

33. Charles Simic - Winter Night

34. Robert Haas - A Story About the Body

35. Christine Garren - The Well

36. Norman Dubie - Poem

37. Michael Burkard - Amends

38. Mark Levine - Eclipse, Eclipse

39. Wallace Stevens - A Postcard from the Volcano

40. Graham Foust - Google

41. Mark Halliday - The Man Who is not at the Table

42. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 5

43. Zachary Schomburg - Experiment in Geography

44-46. Patrick Lawler - Patrick Lawler Writes About Patrick Lawler

47. Ashley Capps - Black Ice

48. Wallace Stevens - Hymn for a Watermelon Pavilion

49. Rae Armantrout - Seconds

50. Charles Simic - Gallows Etiquette

51. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 1

52-53. Mark Halliday - Nebraska Novel

54. Ashley Capps - Rosa Canina

55. Rae Armantrout - Greeting

56. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 2

57. Joel Brouwer - Explanations

58. Graham Foust - Blood Test

59-60. Wallace Stevens - Farewell to Florida

61. Charles Simic - Note Slipped Under a Door

62. Dorianne Laux - How it Will Happen, When

63. John Gallaher - On the Map of the Folded World

64. Mark Halliday - Parkersburg

65. Wallace Stevens - Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

66. Joel Brouwer - Diagnosis

67. Dorianne Laux - Family Stories

68. Christine Garren - Portrait Before Dark

69. Ashley Capps - Encore

70. Mark Halliday - Schnetzer Day

71. Graham Foust - After Aretha Franklin

72-73. John Gallaher - When One has Lived Too Long Among Other People

74-75. Robert Haas - Heroic Simile

76. Franz Wright - To John Wieners: Elegy & Response

77. Michael Burkard - Unappreciated Butterfly

78. Norman Dubie - Sky Harbot

79. Rae Armantrout - Rehearsal

80. Ralph Angel - This

81-82. Ralph Angel - Breaking & Entering

83. Ted Kooser - After Years

84. Zachary Schomburg - Bear and Camper

85. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 7

86. Charles Simic - History Book

87. Ashley Capps - Lullaby

88. Ted Kooser - Flying at Night

89. Robert Haas - Meditation at Lagunitas

90. Michael Burkard - Lunar Shoulder

91. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 8

92-93. John Gallaher - The Rejected House

94. Michael Burkard - Small Paintings on Paper

95. Ted Kooser - In January

96. Christine Garren - Message

97. Zachary Schomburg - A Band of Owls Moved into Town

98. Joel Brouwer - Serena

99. Wallace Stevens - What is Divinity

100. Graham Foust - Panama

101. Franz Wright - Morning Arrives

102. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 9

103-104. Norman Dubie - At Corfu

105. Rae Armantrout - Performers

106. Franz Wright - Domesticity

107. Ashley Capps - Ars Poetica

108. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 10

109. Joel Brouwer - Recluse

110. Rae Armantrout - Interval

111. Christine Garren - The Deserted Field

112. Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream

113-114. Rae Armantrout - Manufacturing

115. Robert Haas - Untitled

116-117. Robert Haas - Untitled # 2

118. Ted Kooser - At the Cancer Clinic

119. Ralph Angel - It Takes a While to Disappear

120. Charles Simic - Hotel Insomnia

121. Joel Brouwer - Bridge

122. Ashley Capps - Tar

123-124. Norman Dubie - February: The Boy Breughel

125. Franz Wright - Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse

126. Ted Kooser - Carrie

127. Ralph Angel - Tidy

128-129. Patrick Lawler - Marx Dancing with History meets Marques Dancing with Time

130. Dorianne Laux - Break

131. Christine Garren - The Shore: A Love Poem

132. Charles Simic - The School of Metaphysics

133-135. Samuel Coleridge - A Soliloquy Of The Full Moon, She Being In A Mad Passion

136. Robert Haas - Spring

137. Ashley Capps - My People

138. Joel Brouwer - Childhood

139. Norman Dubie - Not the Bathing Tank at Madras: A Romance

140. Ralph Angel - Man in a Window

141. Mark Halliday - My Strange New Poetry

142. Franz Wright - Auto-Lullaby

143. Christine Garren - The Ritual

144. John Gallaher - Poem for the End of January

145. Graham Foust - Devotio Moderna

146. Michael Burkard - Small and Smaller

147. Charles Simic - Bedtime Story

148. Ted Kooser - Selecting A Reader

148) Selecting A Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

---Ted Kooser

147) Bedtime Story

When a tree falls in a forest
and there's no one around
to hear the sound, the poor owls
have to do all the thinking.

They think so hard they fall off
their perch and are eaten by ants,
who, as you already know, all look like
Little Black Riding Hoods.

---Charles Simic

146) Small and Smaller

for charles simic

dime store lingo
says make an
early choice between
my kiss and his -
a one-time detective
waits for a rare
bus - an overnight
waitress opens an
umbrella but just to
check it out - no
rain anywhere -
small car with almost
not even a driver
stops to pick her up -
small and smaller -
end of line

---Michael Burkard

145) Devotio Moderna

Who but us
could know wisdom's cut,

the pain of pain's
leaving, same as you?

Who would smooth us to
a circle? You would. You would.

You and your planet. You
and your flagrant blue room.

---Graham Foust

144) Poem for the End of January

In the wind, the so-much wind,
call them a couple people in winter,
dark against the snow.

What has who they are to do with it,
this winter wind,
this calling them?

What has who we imagine them to be
to do with it,
in the elocution of the wind,

to speak the countable trees up and down
in a glaze of snow over ice,
without sanctuary?

As seeing is further surfaces.
And when it is done,
we all have new names.

What has winter to do with it?
What has the wind
to do with it?

This performance in pale hues.
Some calendar photograph. Some figures
in morning snow.

Which is dark against light. Which is
that I don't mean any of this.
It's winter. I'm reading from the script.

---John Gallaher

143) The Ritual

We left early in the morning and walked across a field
and at last came to a stream
and sat down on the bank and looked over it.
In one gray pool we saw our forms,
blown there like dark glass. Over us,
the planes were taking their passengers into the city
and etched in the sky were their shaken lines of exhaust--
while we floated together on the water, rested--
her shoulders on the liquid, our hands too,
before the other shore as if betrothed.

---Christine Garren

142) Auto-Lullaby

Think of a sheep
knitting a sweater;
think of your life
getting better and better.

Think of your cat
asleep in a tree;
think of that spot
where you once skinned your knee.

Think of a bird
that stands in your palm.
Try to remember
the Twenty-first Psalm.

Think of a big pink horse
galloping south;
think of a fly, and
close your mouth.

If you feel thirsty,
then drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.

---Franz Wright

141) My Strange New Poetry

In my strange new poetry the lines will be black
and long. They will be dense with not ordinary life
but the wiry vitalism of a guy in a Pirates cap
heaving a pink rubber ball against the side of a drugstore
at midnight. There will be sentences but not
only, not always, not just properly, some stray dog
will skitter through the torn fence beside the polluted river
to half bark half growl at kids in a metal dinghy.
"Gimme the worms, Jody. Gimme those worms!"
You, you won't quite know what you think--
you won't nod your old professional approval
but like if a tall stranger in tight jeans
suddenly in the kitchen at a party touched your neck
and kissed you hard or said "You stupid bastard"
you'll step back and a minute later still feel hot
and not forget the damn poem with its nettles.
You'll sway in it like trying to move through
a rocking Amtrak express halfway to the cooked city
with both your hands out and balance turned into
mostly raw luck plus nerve - it won't be
allegorical for you, no way, it grins
and calls you Big Shot and you narrow your eyes
like a Cherokee hearing the wrong footsteps.
Gime those worms, Jody. The back lot of
the Ramblin' Root Beer distributor has for some reason
two goats in it and in my new black lines
they too get expressed, It's a thickness
and a dark kind of living in the words
in my strange new poetry that soon I put
right on paper, next week or sooner than that.

---Mark Halliday

140) Man in a Window

The morning’s mail rises up the stairwell
with its simple breakfast; postage from Gambia
rivaling the khaki toast and jam, pomegranate
for importance both of paint
and shrinking perspective. The orchid goes
nervous in its stringy waist
for the master does not answer
Gertie’s repeated knocking. Her husband

rests a wooden ladder
against the evidence of black glass;
making a mask
with his large hands against the new sun,
he peers into the locked room
tapping on the window with an appropriate

rhythm that reminds him
of haying bells. He then begins his descent
wondering if with old Harold dead
will the younger master
leave him to starve
out among the rocks of a yawning heath.

His good foot, which is only middling today,
is testing the air
for a ladder rung or the untimely lawn
while he begins to fall
toward a railing of iron lilies and javelins.

The orchid on its pewter tray
screams waking old Harold
who farts so loudly
that Gertie begins to laugh and cry
from her hallway,
now greeting the unlikely Lord
who opens the door to his cool dark tank
as if it were a solemn medieval lake.

---Ralph Angel

139) Not the Bathing Tank at Madras: A Romance

The morning’s mail rises up the stairwell
with its simple breakfast; postage from Gambia
rivaling the khaki toast and jam, pomegranate
for importance both of paint
and shrinking perspective. The orchid goes
nervous in its stringy waist
for the master does not answer
Gertie’s repeated knocking. Her husband

rests a wooden ladder
against the evidence of black glass;
making a mask
with his large hands against the new sun,
he peers into the locked room
tapping on the window with an appropriate

rhythm that reminds him
of haying bells. He then begins his descent
wondering if with old Harold dead
will the younger master
leave him to starve
out among the rocks of a yawning heath.

His good foot, which is only middling today,
is testing the air
for a ladder rung or the untimely lawn
while he begins to fall
toward a railing of iron lilies and javelins.

The orchid on its pewter tray
screams waking old Harold
who farts so loudly
that Gertie begins to laugh and cry
from her hallway,
now greeting the unlikely Lord
who opens the door to his cool dark tank
as if it were a solemn medieval lake.

---Norman Dubie

138) Childhood

Surrounded by ragweed and burdock. The silo, crumbling then,
invisible now. A nimbus of squirrel skulls glowing yellow in
the dirt. My memory as empty. Did I climb to the barn's lightning
rod, or just threaten? We weren't farmers. In summer, the
dead man's fields, ours via probate caprice, sprouted gladiolus,
blueberried, rhubarb. We watched bewildered, filled vases and
bowls, but most of it rotted where it stood. The daffodils still
come up without me to cut, rubber-band, and sell them by the
roadside. Four cars a day came by. Here's the rusty coffe can I
dreamed full of dimes.

---Joel Brouwer

137) My People

We bury the sofa for no good reason
Who poisoned Jim's meds
Who pistol-whipped Stick's buddy's sister
Who lashed those cumulonimbus
clouds to the highway, Lord?
We pray for our enemies
We pray for the elms and the poplars
We are some damn switch hitters
The sky, the sky, we always say
You can hear the knife slide through the sun.

---Ashley Capps

136) Spring

Today his body is consigned to the flames
And I begin to understand why people
Would want to carry a body to the river’s edge
And build a platform of wood and burn it
In the wind and scatter the ashes in the river.
As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air,
And, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream.
Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water
or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back
toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite
saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done.
I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape
Or other, “You know, you have the impulse control
Of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don’t know
What a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to,
But I get greedy.” An old grubber’s beard, going grey,
A wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap.
“I’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know
if she were around now, she’d be nothing. You know
what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born
at a time when they were writing the kind of songs
and people were listening to the kind of songs
she was great at singing.” And I would say,
“You just got evicted from your apartment,
you can’t walk, and you have no money, so
I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday
Right now, OK.” And he would say, “You know,
I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius
For denial, don’t you think? And the thing is.
You know, she was a pretty happy person.”
And I would say, “She was not a happy person.
She was panicky and crippled by guilt at her drinking,
Hollowed out by it, honeycombed with it,
And she was evasive to herself about herself,
And so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody,
And her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.”
And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.”
Well, I am through with those arguments,
Except in my head, though I seem not to be through with the habit—
I thought this poem would end downstream downstream—
of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.

---Robert Haas

133, 134, & 135) A Soliloquy Of The Full Moon, She Being In A Mad Passion

Now as Heaven is my Lot, they're the Pests of the Nation!
Wherever they can come
With clankum and blankum
'Tis all Botheration, & Hell & Damnation,
With fun, jeering
Conjuring
Sky-staring,
Loungering,
And still to the tune of Transmogrification--
Those muttering
Spluttering
Ventriloquogusty
Poets
With no Hats
Or Hats that are rusty.
They're my Torment and Curse
And harass me worse
And bait me and bay me, far sorer I vow
Than the Screech of the Owl
Or the witch-wolf's long howl,
Or sheep-killing Butcher-dog's inward Bow wow
For me they all spite--an unfortunate Wight.
And the very first moment that I came to Light
A Rascal call'd Voss the more to his scandal,
Turn'd me into a sickle with never a handle.
A Night or two after a worse Rogue there came,
The head of the Gang, one Wordsworth by name--
`Ho! What's in the wind?' 'Tis the voice of a Wizzard!
I saw him look at me most terribly blue !
He was hunting for witch-rhymes from great A to Izzard,
And soon as he'd found them made no more ado
But chang'd me at once to a little Canoe.
From this strange Enchantment uncharm'd by degrees
I began to take courage & hop'd for some Ease,
When one Coleridge, a Raff of the self-same Banditti
Past by--& intending no doubt to be witty,
Because I'd th' ill-fortune his taste to displease,
He turn'd up his nose,
And in pitiful Prose
Made me into the half of a small Cheshire Cheese.
Well, a night or two past--it was wind, rain & hail--
And I ventur'd abroad in a thick Cloak & veil--
But the very first Evening he saw me again
The last mentioned Ruffian popp'd out of his Den--
I was resting a moment on the bare edge of Naddle
I fancy the sight of me turn'd his Brains addle--
For what was I now?
A complete Barley-mow
And when I climb'd higher he made a long leg,
And chang'd me at once to an Ostrich's Egg--
But now Heaven be praised in contempt of the Loon,
I am I myself I, the jolly full Moon.
Yet my heart is still fluttering--
For I heard the Rogue muttering--
He was hulking and skulking at the skirt of a Wood
When lightly & brightly on tip-toe I stood
On the long level Line of a motionless Cloud
And ho! what a Skittle-ground! quoth he aloud
And wish'd from his heart nine Nine-pins to see
In brightness & size just proportion'd to me.
So I fear'd from my soul,
That he'd make me a Bowl,
But in spite of his spite
This was more than his might
And still Heaven be prais'd! in contempt of the Loon
I am I myself I, the jolly full Moon.

---Samuel Coleridge

132) The School of Metaphysics

Executioner happy to explain
How his wristwatch works
As he shadows me on the street.
I call him that because he is grim and officious
And wears black.

The clock on the church tower
Had stopped at five to eleven.
The morning newspapers had no date.
The gray building on the corner
Could've been a state pen,

And then he showed up with his watch,
Whose Gothic numerals
And the absence of hands
He wanted me to understand
Right then and there.

---Charles Simic

131) The Shore: A Love Poem

The sky was empty and the ocean, farther out, was like a glaze
the afternoon we watched things from the shore's gazebo--
others raise their umbrealls and leave the pier,
we watched the large man running to the sea
and the newcomers erect the volleyball net
until, to give us nothing
but ourselves, I put my hand on it
as if on a piece of glass and covered
the unnecessary world.

---Christine Garren

130) Break

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

---Dorianne Laux

128 & 129) Marx Dancing with History meets Marquez Dancing with Time

I’m listening to the flesh radio, and it says: After they burn
the villages, they burn the books. It asks: Is anyone
listening?

I’m listening to the mouth radio, and it says: We need
Khlebnikov’s “star language.” It says: When we open
our mouths, the night sky falls out.

I’m listening to the fire radio, and it says: Marx is watching
a light burn in Macondo. It says: Conquerers
are drinking the galaxies. It asks: Who can remember
the victims?

I’m listening to the moon radio, and it says: La lah. La lah.

I’m listening to the word radio, and it says: People are
forgetting the meaning of words. Each word says,
“Walk through me.”

I’m listening to the gland radio, and it says: We live in a land
of violet crimes. It says: A word is stirring on the edge
of the universe. It says: After they burn the sky,
they burn the windows.

I’m listening to the dream radio, and it says: This just in...

I’m listening to the weather radio, and it says: Tomorrow
everything will be brown. It says: The next day
everything will be intellectual. It says: The day after
everything will suffer in blue.

I’m listening to the Nagasaki radio, and it says: Forget
everything you ever knew.

I’m listening to the world radio, and it says: Subvert
the apparatus of cognitive control. Subvert the
apparatus of cognitive control. Subvert the apparatus
of cognitive control.

I’m listening to the chromosome radio, and it says: The radio
is thinking through you. It says: The radio is
thinking for you.

I’m listening to the light radio, and it says: The light
meanders slowly through the brain of a cat. It says:
Every morning light remembers and then gradually
forgets.

I’m listening to the womb radio, and it says: The mother
grows around the child.

I’m listening to the meat radio, and it says: Red is
throbbing outside the window. It says: We need
to stop giving birth to mammals.

I’m listening to the brain radio, and it says: America.
And it says: America died in 1900 something. It says:
After they burn the people, they burn the dreams.

I’m listening to the star radio, and it says: You cannot.
It says: You cannot burn the memories of the burning.

---Patrick Lawler

127) Tidy

I miss you too.
Something old is broken,
nobody’s in hell.
Sometimes I kiss strangers,
sometimes no one speaks.
Today in fact
it’s raining. I go out on the lawn.
It’s such a tiny garden,
like a photo of a pool.
I am cold,
are you?
Sometimes we go dancing,
cars follow us back home.
Today the quiet
slams down
gently, like drizzled
lightning,
leafless trees.
It’s all so tidy,
a fire in the living room,
a rug from Greece,
Persian rugs and pillows,
and in the kitchen,
the light
fogged with windows.

---Ralph Angel

126) Carrie

"There's never an end to dust
and dusting," my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There's never an end to it.

---Ted Kooser

125) Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse

And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally—


it is only
the force we exert all our lives


to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,


as the horror of being excluded— . . .
something like that, the Canadian wind


coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow


appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.

---Franz Wright

123 & 124) February: The Boy Breughel

The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
These icy trees
Are hanging by their thumbs
Under a sun
That will begin to heal them soon,
Each will climb out
Of its own blue, oval mouth;
The river groans,
Two birds call out from the woods

And a fox crosses through snow
Down a hill; then, he runs,
He has overcome something white
Beside a white bush, he shakes
It twice, and as he turns
For the woods, the blood in the snow

Looks like the red fox,
At a distance, running down the hill:
A white rabbit in his mouth killed
By the fox in snow
Is killed over and over as just
Two colors, now, on a winter hill:

Two colors! Red and white. A barber's bowl!
Two colors like the peppers
In the windows
Of the town below the hill. Smoke comes
From the chimneys. Everything is still.

Ice in the river begins to move,
And a boy in a red shirt who woke
A moment ago
Watches from his window
The street where an ox
Who's broken out of his hut
Stands in the fresh snow
Staring cross-eyed at the boy
Who smiles and looks out
Across the roof to the hill;
And the sun is reaching down
Into the woods

Where the smoky red fox still
Eats his kill. Two colors.
Just two colors!
A sunrise. The snow.

---Norman Dubie

122) Tar

I knew with a primal certitude his blood
was becoming slow lava chugging thick
Visualize your body healing I said
but he shook his head and described
black luna moths on his lungs
hungry flotilla sourcing the lymph
and on his birthday when we argued over a cloud
resembling: a) a chandelier
b) a lesser-tentacled squid
c) (we both saw the lost photograph of my mother
unwinding her pink foam curlers) I knew
we had loved the same world
overwhelmed by different ideas
about how it should be;
that the love faded naturally with experience
but the ideas died harder.

---Ashley Capps

121) Bridge

He's terrified of sharks, so when the storm nails them to the
bridge back from the Keys, he snaps: the bridge will buckle,
the car will drop like a cartoon anvil to the Gulf's sandy floor, a
hammerhead will tear them open like pillows of blood. Plus
barracuda, she reminds him. Thanks. She says the bridge can take
it, the bridge will hold, but then why's it swaying like a drunken
tugboat? That's exactly why it won't break. It gives a little. It gives too
goddamn much. She stops the car. Sharks circle. Here they are:
home again so soon.

---Joel Brouwer

120) Hotel Insomnia

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
a crippled old man came to play
"My Blue Heaven."

Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revery.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The "Gypsy" fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

---Charles Simic

119) It Takes A While to Disappear

The city purrs, it hums along, the morning hardly risen.
A well-dressed drunk smears her finger across a doorman’s lips and whispers.
Someone stumbles. Someone curses. Someone hoses down the pavement.
We must have made a mess of things again, all fuzzy black and white
and greenish at the corners. Some final thing
that put us in our places.
You’re still standing in your winter coat alongside
everything you wanted and deserve. But you were thinner. The desk clerk
looked right through you. The cabby didn’t listen. You were
out of sorts back then, you say, but
you’re still frowning!
In vain a shrieking siren repeats itself
and fades. The quiet idles there, a crosswalk signal chirping. You’re still
standing in your winter coat, but I don’t know you. Someone
scrambles down a fire escape, his shirt a flag
that’s shredded. A boy
salutes. And then his mother, too.
She stoops to smooth his collar. She makes a sculpture of her packages.
You’re a different person now, you say, but
you will never happen.

---Ralph Angel

118) At The Cancer Clinic

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

---Ted Kooser

116 & 117) Untitled 2

Today his body is consigned to the flames
And I begin to understand why people
Would want to carry a body to the river’s edge
And build a platform of wood and burn it
In the wind and scatter the ashes in the river.
As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air,
And, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream.
Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water
or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back
toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite
saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done.
I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape
Or other, “You know, you have the impulse control
Of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don’t know
What a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to,
But I get greedy.” An old grubber’s beard, going grey,
A wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap.
“I’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know
if she were around now, she’d be nothing. You know
what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born
at a time when they were writing the kind of songs
and people were listening to the kind of songs
she was great at singing.” And I would say,
“You just got evicted from your apartment,
you can’t walk, and you have no money, so
I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday
Right now, OK.” And he would say, “You know,
I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius
For denial, don’t you think? And the thing is.
You know, she was a pretty happy person.”
And I would say, “She was not a happy person.
She was panicky and crippled by guilt at her drinking,
Hollowed out by it, honeycombed with it,
And she was evasive to herself about herself,
And so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody,
And her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.”
And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.”
Well, I am through with those arguments,
Except in my head, though I seem not to be through with the habit—
I thought this poem would end downstream downstream—
of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.

---Robert Haas

115) Untitled

You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who didn’t take the old white horse
Took the morning train.

When you go down into the city of the dead
With its whitewashed walls and winding alleys
And avenues of autumnal lindens and the heavy bells
Tolling by the sea, crowds
Appear from all directions,
Having left their benches and tiered plazas,
Laying aside their occupations of reverie
And gossip and the memory of breathing—
At least in the most reliable stories,
Which are the ones the poets tell—
To hear what scraps you can bring
Of the news of this world where the air
Is thin in the high altitudes and
Of an almost perfect density in the valleys
And shadows on summer afternoons sometimes
Achieve a shade of violet that almost never
Falls across pavements down there. Only the arborist
In the park never comes for new arrivals. He is not incurious
But he loves his work, pruning the trees,
Giving them their graceful lift
Toward light, and standing back
To study their shapes, because it is he
Who gets to decide
Which limbs get lopped off
In the kingdom of the dead.

You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who don’t take the old white horse
Take the evening train.

---Robert Haas

113 & 114) Manufacturing

1
A career in vestige management.

A dream job
back-engineering
shifts in salience.

I’m so far
behind the curve
on this.

So. Cal.
must connect with
so-called

to manufacture
the present.

Ubiquity’s
the new in-joke

bar-code hard-on,

a catch-phrase
in every segment.




2
The eye asks if the green,

frilled geranium puckers,
clustered at angles

on each stem,
are similar enough

to stop time.

It has asked this question already.

How much present tense
can any resemblance make?

What if one catch- phrase
appears in every episode?

Does the language go rigid?

The new in-joke
is a pun
pretending to be a bridge.

---Rae Armantrout

112) The Emperor of Ice Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

---Wallace Stevens

111) The Deserted Field

You must walk up a hill to reach it
and so the heart has been worked--
and where one expects something liess deserted,

perhaps an orchard with the vinegar scent of apples,
not even the perishable sound of insects could be heard--

and so I put my ear
the brief hilltop
the field and sky without wind

and reached you.

---Christine Garren

110) Interval

We flex
to create coordinates.

How often in dreams
I'm making my point
clear—

some point
I've never wanted to make
before or since—

and to acquaintances
vividly called up
for the occasion.

"Picture time
as a fine mesh

of regular intervals."
But are those intervals

like bits of thread,
their intersections

or the empty squares between?
"Interval" suggests music.

I'm getting ready
for the possibility

that a rhythm
will be monotonous,

relentless.

---Rae Armantrout

109) Recluse

He isn't lonely. Each part of him stays up late, playing bridge,
eating pretzels. Toes do cigarette tricks, the tongue recites
Dickinson. Fingers thread a faded print of Grand Hotel through
the rickety projector, dim the lights, and the eyes watch Garbo
flicker like a moth in a jar. When everything else has drifted
to sleep, the recluse and his penis sip brandy and reminisce.
Ah, Elba, sighs the penis. Night gathers on the porch with
microphones and camera. The recluse turns the lock, tugs
absently at his bandages. Yes, it seems like yesterday. But even today
seems like yesterday.

---Joel Brouwer

108) Potential Random # 10

tall grain
food for the dead


a contest with uncleanness
detestable things


desire


thought


wallow in ashes
wail aloud
howl
scream


covering cherub


ideas of death

---Keith Waldrop

107) Ars Poetica

There is a thing
some men will ache to do
and break themselves
against their lives and women, trying.
Women, too, have lost
their grip, having endeavored
or accomplished it. The devil
threads his needle,
and the string's a river
fat with fish
that wanted other words for it.

---Ashley Capps

106) Domesticity

Gray little clumps weightless as hair dust what is it


Forty years later
utterly unrecognizable
save for our eyes


that is, were we to meet--

---Franz Wright

105) Performers

"I'm so lonely. Boohoo," she said, laughing and rubbing her eyes
with her fist. She was being sociable. When I left, she asked,
"Where are you going? You said I could do a rendition and not be
left alone."

"You'll never be alone," I joked, "if you have the flexibility
to turn on yourself."

I was free - if that meant able to depict desires. To prove it
I would separate from mine, make them flail like puppets. Honky-Tonk
Women. The rote quality of the late work was part of its genius:
a glimpse into the dollhouse of the soul, right? My schtick was
omniscience, which always makes a room look small.

---Rae Armantrout

103 & 104) At Corfu

In seventeen hundred, a much hated sultan
visited us twice, finally
dying of headaches in the south harbor.

Ever since, visitors have come to the island.
They bring their dogs and children.

The ferry boat with a red cross
freshly painted on it
lifts in uneven drafts of smoke and steam
devising the mustard horizon
that is grotesque with purple thunderheads.

In the rising winds the angry sea birds
circle the trafficking winter ghosts
who are electric like the locusts at Patmos.

They are gathering sage in improvised slings
along the hillsides,
they are the lightning strikes scattering wild cats
from the bone yard:
here, since the war, fertilizer trucks
have idled much like the island itself.

We blame the wild cats who have eaten
all the jeweled yellow snakes of the island.

When sufficiently distant, the outhouses have a sweetness
like frankincense.

A darker congregation, we think the last days
began when they stripped the postage stamps
of their lies and romance.

The chaff of the hillsides
rises like a cramp, defeating a paring of moon . . . its
hot, modest conjunction of planets . . .

And with this sudden hard rain
the bells on the ferry boat
begin a long elicit angelus.

Two small Turkish boys run out into the storm--
here, by superstition,
they must laugh and sing--like condemned lovers,

ashen and kneeling,
who are being washed

by their dead grandmothers' grandmothers.

---Norman Dubie

102) Potential Random # 9

The shapes of things rise up against me-cube, pyramid, cone-actual, ideal-and threaten to trip me up, obstruct me, box me in.



They lie in wait. They spring from my own eyes.



I take them all, straight-lined or curved, reducing each to a circle-closed, each circle, by a movement of my hand.

---Keith Waldrop

101) Morning Arrives

Morning arrives
unannounced
by limousine: the tall
emaciated chairman


of sleeplessness in person
steps out on the sidewalk
and donning black glasses, ascends
the stairs to your building


guided by a German shepherd.
After a couple faint knocks
at the door, he slowly opens
the book of blank pages


pointing out
with a pale manicured finger
particular clauses,
proof of your guilt.

---Franz Wright

100) Panama

Fruit thumps in the pointless
grass, has no hand in itself.
Complaint's a sort of orchard.
A summer flower plucked black's
another tool.

If only I couldn't
understand, I'd imagine
some sarcastic new Christ and say
something someone would say.

*

Pain is okay--
it's the practical
that murders.
Birdsongs now

in the trash-
thicketed blackout.
I want something to not
do with my hands.

---Graham Foust

99) What is Divinity

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch,
These are the measures destined for her soul.

---Wallace Stevens

98) Serena

One autumn, years after you fucked me to shreds and vanished,
I visited Anna at her studio upstate. We walked the stubbled
fields, drank wine beneath a yellow willow, and after dinner she
showed me some canvases. One was of you: stretched nude in a
green chair, your fingers even longer, skin even deeper burnt
umber than I remembered. Anna was amazed. I didn't known her.
She modeled at the colony last summer. Today, years since I saw
Anna, someone behind me on the snowy sidewalk calls Serena!
Lost one, what's become of me? I thought of the painting first.

---Joel Brouwer

97) A Band of Owls Moved into Town

A band of owls moved into town,
shopped for groceries, ran for office,
that sort of thing. It began casually,
some of them gathered on Sundays
at Sophia’s to get their hair done and
then it was the bookstore on the corner.
Everyone simply put up with the owls
because businesses were booming
and the schoolchildren’s test scores
had suddenly taken a turn for the better.
More and more owls, and some people too,
made the move into town and the room
for accommodations began to diminish.
Needless to say, there was much
construction. The town quickly became
a city. It developed a night life and the
constant yellowish buzz of electricity.
One night at the Electric Mole, I met Julia,
the daughter of new and prosperous
socialites in town. She was incredible—
the most amazing eyes. We would stay
awake through most nights holding each
other beneath the moonlit window. We
talked about everything there, but mostly
about our disdain for the construction
and the flood of immigrant owls. I would
tell her, “We seem to be the only two who
are concerned, who notice. The only two
who want out…”
“…Who want a simpler life,”
she would say. “The only two who…who…”

---Zachary Schomburg

96) Message

The roof is tin. You could come here.

I had wanted to hear water again

and the stream does move
with enough noise over the rocks. It's night,

black now.

Earlier I had heard the wolf-clouds
leave over the moorlike edge

and they're back again, thundering. I am thinking I might rent
a trailer in some other woods

nearer
you.

---Christine Garren

95) In January

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.

---Ted Kooser

94) Small Paintings on Paper

what were you hoping for?
what were you trying to do?
these are some of the questions
she had for her mother

or her mother had for her -
one did not know the other
had the same questions -
you were tapped by the daughter

as a friend
and asked to help
but you yourself hesitated -
trapped by words before and after

you could not see starlight
lending much of a hand
or a moon or a down thing
to help them

---Michael Burkard

92 & 93) The Rejected House

Strangers arrive with their old lovers in town
for the weekend. None of us
has ever had it so good. The shelves are full
of rubber fruit. Teeming, we say.
There's a television on. It's a tennis match.
Someone's whispering love
into a cell phone. The person on the other end
is asking
for pictures of this house
that was rejected
for being a surface house, a distant house.

"Look," Margo says, "I'm made of glass
and covered in glass." And the yard is full
of chickens' blood
and pianos on fire. And the chickens are full
of the blood of yards
as vans full of illegal workers pass
with pickups full of illegal workers
throwing each other into the ocean
many miles away
where we hear there are no oceans.

Many miles away, I'm holding the house
over the flower bed, so my desperation
can have an easier view
of another summer of birds
falling from the sky
onto this house that starts and stops. This house
that turns slowly above me in the breeze.

Why did I never realize
the house was so light, was this light?
Can this really be what all the fuss was about?
Just something with a little blood on it?

---John Gallaher

91) Potential Random # 8

At the mouth of the stream, there is a mysterious island.
A mountain on the island.
The trees there bear (no Tree-of-Life) precious stones.
A place of desires.


I crouch down in my torn clothes.
Bloodstained cloak.
I cut off my hair and howl.
Slain man wallowing in his blood.


They are so terrified they forget to call for mourners.
The other side of death.
They mourn with astonishing frequency.
A razor from beyond the Euphrates.


She saunters under quick green trees, angels falling around her.
Chinks in the rational.
Song turns into lamentation.
Canopy of darkness.


Soldiers offer strawberry coral.
Eidola.
The dark is slippery.
Shapeless logs, sacred stones, then images.

---Keith Waldrop

90) Lunar Shoulder

“The world is something not enough people dream of, one
Shouldn’t use the word dream & one shouldn’t use
The words should and shouldn’t” - Bernadette Mayer

Avis says something like this: that she has never had enough
“unto” - that when she grew up she always was adding and looking for
the extra fact: do unto others as you would have them do unto you
was coupled with this additional seeking of and if you do unto them
as you would do unto you they will then do unto you what you would
like them to do - she says “there was never enough ‘unto’ in my life” -

the world is something unto her stories -
the world is the moon attached to the stupid boat -
the stupid boat is in the stupid harbor under the stupid shadow of the
stupid rock-like-moon tonight
white men realize as hunters after only thousands of years
that deer live according to the lunar calendar or rhythm
this stupidity pleases me but now i am more afraid for the deer

at this door a lunar book dangles from the door
to indicate to those living by lunar calendars
this is a safe harbor
we are not so stupid as some mostly white men
would assume

- when you die
you will think of this and your darkling eyes
and your darling blending in with the landscape
of this above all snowy and unexpected towns -

the moonophobic will be secrets:
secret milk bottles
secret shoes
secret people at wakes and rituals for secret reasons

i am your door
i am your fault
i am your lunar shoulder
i am a member of your lunar family

moon unto moon
lake’s end

---Michael Burkard

89) Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided lgiht. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

---Robert Haas

88) Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

---Ted Kooser

87) Lullaby

For tears.


Too big, that were
gunbright on her



face.


“What”


is the question
again I have to



remind myself


a sale is always
taking



place
or shape &



the fire this time
is the fire last time



another coonskin
on the wall
if you will



how & why
things happen
as they do



and not otherwise
from discontent?

---Ashley Capps

86) History Book

A kid found its loose pages
on a busy street.
He stopped bouncing his ball
to run after them.

They fluttered in his hands
and flew off.
He could only glimpse
a few dates and a name.

At the outskirts the wind
lose interest in them.
Some fell into the river
by the old railroad bridge

where they drown kittens,
and the barge passes,
the one they named "Victory"
from which a cripple waves.

---Charles Simic

85) Potential Random # 7

What is seen then, as the center, is not the center, but only light feeding into the center.

Devastation, ritual of covenant accompanied by darkness.

Wash your clothes.

Shave off your hair.

Bathe yourself in water.

All space becomes neutral.

Uncaulked and unprovisioned, we reach shore.

Something must be done about darkness before we can live in this light.

Cold air and warm air twinkle the starlight, Nobody's mother tongue.

---Keith Waldrop

84) Bear and Camper

Inside the forest there is a bear mauling a camper slowly,
almost unnaturally, almost poetically,
so that the downward sweep of each claw can be considered,
then each claw licked clean, and deep inside
the bear somewhere

is another camper, this time warmly lit by campfire,
calmly narrating the aforementioned assault—
“the floating hair”, he says, “the doll-like flaccidity of the camper”,
he says, but without irony as if simply giving

instructions on, say, making a sandwich or as if reading poetry—
and inside that camper is a bear sitting beside
another campfire, being introspective,

playing classical
guitar.

---Zachary Schomburg

83) After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

---Ted Kooser

81 & 82) Breaking and Entering

Many setups. At least as many falls.
Winter is paralyzing the country, but not here.
Here, the boys are impersonating songs of indigenous
wildlife. Mockingbird on the roof of the Gun Shop,
scrub jay behind the Clear Lake Saloon.
And when she darts into a drugstore for a chocolate-covered
almond bar, sparrow hawks get the picture
and drive off in her car.
Easy as 8th & Spring Street,
a five-course meal the size of a dime.
Easy as vistas admired only from great distance,
explain away the mystery
and another thatched village is cluster-bombed.
Everyone gets what he wants nowadays.
Anything you can think of is probably true.
And so, nothing. Heaven on earth. The ruse
of answers. A couple-three-times around the block
and ignorance is no longer a good excuse.
There were none. Only moods
arranged like magazines and bones, a Coke bottle
full of roses, the dark, rickety tables about the room.
And whenever it happens, well, it’s whatever it takes,<>a personality that is not who you are
but a system of habitual reactions to another
light turning green, the free flow of
traffic at the center of the universe where shops
are always open and it’s a complete
surprise each time you’re told that minding your own business
has betrayed your best friend. But that’s over,
that’s history, the kind of story that tends to have an ending,
the code inside your haunted head.
Easy as guilt. As waking and sleeping, sitting down
to stand up, sitting down to go out walking,
closing our eyes to see in the nocturnal
light of day. “Treblinka
was a primitive but proficient
production line of death,” says a former SS Untersharfurer
to the black sharecropper-grandchild of slavery
who may never get over
the banality of where we look.
Only two people
survived the Warsaw uprising, and the one
whose eyes are paths inward, down into the soft grass,
into his skeleton,
who chain-smokes and drinks, is camera shy,
wears short-sleeved shirts, manages to mumble,
“If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”

---Ralph Angel

80) This

Today, my love,
leaves are thrashing the wind
just as pedestrians are erecting again the buildings of this drab
forbidding city,
and our lives, as I lose track of them,
are the lives of others derailing in time and
getting things done.
Impossible to make sense of any one face
or mouth, though
each distance
is clear, and you are miles
from here.
Let your pure
space crowd my heart,
that we might stay awhile longer amid the flying
debris.
This moment,
I swear it,
isn't going anywhere.

---Ralph Angel

79) Rehearsal

The characters are sounds made by various sizes and kinds of engines. They continue to enter indefinitely, in random order, but are always recognized. Each mentions respiration as something that has already occurred.




*
Is a short time
circular?

Practiced?

Loops
on ruled paper.

What is supervised
has meaning.

A brow-beating
pulse


---Rae Armantrout

78) Sky Harbor

The flock of pigeons rises over the roof,


and just beyond them, the shimmering asphalt fields

gather their dull colored airliners.



It is the very early night,

a young brunette sits before the long

darkening glass of the airport's west wall.



She smells coffee burning

and something else-- her old mother's

bureau filled with mothballs.



Her nearly silver blouse smells of anise

and the heat of an iron.

She suddenly brushes sleep from her hair.



I have been dead for hours. The brunette

witness to nothing studies her new lipstick

smeared on a gray napkin.



The fires of a cremation tank are rising...

she descends into Seattle

nervous over the blinking city lights



that are climbing to meet her flight.

The old man seated next to her closes his book.

He has recognized her.



And leans into the window

to whisper, nothing happens. Nothing

ever happens.

---Norman Dubie

77) Unappreciated Butterfly

I think I was on a balcony

overlooking the whole thing.


--Yusef Komunyakaa

"April Fool's Day"



No soon, no hard loan, no geometric woodwork

to make you feel at home. No soap, no anonymous

bourbon, no portrait or copy of a portrait painted

by some writer or star or family member or any

other-than-artist person. No short drop

(you were fifteen floors up), no secret way

out, no voice of self-hatred (which you are at least

used to). No past tense. Sometimes no tense at all.

Sometimes not even an all or nothing. Sometimes

not even a real estate dream, not even a frame,

not even a framework. A balcony but not a back

kitchen porch. A woman hanging out her laundry

but not hanging out. Railroad tracks and motor-

cycle gang around the corner but not a ticket

or a destination. Not even the sense of a weird

dead end. Not a lemon or a sun. No children.

No stories about children, no crooked arrow.

No ghost named Leslie or Vallejo. No C. No M.

No J.

---Michael Burkard

76) To John Wieners: Elegy & Response

The street outside


the window says

I don't miss you, and I don't wish you well



Says crocuses

coaxed out of hiding

and killed in the snow



Says six o'clock and a billion black birds

wheeling, and the dusk stars

wait, and the avalanche waits--



And have you looked at the paper today



Medical research discloses

that everyone is going to die

of something



Ulterior avenues, I will not take you



Supernaturally articulate pencil, where the heaven

of lost objects are you



Beginning summer now, incredibly close

clouds like an illustration

that disturbed you as a child



Appalling and incomprehensible mercy--



The seeing see only this world.

---Franz Wright

74 & 75) Heroic Simile

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

---Robert Haas

72 & 73) When One Has Lived Too Long Among Other People

Because life is a puzzle

isn't it, there is a person framed

by a window, stuck

on repeat.

Once they carried the entertaining

sunset around. Look, isn't this

entertaining?

And look, isn't it your body

that does the dreaming, the settled sunsets

stuck on repeat?

I am writing a note, I am not

falling down. I am writing X

of windows. I am thinking

there is no more.

That these are larger boxes

in this city, stuck on repeat.

We call it the apology of.

Or we call it the apothecary

landscape of.

I'm standing in a hospital room,

dusting you, for days.

If everything could only be cleaner.

When one has spent a long time

among others, the windows

are these little windows.

Here is a flower stuck on repeat,

to cross the summer rooms, to write

the summer notes.

---John Gallaher

71) After Aretha Franklin

Baby, I know

but not much,

enough.

We are two

breathing people in

a room.

The rest, the rest

is as emphatic,

scratched out.

The meaning of a cruelty

is its hurry,

its use.

---Graham Foust

70) Schnetzer Day

This amazing fine song comes on the radio
the day after my death,
it's Greenie Schnetzer and the Generous Glands
singing "Defrocked Bishop of Love" and it is gorgeous.
The song combines the feel of "Get a Job" by the Silhouettes
with the sexy speed of "Roadrunner" as performed by
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and someone hears it
and realizes all this. Less than a day has passed
since my demise, and someone feeling comfortable
in a soft pair of old jeans suddenly remembers
the calm weary face of his mother, or sister,
a few weeks before she died of cancer, and also
sees back to his father one sad Christmas
saying "This Bulgarian wine is surprisingly good"
and has a sense of how people keep trying. Also
someone wearing an old herringbone jacket in a hallway
sings "Gypsy gal" softly and it means a great deal.
And around a corner comes a certain potential romantic partner
and says "Lunch?"
Meanwhile I'm dead.
In a school gym some guy makes an absurd hook shot
from downtown, nothing but net, with a certain Susan watching.
And a person wearing a Portland Sea Dogs cap
finishes a poem by rhyming "tyro" with "Cairo"
and places warm forehead against a cool pane of glass.
And there's more, involving children's games and tragic visions,
but already it seems obvious that my death is a bad mistake --
just think of Greenie Schnetzer! --
and I guess in fact I'd better live forever.

---Mark Halliday

69) Encore

I followed a little black dog

past a chalk outline

past a field of blond grasses tipped with frost

a low mauve cloud

a meadow cricket

past Miller's Chicken

past the rain

construction workers in yellow slickers

a river baptism, a little cough,

past the wig-maker's shop & a bald woman

tilting in front of a mirror;

past a flame thrower

& a flame blower

& their pyrotechnics & wedding & the widow

in attendance dancing

under her long black veil--

to a small white house

where a man I didn't recognize stepped out

& clapped me once on the shoulder

& said, Come in, it's been

a disaster without you.

---Ashley Capps

68) Portrait Before Dark

On one of the back logs, a shell has been placed.

And as it is right before dusk, the shell is very clear--

its small ridged spine above the echoing, turned-down interior.

While the whiplike winds lengthen

over the shell's stillness and the nandinas' quiver, one could say

the shell's marblelike flame

has become the central force of the yard, like a sharp pain

or stab one feels and then ignores

when something is, like you, simultaneously beautiful and vanishing.

---Christine Garren

67) Family Stories

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,

how an argument once ended when his father

seized a lit birthday cake in both hands

and hurled it out a second-story window. That,

I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger

sent out across the sill, landing like a gift

to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine

it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,

and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed

the people in his stories really loved one another,

even when they yelled and shoved their feet

through cabinet doors or held a chair like a bottle

of cheap champagne, christening the wall,

rungs exploding from their holes.

I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury

of the passionate. He said it was a curse

being born Italian and Catholic and when he

looked from that window what he saw was the moment

rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous

three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship

down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk

deep in the icing, a few still burning.

---Dorianne Laux

66) Diagnosis

The doctor says, Think of it this way. Your insides are like the

jungle at night: warm, noisy, rank with mango, and but for some holes

drilled through the sky by stars, wholly dark. A river floats through you

on its back, shivering with silver piranhas. Banyan roots claw its face

with thirsty fingers and draw black water up to the leafy canopy, where

the last honeysuckle vireo on earth has sunk her beak into the single

living pygmy anaconda, which in turn has the bird half wrapped in its

flexing grip. Only one will live. It's too soon to say.

---Joel Brouwer

65) Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence. Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. ---Wallace Stevens

64) Parkersburg

I will arise now and put on a black baseball cap and go

to Parkersburg. It will fit me,
the cap will, and it will be black,
the sneakers on my feet will be purple,
and I will not have shaved for three days.
The day will be rainy and cool
and I will wear an old jacket of pale wool
that was once my Uncle Lew's.
And go to Parkersburg.

On a bus I may go
or in an old car full of tapes --
Elmore James; Fred McDowell; Taj Mahal; the Kinks.
Into the town of Parkersburg
on a day so rainy and cool. And I will be
terrifically untroubled if anyone thinks I am strange,
in fact everything about this day will be a ratification
of how I am not them; and my manner, though courteous,
will tend to make them suspect that they are boring.
They will wonder why they have no purple sneakers. Cool

and lightly rainy in Parkersburg
and me all day there exactly as if my belief
had long been firm; not forgetting for one minute
how I felt years ago listening to "I'm Different" by Randy Newman
and the sacred tears in my eyes at that time.
I and my black baseball cap will enter a tavern

and there we will read a French poet with such concentration
it will be like I am that guy. Then pretty soon
in another tavern it is a Spanish poet whom I read
with similar effect. In Parkersburg!
Oh my Parkersburg . . . And I swear,
though I might not meet a lonely marvelous slim woman with black hair
it will still be as if I did.

---Mark Halliday

63) On the Map of the Folded World

We're at a great distance.

Little specks of things.

We have this hunger.

So let us contemplate the hand. The distance

of the hand.

The grasping of the distance.

The hollow of the eye.

Let us say we are walking into a building

we'll not walk out of.

We know we're all here

somewhere. The table is set.

There are plants along the window.

Out of curiosity. Out of the body

travel.

We consist of smaller things.

"The curtains kept swaying."

We'll tell each other about it.

We'll accuse each other of not caring enough

about what we care about.

As we're folding

from our houses. Folding into the yards.

Our flaming streets. Our streets

in flame.

---John Gallaher

62) How It Will Happen, When

There you are, exhausted from another night of crying,

curled up on the couch, the floor, at the foot of the bed,

anywhere you fall you fall down crying, half amazed

at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry

anymore. And there they are: his socks, his shirt, your

underwear, and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile

next to the bathroom door, and you fall down again.

Someday, years from now, things will be different:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows

shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across

the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. You'll be peeling

an orange or watching a bird leap from the edge of the rooftop

next door, noticing how, for an instant, her body is trapped

in the air, only a moment before gathering the will to fly

into the ruff at her wings, and then doing it: flying.

You'll be reading, and for a moment you'll see a word

you don't recognize, a simple word like cup or gate or wisp

and you'll ponder it like a child discovering language.

Cup, you'll say it over and over until it begins to make sense,

and that's when you'll say it for the first time, out loud: He's dead.

He's not coming back, and it will be the first time you believe it.

---Dorianne Laux

61) Note Slipped Under A Door

I saw a high window struck blind

by the late afternoon sunlight.

I saw a towel

with many dark fingerprints

hanging in the kitchen.

I saw an old apple tree,

a shawl of wind over its shoulders,

inch its lonely way

toward the barren hills.

I saw an unmade bed

and felt the cold of its sheets.

I saw a fly soaked in pitch

of the coming night

watching me because it couldn't get out.

I saw stones that had come

from a great purple distance

huddle around the front door.

---Charles Simic

59 & 60) Farewell to Florida

I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back


II
Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...


III
I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.


IV
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

---Wallace Stevens

58) Blood Test

One's it
or in it--but what?

What's this:

your shout-out's
a shut-in,

the useless a fire,

some unbroken fuck
your new brain.

---Graham Foust

57) Explanations

You mistook sex for architecture and climbed a ladder inside her
to examine a cornice. You found a glass box packed with feathers
and ashes. It fell from your fingers and shattered. You fell after it.
You cracked your back. You made her mad. She turned into water
and that's why the tanker went down with all the hands. The feathers
flew to Ecuador and that's why the Pope got shot. You kept the
ashes, and that's why this morning the tress are full of arsonists
and you'll wake up with a red-handled hatchet perched in your
fist like a bird.

---Joel Brouwer

56) Potential Random #2

Many books have been destroyed, carelessly or by design. Lost, burnt, forgotten, volumes drop out of existence, along with—more easily disposed of—proofs never pulled, unpublished manuscripts, notes for books, plans and proposals for things to be written, collected, put into books. The number of projects unaccomplished in history must be enormous.

And much larger, almost infinite, the realm of projects unattempted, never started, what no one ever thought to try.

My doctrine would derive, not from wisdom concealed by anxious arhats in caves beneath impassable Himalayas, nor from a chain of unwritten instruction passed guru-wise down centuries. It would remain in a world beneath notice, too obvious to be considered. Thus, secret.

The world as it lies open here, waiting for me to fail.

I do not need to know your real name.

This much seems obvious, that as we move along the path, slowly but certainly the path replaces us. And also, just as strands in the vitreous humour cloud the visual field, words stray, making our thought opaque.

---Keith Waldrop

55) Greeting

That wood pole's
rosy crossbar,

shouldering a complement
of knobs,

like clothespins
or Xmas lights,

to which crinkly
wires rise up
from adjacent yards.

*

I miss circumstance
already —

the way a single word
could mean

necessary, relative
provisional

and a bird flicks past
leaving

the sense that one
has waved one's hand.

---Rae Armantrout

54) Rosa Canina

A dog peed on a Dog Rose.

The man with the dog: all his wounds had healed.

The dog wandered on, not getting the joke.

Could there be dog pee on another dog rose?

And could the man have lived a life less broken—

he looked at a puddle in which night was.

What I could have done but did not do, he thought.

Then he thought: what someone else could have done,

but didn’t.

---Ashley Capps

52 & 53) Nebraska Novel

Chapter One.
While Coby put his denim jacket on, Lanna rolled her coveralls
and handed them to Wyatt, who put them on the seat of the tractor.
Then the thub skelled and the frobbies wackled up shorfing
over the brown water. Coby glanced his hat and wiped his belt
and folded his brows and blew his cuffs. "Yeah, Coby," said Lanna,
with a smishing of her dark dables.
Wyatt hopped into the tractor, beside her coveralls and the janker.
He handed the janker to Coby who handed it to Lanna.
Then she placed her hand on his hand on the janker.
Wyatt watched from the corner of his crinkle.
And the wind cheffed over the brown water.

Chapter Two.
Coby woke with his denims grunked on the cold wood floor
and his arm polgoed over Lanna's bresh. Outside, Wyatt whistled
while he poured oil into the tractor. "Shap dolly day,
grass on the dray, will you put the puddin' on, wish I may"
was what Wyatt sang in the creeling light of the molehumped yard.
Lanna woke and said "Yeah, you, Coby"
and the frobbies began their droomatious shorfing again.

Chapter Three.
The tractor fregged a little and medged a good bit
but soon Wyatt was jouncing along the road
past the long reaches of brown water. The road was dirt
and dirt the road and this was all like it was. It was
like so. Then Wyatt stretched for Coby and yanked him up
to the tractor seat and Lanna came flammering
and hoikled right up beside them. Coby took off his denim jacket
in the crispy sunshine and he handed it to Wyatt.
Wyatt handed it back. Lanna took it and rolled it up
inside her coveralls. It made a lump and Coby's stump made a thump
as they passed over a hump near the brown pump
while Lanna's dables kept on smishing darkly.

Chapter Four.
Oh the land was big, and wet and dry. The land is huge and a whopper the sky
and the smibnibs are eternal. Big was the land
and they knew it in the pulchy cribs of their orgs,
as the thub skelled, with a crimshinsky noise,
and the wind cheffed briskly over the brown water.

---Mark Halliday

51) Potential Random #1

alight
settle down
make a stop
linger

the alighting of birds

through a place
pass
dance wandering women
rebel
(unstable)

pinched off from a piece of clay

a kind of earth or soil
weakness
rejection

asphalt in the third millenium

unconscious recipient of mercy

caulking for Noah's ark
the basket in which Moses was placed

and the Nile

dependent on water
solemn set up camp

(watch me disappear)
unafraid

filled with terror

fat
shelter
rest
be quiet

---Keith Waldrop

50) Gallows Etiquette

Our sainted great-great
grandmothers
used to sit and knit
under the gallows.

No one remembers what it is
they were knitting
and what happened when the ball of yarn
rolled out of their laps
and had to be retrieved?

One pictures the hooded executioner
and his pasty-faced victim
interrupting their grim business
to come quickly to their aid.

Confirmed pessimists
and other party-poopers
categorically reject
such far-fetched notions
of gallows etiquette.

---Charles Simic

49) Seconds

The point is to see through
the dying,

who pinch non-existent
objects from the air

sequentially,

to this season's
laying on of
withered leaves?

2

A moment is everything

one person

(see below)

takes in simultaneously

though some

or much of what

a creature feels

may not reach

conscious awareness

and only a small part

(or none) of this

will be carried forward

to the next instant.

3

Any one
not seconded

burns up in rage.

---Rae Armantrout

48) Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion

You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,

Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose
The one obscured by sleep?

Here is the plantain by your door
And the best cock of red feather
That crew before the clocks.

A feme may come, leaf-green,
Whose coming may give revel
Beyond revelries of sleep,

Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,
So that the sun may speckle,
While it creaks hail.

You dweller in the dark cabin,
Rise, since rising will not waken,
And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

---Wallace Stevens

47) Black Ice

In the porcelain artist’s painting, the mistress
languishes behind a screen.

She receives her pain.
I sleep, eat, the egg slides over the pan,
the flyers say WE ARE SLAVES TO THE CAPITALISTS
or they say CARPET STEAMED 4 LESS;
it’s almost Christmas.
The light is gone by six o’clock.
I force narcissus in a bowl of shallow rocks.

On channel three, a teary Miss America is planting kisses
on the small bald heads at the children’s cancer ward.

Across the street, my neighbor’s yard blinks:

HAPPY! BIRTHDAY! BABY! JESUS!
Love rises
like a blister on the season.

---Ashley Capps

44, 45, & 46) Patrick Lawler Writes About Patrick Lawler

First, Patrick Lawler would never write
a poem called "Patrick Lawler."
That's the first thing. The first clue.
And there are others.
I mean he wouldn't be that pretentious.
That self-obsessed. Self-absorbed. Narcissistic.

The person who says he is Patrick Lawler
does things that Patrick Lawler would never do.

I warn you.
The Patrick Lawler you know is an impostor.
The body that surrounds him
is his, but the insides are not.

The real Patrick Lawler, the one who does not
reside in quotation marks, is being held hostage.
Somewhere. I can assure you there will be
elegantly written ransom notes
with onomatopoeia and subtle internal rhyme.

Remember the Patrick Lawler
who was a ventriloquist.
Remember the Patrick Lawler who stuttered.

Oh, sure, in retrospect, it's easy to see
how we made the mistake. The fake Patrick Lawlers
looked so much like the real thing. Even better.
They carried a stain of authenticity.

Remember when they had the Win-a-Night-with-
Patrick-Lawler Contest. That was a fake Patrick Lawler.

At one time or another, we've all been fooled.

I must admit I myself have been accused of being
a Patrick Lawler impersonator.

I wish he had done something
remarkable or even remarkably mediocre
so there would be more demand for him.
It's hard to justify the attention.

At the Patrick Lawler Impersonator Convention,
they usually complain about the absence of work.
They have to admit it but sometimes they
think that there are just too many of them.
When they look at all the name tags, it makes them queasy.

Then there is the rumor that Patrick Lawler
has given up being Patrick Lawler.

Here's the evidence: If Patrick Lawler
did not want to be Patrick Lawler,
then why would he write a poem titled "Patrick Lawler"?

Remember the Patrick Lawler Anonymous meetings?
Remember the Patrick Lawler who had lead eyes?

Remember the Patrick Lawler who tried to use
crutches for wings? It was if someone were holding him
underwater. He forgot he had eyes.

The real Patrick Lawler's life became dependent
on the Patrick Lawler impersonators.
They began to live his life in more meaningful
ways than he himself had ever lived it.

There was no single, solitary, existential, autonomous
Patrick Lawler. Like emergent properties. Like birds.
Like weather. Like a collection of hats. Consciousness
if the whole was more important than the single self.

You always know if it is him because he stands in front of you--
sometimes silvery, sometimes in slow motion--
and he tries to convince you as if it is the most
significant fact he can possibly share with you.

"The 'person' in front of you," he says, "is not Patrick Lawler."

---Patrick Lawler

43) Experiment in Geography

I suppose I should tell you
I've finally been fired
from the glove factory.
I'd been putting beaches
in North Dakota
for two months.
Before that, it was mountains.
When I was on map duty,
I put a fairground
next to our neighborhood.
I thought it would help.
I could have spent
an entire week there
painting your face.
Remember when
I took you to see Kansas City?
That was Omaha.

I want to apologize.
I am sorry.

If you want me to leave,
I will. I'll move
to the eastern seaboard.
I will split coconuts
and become a giant fly.

---Zachary Schomberg

42) Potential Random #5

Stand here, where without too great a turn, my eyes meet your eyes mirrored. And my eyes in the mirror, your eyes.

Whatever's to either side of us runs out of the frame and is lost. What's behind us is lost behind us.

Reduced to picture, we can appreciate our picture, reversed but right side up. Our lines of sight are straightforward—the surface glassy, clear.

Simple and astonishing, the location of bodies, grandly irregular in the smooth surrounding echo.

---Keith Waldrop

41) The Man Who Is Not At The Table

Now that my humorous friend is dead
and from the world is deleted
he does not sit at the long table in the dining room,
the long table whose faded green tablecloth can be described
as gentle and modest by someone alive
in a world just waiting for adjectives. He does not sit there

reading a book he hasn't looked at since grad school,
bemused by his own marginal jottings --
"Art as illusion? Or is this ironic?" -- seeing
an idiosyncratic merit in phrases that once provided only
promptings for lunch-hour parodies in that courtyard
where the yellowjackets obsessed over our sandwiches . . .
He's not there

at the table in such a way
that someone could notice his dark reflection
in the glass pane that protects a watercolor of beached boats,
his reflection dark-shadow-gray but not black
framed by the oddly bright reflection of the red and white curtains
behind him filtering winter afternoon sunlight
with a quiet complication

that someone usually might skim over
as if there would be plenty of time to go back
and really ponder the bits that seemed elusive
or just not crucial to the main theme
the first time through.

---Mark Halliday