We crawl through the tall grass and idle light,
our chests against the earth so we can hear the river

underground. Our backs carry rotting wood and books
that hold no stories of damnation or miracles.

One day as we listen for water, we find a beekeeper—
one eye pearled by a cataract, the other cut out by his own hand

so he might know both types of blindness. When we stand
in front of him, he says we are prisms breaking light into color—

our right shoulders red, our left hips a wavering indigo.
His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits

on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies
of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,

says the graveyard is full of dead prophets. To you, he presents
his arms, tattooed with songs slave catchers whistle

as they unleash the dogs. He lets you see the burns on his chest
from the time he set fire to boats and pushed them out to sea.

You ask why no one believes in madness anymore,
and he tells you stars need a darkness to see themselves by.

When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt?
and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm.

(Source: poets.org)

In the country where believers eat the bodies
of the gods, we meet a priest who pulls a rope
of thorns through his tongue to make his mind

pure enough for a vision. He dances to music
we can’t hear and waits to come trembling
into knowledge. We don’t recognize ourselves

in his radiance, but we do in his suffering.
He passes through pain and into healing
without seeing the holy rendered visible.

He tells us the oracle died when she refused
to divine the future, but we find her tangled
in her own hair wearing a garland of burrs,

manacled to the bed. We ask for a better world
to die in, but she says, Submit to your freedom.
We tie new knots in her hair and swim

into the belly of a shark to retrieve the book
of signs. Rumors say the secret of life is sewn
into a dead man’s coat, but when we unearth him,

all we find in his sleeves are his fractured arms.
We want to believe, to split open the myth
and lie in it, return to original dark and be changed,

but the bones won’t yield to us, pages are missing
from the book, the gods remain so quiet
we hear water speaking between the stones.

(via rabbit-light)

(Source: poems.com)

Standing in the book aisle like a broken tulip,
searching for a history.  What has happened
to your self from six years ago, and why

can’t you remember the title of the book
that says a word once divided land from sea,
light from shadow? Every story is a door.

Run your fingers over the dusted spines
holding stories of wolf-hearted gods and glorious war.
How can you believe there are answers here?

Here, where villains teach you about heroes,
here, where the usual angel betrays the Lord for
the sake of a boy’s beauty.  You know all

the names for god, but you’ve forgotten how
to speak. Tonight, when the light goes, place
your two hands over your heart. A sadness

exists there that existed before language.
It will outlast you. It will outlast every page here.
Dusk comes, like a wise man.  The library

is stone quiet but your mind is storm
in August.  In the half-light, a hand appears
to write on the wall: Here is your sorrow and here

is how to survive it. Rising waters will one day
spare nothing, not even the word.  Not even
your hunger—the only sign that you are living.

(Source: lafovea.org)

The first night you don’t come home
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth 1 found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough
with dirt. The dog finds me and presents
between his gentle teeth a twitching
nightjar. In her panic, she sings
in his mouth. He gives me her pain
like a gift, and I take it. I hear
the cries of her young, greedy with need,
expecting her return, but I don’t let her go
until I get into the house. I read
the auspices the way she flutters against
the wallpaper’s moldy roses means
all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling
means a storm approaches. You should see
her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing
at the starless window, her body a dart,
her body the arrow of longing, aimed,
as all desperate things are, to crash
not into the object of desire,
but into the darkness behind it.

(Source: versedaily.org)

Angels, give us this day. Set down your plagues,
and forgive us this night. I’ve lifted a candle to see
who I’ve been making love to and examined his body

for the first signs of terror. Whoever you are, wake up.
Tell me heaven will be like Venice—dirty, beautiful
and sinking. Tell me the walls of every paradise fall,

that there are riots in the city of peace. Promise me
I will die of love. Promise me we take our suffering
with us, the scratches we crewel down each other’s

backs as we rush into joy. Take the ghosts first,
they’ve gone mad for grieving for the world. Let the apostles pull
up their nets. Keelhaul the archangels, make seraphs kiss

the sharks, but do not call me unto you. Do not spare me
gunshots outside my window. Do not spare me the man
who touched my neck on the train to St. Petersburg

when he thought I was asleep. The devil has been up all night
and is sleeping it off in the basement. Let him rest awhile.
Let us continue wandering in these perishable machines

made of dirt and music. The saguaros swell with rain.
Hallelujah. The mysteceti’s heart is big enough to crawl
through and it sings for no reason, hallelujah. Praise

for young seahorses growing in their fathers’ bodies.
Praise for the avocados clinging to the trees. I will hold onto
the night like a girl with wet hair. I will put my fingers

into bullet holes in the opera house. Do not destroy this.
Gone would be Goya, Paris and the Marinsky ballet.
Gone the glaciers and Great Barrier Reef. Gone the cave

paintings where humans first learned we must love
what we kill. My dear God, my darling Torquemada,
the first and the last and the everlasting, you already know

how this will end, how as a child I heard Talitha cum
and woke standing over my father, saw the fire
burning next to him. I nestled into his body’s curve

and pretended to sleep so he would take me back to bed,
bear me like a bowl brimming with water, like an angel
carry me to the end of the world and lay me down.

This is how I betrayed my country—
with each almond I fed them, with each grape’s
red blister. After the war began, there were years
of hunger and fear and our bodies unheld.
 
When the suitors arrived, they wore weapons
in order to sleep, and I stroked their backs.
I will not defend myself. Bees entered me
when we kissed, stingers clotted my throat.
 
O harsh, unforgiving kingdom, everyone betrays.
Penelope unwove her shroud and stopped
looking for sails, uttered his name
as she dropped black thread on the floor.
 
But now the bard who once sang of desire
will be spared and told to sing about mercy.
Praise the ruler who wears disguises.
Praise the ruler who kills for peace.
 
Even as we wash blood from the table,
I do not regret it. As we toss swords
into the arms of olive trees and scatter hawks roosting
in helmets, I know this is why we love—
 
so someone will watch us die and carry our body
to the place of our burning. Even as they knot
the ship’s cable and pull our feet from the ground,
I am not sorry I tasted such honey.

(Source: passagesnorth.com)

You counted days by their cold silences.
          At night, wolves and men with bleeding hands

colonized your dreams. The last time I visited,
          you said you trapped a dead woman in your room

who told you to starve yourself to make room for God,
          so I let them give your body enough electricity

to calm it. Don’t be afraid. The future is not disguised
          as sleep. It is a tango. It is a waterfall between

two countries, the river that tried to drown you.
          It is a city where men speak a language

you can fake if you must. It’s the hands of children
          thieving your empty pockets. It’s bicycles

with bells ringing through the streets at midnight.
          Come up from the basement. It’s not over.

Before the sun rises, moonlight on the trees.
          Before they tear the asylum down, joy.

(via ecstasis)

(Source: Slate)

After the great destruction, looters came with their loose eyes
           and desire for oil and marble.

They wanted beauty in her old disguises, like statues of
           ancient cities before

they were taken by marauders.  The fractured hands before you
           belong to the conquered gods.

The tapestry in the hall tells an old legend, the tale of the woman 
           warrior with her twisted dagger,

and the many arrows in her quiver that warmed themselves in
           the bodies of her enemies.

Here lies her spear and shards of the hunted.  When you roam
           the dark corridors bring her weapons

made from molten and steel, for once men stole their brides
           mistaking possession for love.

Hide your body in her armor. Hide your heart in an empty grave.
           When you leave here, take nothing.

(Source: diodepoetry.com)

The first time I saw my mother, she’d been dead
fourteen years and came as a ghost in the mirror,

plucking the hair beneath her arms, and humming
a bossa nova. She lotioned her chapped heels

and padded her bra as if she were alive in the old way.
She said I was born with my cord wrapped

around my neck like a rosary, and she knew God,
the doomed father of her days, wanted us both.

Before midnight she plaited my hair, hemmed my skirt,
sang lullabies she’d learned on the other side of the flood.

She lifted her dress to show her bones shedding light
on a stillborn fetus accidentally raptured into her ribs.

She said she’d choose her death again, obey any pain
heaven gave her. Years ago she watched a man ride

a diving bell to the bottom of the Amazon to face
the mysteries God had placed there. The chain broke,

and they pulled him to the surface smiling, stiff, refusing
to open his fists. They broke and unpeeled his fingers.

No one wept or fought to hold it. She covered her eyes
so she wouldn’t see what God, in his innocence, had done.

(Source: poets.org)

We have been telling the story wrong all along, 
how a king took Philomela’s tongue after he had taken 
her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale

so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets 
wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned 
on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday’s heat,

pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir until 
they hear music below them. Inside, a woman warms up 
the organ and sings Via Dolorosa about a Messiah

who wanted to save everyone from the wages of pleasure. 
But how can I keep a man’s fingers from my mouth? 
How can I resist bare trees dervishing on the sidewalk?

A woman outside the train station asks, Is there a city 
underneath this city? I say, Let me tell you a story, 
and tell her that after Longfellow put out the fire

in his wife’s dress, after he buried her, after his burns 
turned to soft pink skin, he translated the Inferno. 
There is a place deep in the earth for the ravished

and ruined where everyone is transformed by suffering. 
And the truth is that Philomela originally became 
a sparrow stuttering in the laurels, but the story

changed with the telling. Someone wanted to give her 
mercy, a song. Now the truth is a red stain on her breast. 
Now truth is the pulse where her tongue used to be.

(via softcollapse)

(Source: poems.com)

Water drowns your panic like a Sunday blessing.
It’s spring. The sky above you darkens with rain.

You think passion is your only gift, but a sadness 
older than the sea keeps time in your blood. 

Once you saw two skeletons locked in a kiss. 
Time has forgotten them. Time forgets

everything except the swan’s neck reflected 
in the dark fountain and the way it cried out

its silver anthem of loneliness. Do not drink
from here. The water looks cold and clean

but clarity like that only leads to madness. 
Remember when you came here with the one

who held your body even as it changed
beneath his hands and waited for you to

renounce the world? You will never renounce it.

(via softcollapse)

(Source: diodepoetry.com)