Owl Song by Margaret Atwood

*

It Is Bitter

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

*

Poem:  The Black Riders and Other Lines, by Stephen Crane (1895)
Painting: Mitchell Nolte, Black Light Incantations

Letters (With Photos)

I had a lover once, I had a lover twice, easily three times I loved. And in between my heart reconstructed itself perfectly like a worm. And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.
After a time, I realized I was living a completely idiotic life. Idiotic, wasted. And sometime later, you and I began to correspond, inventing an entirely new form.
Deep intimacy over great distance! Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatrice.
One cannot invent a new form in an old character. The letters I sent remained immaculately ironic, aloof yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing different letters in my head, some of which became poems.
So much genuine feeling! So many fierce declarations of passionate longing!
I loved once, I loved twice, and suddenly the form collapsed: I was unable to sustain ignorance.
How sad to have lost you, to have lost any chance of actually knowing you or remembering you over time as a real person, as someone I could have grown deeply attached to, maybe the brother I never had.
And how sad to think of dying before finding out anything. And to realize how ignorant we all are most of the time, seeing-things only from the one vantage, like a sniper.
And there were so many things I never got to tell you about myself, things which might have swayed you. And the photo I never sent, taken the night I looked almost splendid.
I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow kept hitting the mirror and coming back. And the letters kept dividing themselves with neither half totally true.
And sadly, you never figured out any of this, though you always wrote back so promptly, always the same elusive letter.
I loved once, I loved twice, and even though in our case things never got off the ground it was a good thing to have tried. And I still have the letters of course. Sometimes I will take a few years’ worth to reread in the garden, with a glass of iced tea.
And I feel, sometimes, part of something very great, wholly profound and sweeping.
I loved once, I loved twice, easily three times I loved.

Louise Gluck

The Obscene Clutch

H.P. Lovecraft

*

The Pumpkin Tide

"I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea." 

— Richard Brautigan, The Pumpkin Tide

*

Poem in the Early Morning

The Sudden Light and the Trees

My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog

and wife beater.

In bad dreams I killed him

and once, in the consequential light of day,

I called the Humane Society

about Blue, his dog.

They took her away

and I readied myself, a baseball bat

inside my door.

That night I hear his wife scream

and I couldn't help it, that pathetic

relief; her again, not me.

It would be years before I'd understand

why victims cling and forgive.

I plugged in

the Sleep-Sound and it crashed

like the ocean all the way to sleep.

One afternoon I found him

on the stoop,

a pistol in his hand, waiting,

he said, for me.

A sparrow had gotten in

to our common basement.

Could he have permission

to shoot it? The bullets, he explained,

might go through the floor.

I said I'd catch it, wait, give me

a few minutes and, clear-eyed, brilliantly

afraid, I trapped it

with a pillow.

I remember how it felt

when I got my hand, and how it burst

that hand open

when I took it outside, a strength

that must have come out of hopelessness

and the sudden light

and the trees.

And I remember

the way he slapped the gun against

his open palm,

kept slapping it, and wouldn't speak. 



*
Poem by Stephen Dunn
Photographer Pero Crepulja

Corners

Corners

I've sought out corner bars, lived in corner houses;
like everyone else I've reserved
corner tables, thinking they'd be sufficient.
I've met at corners
perceived as crossroads, loved to find love
leaning against a lamp post
but have known the abruptness of corners too,
the pivot, the silence.
I've sat in corners at parties hoping for someone
who knew the virtue
of both distance and close quarters, someone with a
corner person's taste
for intimacy, hard won, rising out of shyness 
and desire.
I've turned corners there was no going back to,
corners
in the middle of a room that lead
to Spain or solitude.
And always the thin line between corner
and cornered,
the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies
that permit no repose,
the places we retreat to, the places we can't bear
to be found.

*
Photographer unknown
Poem by Stephen Dunn

Lost

The Letter

And in the end, all that is really left

Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable—

That somehow we deserved something better.   

That somewhere along the line things

Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s   

In charge, which certainly would have set   

Everything straight between us and the world,

Never reached us. Got lost somewhere.   

Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.   

Or sent by mistake to an old address   

Whose new tenant put it on her dresser   

With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting   

To give it to the landlord to forward.   

And we still wait like children who have sent   

Two weeks’ allowance far away   

To answer an enticing advertisement   

From a crumbling, yellow magazine,

Watching through years as long as a childhood summer,   

Checking the postbox with impatient faith   

Even on days when mail is never brought. 

 

*

Poem by Dana Gioia

Photo taken 11/8/14

What the Dead Fear

What the Dead Fear

On winter nights, the dead
see their photographs slipped
from the windows of wallets,
their letters stuffed in a box
with the clothes for Goodwill.
No one remembers their jokes,
their nervous habits, their dread
of enclosed places.
In these nightmares, the dead feel
the soft nub of the eraser
lightening their bones. They wake up
in a panic, go for a glass of milk
and see the moon, the fresh snow,
the stripped trees.
Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich,
or watch the patterns on the TV.
It’s all a dream anyway.
In a few months
they’ll turn the clocks ahead,
and when they sleep they’ll know the living
are grieving for them, unbearably lonely
and indifferent to beauty. On these nights
the dead feel better. They rise
in the morning, and when the cut
flowers are laid before their names
they smile like shy brides. Thank you,
thank you, they say. You shouldn’t have,
they say, but very softly, so it sounds
like the wind, like nothing human.

Poem by Kim Addonizio

*

Their Accustomed Place

 
Forgive me.
For hours I had tried to sleep
and failed;
restless and wild,

I could settle on nothing
and fell, in envy
of the things of darkness
following their sleepy course--

the root and branch, the bloodied beak--
even the screams from the cold leaves
were as red songs that rose and fell
in their accustomed place.

-Mary Oliver

*

Photo taken 9/24/2014

Weathered

What's this?
This is an old toolshed.
No, this is a great past love.

 - Yehuda Amichai

*
Photo taken around 2012

So Many Stars

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual. 

*

Photographer Masao Yamamoto
Poem by Laura Gilpin

Night

The Night Is Darkening Round Me

 

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me,

And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow;

The storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go. 

 

*

Poem by Emily Bronte

Photographer Nicholas Hughes

What The Leaves Tell Us

Something Large Is In The Woods

That's what the leaves are telling us tonight.
Hear them frighten and be struck dumb
So that we sit up listening to nothing,
Which is always more worrisome than something.

The minutes crawl like dog fleas up our legs.
We must wait for whatever it is to identify itself
In some as-yet-unspecified way
As the trees are rushing to warn us again,

The branches beat against the house to be let in,
And then change their minds abruptly.
How many leaves are holding still in the woods
With no wish to add to their troubles

With something so large closing upon us?
It makes one feel vaguely heroic
Sitting so late with no light in the house
And the night dark and starless out there.

*

Photographer Unknown

Poem by Charles Simic

In The Haze Of Sleeplessness

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

-Li Young Lee

*
Photographer Dan Otis
Song(s) by Loscil (click picture)

Of Harvest Or Pestilence

All Hallows

Even now the landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

*
Photographer unknown
Poem by Louise Gluck

*

Anna

Nothing moved except a green fern pushing its way out of a jar.
In our house, truths were told in the kitchen,
always in the hum of the fridge and in half darkness:
early evening, with what was left of light gathered on rims of things,
or in the pale vibrato light before sunrise
after we'd left our warm bed
and made our way to the kitchen table.

That summer we sat on the porch as if waiting,
as if we knew it was ending.
We waved to Anna, sixteen, in the white shorts and sneakers,
already halfway down the street and not looking back.
She flew like a moth into those soft evenings,
restless in the strange mixture
of twilight and the light of streetlamps.

One night we drove to the lakeshore,
past the powerful debris at the harbour,
rows of bins and trucks, train tracks, factories.
Past places we never saw inside of.
We watched the water until midnight
and never knew Anna was with us,
calling out in the fish-burnt air,
calling from the shiny embrace that closed around her as it opened.
No one heard.
Boat lights on the surface like the rim of light beneath a door.

She floated; rigid as driftwood to the brim of the lake.
Two miles from here we sat, in the night's slow annulment of colour,
gulls like winter breaths close to the water.

Endings concur: a crossroad.
Grief strikes where love struck first.
Our last morning together we sat with Anna's family in dark rooms.
We watched her mother put a sweater in the coffin.
These are endings that bind,
love still alive, squirming in the rind of the heart.

A voice we don't recognize calls up from ourselves.
We move in closer, trying to make out the words.
That begins love, or ends it - we start to make out the words.
We give to save ourselves. We forgive to save ourselves.

We recognize death and love when we can start calling them names.
Each other's.
The name of a young girl turned ugly by our deafness.

*

Poem by Anne Michaels

A Letter

A Letter

I have tried a dozen ways
to say those things
and have failed; how the moon
with its bruises
climbs branch over branch
through the empty tree;
how the cool November dusk,
like a wind, has blown
these old grey houses up
against the darkness;
and what these things
have come to mean to me
without you. I raked the yard
this morning, and it rained
this afternoon. Tonight,
along the shiny street,
the bags of leaves--
wet-shouldered
but warm in their skins--
are huddled together, close
so close to life.


*
Poem by Ted Kooser

Coal For Your Stocking

Rat Jelly

See the rat in the jelly
steaming dirty hair
frozen, bring it out on a glass tray
split the pie four ways and eat
I took great care cooking this treat for you
and tho it looks good
and tho it smells of Westinghouse still
and tastes of exotic fish or
maybe the expensive arse of a cow
I want you to know it's a rat
steaming dirty hair and still alive

(caught him last Sunday
thinking of the fridge, thinking of you.)

*
Photo by Junker Jane
Poem by Michael Ondaatje

Prose Poem

Vengeance

The sheer sensuousness of returning an offense. The release. Then no place to go but back into ourselves where suddenly we're cool and numb. That node of anger, that galvanizer, gone. No excuse left to delay living our lives. Maybe only love is as personal. The singularity, the intense focus. Once, though, in existentialism's first grasp, I was content to believe that in time the wicked would hang themselves. Nothing we need do to them. I'd forgotten how hurt won't let philosophy be king, that hurt wears its own crown, wants to rid itself of itself. But so much vengeance is a quiet affair. Just vengeance and me, the cause elsewhere, perhaps in another city, enjoying himself, untroubled by my trouble with him. I've taken him to sleep with me where he's met his proper death. No mercy in that dark realm. And no satisfaction when I woke.

*

Art by Alfred Kubin
Poem by Stephen Dunn