After Love Afterwards, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries. These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in. Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership. The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down. Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the […]
Poetry
Quiet Revelations
Former US poet laureate Louise Gluck, whose poetry I have posted here many times, just won the coveted Wallace Stevens award. Well deserved. Also awarded: An academy fellowship granted to Brigit Pegeen Kelly, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. After reading some of her work online, I am adding Kelly to my list. […]
Striking Deep
I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . . -Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and am now standing quietly, in my new life? –Juan Ramon Jimenez (translated by Robert Bly) […]
The Zimmer Flies
The Great Bird of Love I want to become a great night bird Called the Zimmer, grow intricate gears And tendons, brace my wings on updrafts, Roll them down with a motion That lifts me slowly into the stars To fly above the troubles of the land. When I soar the moon will shine past […]
To Live in this World
In Blackwater Woods Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every […]
As the Ocean Makes Grasses
Someone You Have Seen Before It was a night for listening to Corelli, Geminiani Or Manfredini. The tables had been set with beautiful white cloths And bouquets of flowers. Outside the big glass windows The rain drilled mercilessly into the rock garden, which made light Of the whole thing. Both business and entertainment waited With […]
The Eye Begins to See
In a Dark Time In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood– A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s […]
I Want None of It
For Strong Women A strong woman is a woman who is straining A strong woman is a woman standing on tiptoe and lifting a barbell while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.” A strong woman is a woman at work cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she […]
Fight, Fiddle, Ply, Muzzle
First Fight. Then Fiddle. First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string with feathery sorcery; muzzle the note with hurting love; the music that they wrote bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing for the dear instrument to bear. Devote the bow to silks and honey. Be remote a while […]
May Swenson: Looking at Trees
All That Time I saw two trees embracing. One leaned on the other as if to throw her down. But she was the upright one. Since their twin youth, maybe she had been pulling him toward her all that time, and finally almost uprooted him. He was the thin, dry, insecure one, the most wind-warped, […]