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