More than the beetles turned russet,
sunset, dragging their shield, more than
the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon,
it’s the bees I love this time of year.
Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips
of too many flowers for one summer but
still must go on hunting, one secret
closing, another ensuing, picking
lock after lock, rapping the glass,
getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap,
almost winter, almost dark, reading far past
the last paragraph into the back blank page,
acknowledgments, and history of type.
(via ecstasis)
As a doorman I didn’t know who wanted in,
who out. As an anesthesiologist, I wanted
every one awake between the rotten heart
cut out and the motorcyclist’s installed
to say how it felt. Under the robe,
I wore a holster. I became unafraid
of ladders. I confused the word career
with careen. I was a walk-on bastard
with three lines dispensed by the second scene.
I mean how one morning you look in the mirror
and there’s some foreign, yelping argon
but such tenderness in the world:
people and their guard dogs,
snow smashing its crystals in the lawn,
shushing the crows’ ecumenical arguments,
proof of the persistence of the soul
people think you’re crazy if you say so
even though they have their own bird-brained
promises tapped out on the night’s tins
of rebuffed skepticism.
I believe you get to apologize
maybe twice. See a sunset once.
Death, well, I’ve lost count.
It turns out a guitar is a lousy oar,
its wand founders, its head of smoke
can’t empty a spit valve. Stabbed
by the sky, stitched up by an unknown
farce. Dad watching me putt into the windmill,
green ball being knocked back.
It’s all about timing, how if
you’re in the parking lot when she’s lost
her keys, you get to kiss her breasts
but if you’re in Philadelphia, a star explodes.
That poor piece of music used in a movie
thirty years ago still struggling
to freed itself from the seduction of idiots.
I wore a button that said May I help you?
I carried a bucket from the quaking basement.
Who I went to see would soon be dead
and I didn’t know how the tape recorder worked.
Who knew pigeons could be so loud?
Is it okay to take on faith the mountains
when all I trample are ant hills?
Is it all right to let the cricket keep me awake?
Autobiography is a story the fireplace
tells to a swimming pool. I’m not sure
what else to embroider in my hankie.
We have to go soon, don’t we?
I want to touch everything to be sure.
(Source: narrativemagazine.com)
The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn’t it
electricity’s blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy,
the dog barking at who knows what,
signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray
of printer’s type. Some piece of you
stays in me and I’ll never give it back.
The heart hoards its thorns
just as the rose profligates.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.
(via ahuntersheart)
We all think about suddenly disappearing.
The train tracks lead there, into the woods.
Even in the financial district: wooden doors
in alleyways. First I want to put something small
into your hand, a button or river stone or
key I don’t know to what. I don’t
have that house anymore across from the graveyard
and its black angel. What counts as a proper
goodbye? My last winter in Iowa there was always
a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer
even when it was ten below. We all feel
suspended over a drop into nothingness.
Once you get close enough, you see what
one is stitching is a human heart. Another
is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life.
Whenever you put your feet on the floor
in the morning, whatever the nightmare,
it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion:
the solidity of the boards, the steadiness
coming into the legs. Where did we get
the idea when we were kids to rub dirt
into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania?
Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water,
cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.
(via ahuntersheart) (via emeish)
(Source: lessadventurous)
All night spent betting on a stranger’s heart.
The metaphor is deliciously, dangerously overt. You wouldn’t like it. You would accuse me of romanticizing your viscera. I would cringe. But perhaps you are right. Besides, we’ve been here before.
The news is always grave: Mi muneca…The heart is a prizefighter. It will die trying.
Not funny, Dean.
I mean, all night spent betting on the tidal certainty of breath. Alone against its own best time. Tying on its gloves, sparring in the dark with my lungs, my ribs, my breasts. And yes – my heart. (Oh rhyme, be gone!) So long love a part that one doesn’t notice its slow comeback.
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) is laughable. Though the shtick must already be old. But you deserve it (and it). Those puns all actual, your heart truly duplicitous. Your body working in analogue with every poem penned by every poet.
No more metaphors for you I envy. Like hearing music for the first time or understanding suddenly your complete abdication in service to another, the wild-new must in you be perched like a bird, nervous and patient. A racehorse at the gate.
No more metaphors for you I envy. A brand new heart to break.
A fighter, leaning in to the punch.
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I’ve
been incinerated, I’ve oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what’s never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.
(via poetbabble)
(Source: irunfrombears)
