Extinction of Silence

That it was shy when alive goes without saying.

We know it vanished at the sound of voices

Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,

Though it could be approached by someone praying.

We have no recordings of it, though of course

In the basement of the Museum, we have some stu­ffed

Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed

And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers.

But its song is lost. If it was related to

A species of Quiet, or of another feather,

No researcher can know. Not even whether

A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou,

Where legend has it some once common bird

Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.

by A.E. Stallings

The Changing Light

The changing light

           at San Francisco

 is none of your East Coast light

          none of your

                      pearly light of Paris

The light of San Francisco

                  is a sea light

                                 an island light

And the light of fog

             blanketing the hills

    drifting in at night

                through the Golden Gate

                                 to lie on the city at dawn

And then the halcyon late mornings

 after the fog burns off

      and the sun paints white houses

                              with the sea light of Greece

           with sharp clean shadows

                 making the town look like

                          it had just been painted



But the wind comes up at four o'clock

                               sweeping the hills



And then the veil of light of early evening



And then another scrim

            when the new night fog

                                  floats in

And in that vale of light

                the city drifts

                              anchorless upon the ocean

From How to Paint Sunlight by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Mirabeau Bridge

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away

    And lovers

  Must I be reminded

Joy came always after pain



    The night is a clock chiming

    The days go by not I



We're face to face and hand in hand

    While under the bridges

  Of embrace expire

Eternal tired tidal eyes



    The night is a clock chiming

    The days go by not I



Love elapses like the river

    Love goes by

  Poor life is indolent

And expectation always violent



    The night is a clock chiming

    The days go by not I



The days and equally the weeks elapse

    The past remains the past

  Love remains lost

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away



    The night is a clock chiming

    The days go by not I



From Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Donald Revell.

Lotus

Lotus

I have spent many tranquil and desireless nights
Sitting, my legs crossed in meditation.
I breathe a human's breath— in and out—
eh, world? It hardly exists.

Another world exists…
Other winds, other sacrificial lambs,
other faces, not necessarily lively…
In other words, they belong to another space.

I spread my hands,
the only two lotus I own.
You say they are growing— but in what direction?
You say they are traveling/on their way— but where?

I'm merely learning to forget—
that huge university not seen by eyes of flesh.

-- Shu Cai
Translated by Zhang Er and Leonard Schwartz

No entry for minors

Clasping a liquid hand, drifting.
The sea water doesn't know I'm sea water too
Its nakedness pushing my nakedness
Trying to wash me up on shore.

I drift from one self
Into another, I clasp
My own hand. I haven't forgotten the liquid path
That winds around a submerged reef
From Shanghai to Inner Mongolia.

I'm stranded on the beach. Waves break
Lapping at my face, as if to extinguish a candle
Beneath the water. The beach seems too young.
I remember an unmarked fork in the road.

-- Han Bo, No Entry For Minors
Translated by Jason Pym and Mark Wallace

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

STAND on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

-- T.S. Eliot

A "Thank You" Note

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.

The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.

Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,

and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don't wait for them
from window to door.

Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

-- Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Maria Trzeciak

Kindness

I filled my untidy garden with birds.
It was simple. Let me instruct. You buy
A red plastic cylinder crammed with seeds
(Tawny, black, striped), then precariously
Loop it round twigs. Then birds drop from the sky.
Bluetits quarrel, ferociously.

They bring long-tailed tits with their piping cries,
Sparrows who squabble and scrabble the fence,
Then the robin, wild with anger. He flies
At red like an enemy, Where the seeds
Fall deep, a pale carpet, without defence
Shy chaffinches, loud blackbirds feed.

But the youngest cat lies under a bush.
Her almond-shaped eyes squint patient as day.
I can see, already, her silent rush.
Should I scoop up the seeds? Break tangled strings?
How can I send so many birds away?
How can I live without wings?

-- Alison Brackenbury

a field guide to lemon

Demons are smaller than one might expect.
They land on the shoulder, like specks of sulphur,
then climb into the inner ear,
setting up their equipment on collapsible tables.

I can feel one now, glowing like an ember,
his tiny claws scratching and scraping,
his voice like a gramophone, urging me on
to tell you how much I hate you,

but I will ignore him, as you should,
unless you do not believe in demons,
but only in the pleasant things of life,
of which, I am told, there are numerous examples.

-- Tom Jenks

Blackberrying

One of those gorgeous warm September days
perfect for picking blackberries on the Heath.

We're all vagrants snatching at the hedge,
grabbing the plumpest fruit.

Oak leaves colour pink and gold,
acorns bunch - clusters of bright black

elderberries catch the eye,
rosehips bulge, longing to be pulled

but we're only here to take blackberries.
My fingers and mouth bruise

from the juice I surreptitiously
suck and lick away. Bare arms

snag with brambles a dozen times
for each prize, often not worth

the scratch and tear. How stunted
and deformed the berries are!

Sometimes nature doesn't work,
sometimes it takes a pill to jerk the leaden

psyche into overdrive.
Sometimes you have to fumble.

-- Karen Green

Lavender

With a sachet of lavender secreted inside it
the purple bag is plump as a small bird's
breast, echoes your voice, its restful
clarity. When I slide my thumb down
the velvet underside a sense of psalm

fills me and dark cat night sidling in,
fitting the mound of herself to
a human back. I picture tension easing
in the day-to-day shifts we make
with those we're knitted to. Though I'm weak

the emperor purple gloves my skin
awake, rallies the brain's metropolis, sends
pungent messages to the pulsing townships.
For months my braced body's fought
the indiscriminate battalions sent in to rout

any cancerous cell filching a plot
of land but now it's flagging, wants
to hunch in a ditch, weep at its wounds.
Useless to wish frailty was a boiler suit
I could unbutton - it's married to the roots

of my hair, my blood. But this pouch
you chose for me, its insistent coolth,
raises a garden where flowering bushes
are blue-leaved and threaded with bee thrum,
raspberries spill ripeness on my thumbs.

-- Myra Schneider

Sound of a body falling off a bridge

I can tell you there is no word for this
in any language. I've asked

and everyone seems to confirm
its translatability.

Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-
simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-
exactly how one imagines it.

And somewhere between shuffle and fracture-
the silence of Scott Koch's body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,
which is also the silence of stars.

~

They write their arc over faces
of stones staring up from riverbed,

and if you were a swarm of mayflies
hatching in the pre-dawn, coal-dark

aubade of a Susquehanna morning,
or if you were a freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out
with friends to gaze at stars,

you would know stars make
a hell of a racket. Like time, like death,

they scrawl their inscrutable marks
of light.

~

Say you are not a hatch of insects
or one of those kids wrecked and lovely,

their skins' leaf-awkward sheen.
Though if you were, you'd be lost

in a fury of living and dying.

So you'll have to trust the words
for the way his face twitched, went

stone-white, for how unbeautiful
his body comprehended night, words

for a breath untaken, the arrested
air in his lungs.

~

I give them to you piecemeal,
hand over hand, as if in aftermath

we build a city of bridges. I press each
against your mouth. They taste of salt.

They fall into place. They are beginning
to mean less and less. They only do

what they do. For anything else, you'll need
something like a life, or memory-

car tires ticking over a bridge, wheel
of a flower cart knocking cobblestone,

seams, separations.

-- James Hoch

signs

Earlier, a slow child in the vicinity
of a Slow Children sign, a boy
just taking his time, his bookbag
weighing him down, and now --
driving past Caution: Falling
Rock Zone - an actual fallen rock
right in the middle of the Interstate!
I call 911, report it - the danger -
one loose rock suggesting many,
some hard hilltop family of them
finally about to become unglued.

I say the signs have started to come true,
and laugh, but the operator is serious,
only wants to know where, and who.
I give her the where she needs
and drive on, who I am,
I'm sure, of no importance here.

Outside of Frostburg I exit and stop
at Stop, then at red stop again,
remembering those few times
late at night -- because I'm careful
about my braveries -
when I've gunned it,
went right on through.

Truth is, I'd be happy in this world
to be quietly significant
like a good editor.
I'd like to improve Slow Children,
for example, by putting in
that comma where it belongs.

I'm almost home. The increase in Jesus
bumper stickers has been telling me so.
At Finzel near Little Savage in big letters
at the end of a driveway: Beware Dog,
and there he is, the Beware Dog
halfway between the house and the road,
sleeping or waiting, I'll never know.

-- Stephen Dunn

Love poem

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

Ordinary Life

I applied once again for an ordinary life.
I thought I had the skills, the prerequisites,
the training to couple: advanced degrees,
lemon meringue pie, caesar salad,
the ability to fold napkins and flattery
into pleasing shapes.

I unwrapped my placemats and my tablecloths,
all the pretty coverings.
I was a pretty covering.
I spread myself out
on his bed.

I hemmed my edges
I tucked myself in
I pulled myself tight
I smoothed out all my wrinkles.
I wanted to accomodate him.

He said I was too large for him.
Adjustments would be necessary
for me to fit within his life—
just some minor alterations,
he said, as he trimmed me down to size.

My objections just confirmed
my complete unsuitability.
I was so rigid and inflexible,
he complained, as I folded myself up
and packed myself away.

The woman was

the woman was an envelope
I unsealed her
I read her contents

the woman was paper
I drew on her

the woman was chalk
I wrote her name

the woman was a poem
I memorized her lines

the woman was potsherds
I fit her together

the woman was a net
I untangled her
I loosened the stones that were her weights

the woman was a map of skin
I read the dust within her folds

the woman was a dry creek bed
I followed her

the woman was a message
I uncoded her

the woman was a line of wet sand leading to a well
I drank her

the woman was mist
I inhaled her

the woman was a memory
I marked her place