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musings on June

1. anne sexton (“the truth the dead know”), 2. anne sexton (“suicide note poem”), 3. mary oliver (“august”), 4. l.m. montgomery (“anne of the island”), 5. morgan parker (“the black saint & the sinner lady & the dead & the truth”), 6. found poems: sylvia plath / peter k. steinberg (“percy key among the narcissi”) artwork by hugo grenville

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Words Whispered to a Child Under Siege

by Joseph Fasano

No, we are not going to die. The sounds you hear knocking the windows and chipping the paint from the ceiling, that is a game the world is playing. Our task is to crouch in the dark as long as we can and count the beats of our own hearts. Good. Like that. Lay your hand on my heart and I’ll lay mine on yours. Which one of us wins is the one who loves the game the most while it lasts. Yes, it is going to last. You can use your ear instead of your hand. Here, on my heart. Why is it beating faster? For you. That’s all. I always wanted you to be born and so did the world. No, those aren’t a stranger’s bootsteps in the house. Yes, I’m here. We’re safe. Remember chess? Remember hide-and-seek? The song your mother sang? Let’s sing that one. She’s still with us, yes. But you have to sing without making a sound. She’d like that. No, those aren’t bootsteps. Sing. Sing louder. Those aren’t bootsteps. Let me show you how I cried when you were born. Those aren’t bootsteps. Those aren’t sirens. Those aren’t flames. Close your eyes. Like chess. Like hide-and-seek. When the game is done you get another life.

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Fragment: "Tonight I've Watched"

by Sappho tr. Mary Barnard

Tonight I’ve watched

The moon and then the Pleiades go down

The night is now half-gone; youth goes; I am

in bed alone

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thinking about that toni morrison quote that went to the effect of ‘you’re looking in your children’s face to make sure their face is clean and their hair is combed and they’re looking in your face to see love.’ because it’s saur true.

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Tortures

by Wisława Szymborska tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Nothing has changed. The body is a reservoir of pain; it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep; it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it; it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails; its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched. In tortures, all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed. The body still trembles as it trembled before Rome was founded and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.

Nothing has changed. Except there are more people, and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones — real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent. But the cry with which the body answers for them was, is, and will be a cry of innocence in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed. Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. The gesture of the hands shielding the head has nonetheless remained the same. The body writhes, jerks, and tugs, falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees, bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except the run of rivers, the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers. The little soul roams among these landscapes, disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.

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MY CHILDHOOD HOME IS EMPTY.

You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe / Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1) / Landscape by Louise Glück / Summer's End by Eli McMullen ( Acrylic and gouache on panel) / There is still love here (Ceramic house) by griefmother / How's It Gonna End - Tom Waits / Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow by Noor Hindi / Origin of the Marble Forest by Gregory Orr / A Shropshire Lad by A.E.Housman / Little Summer by Raymond Bonilla (Oil on panel) / Untitled, digital by Tito Merello Vilar / Ivy - Frank Ocean / Disco Elysium (1) / The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman / That’s Okay - The Hush Sound / Checkers by John Marsden / 1986 by Hollis Brown Thornton (pigment transfer on paper) / tumblr post by @ryebreadgf / Outhouse by Rachel McKibbens / 6 ways to draw a circle by tumblr user @filmnoirsbian / From the Scars series by India Lawton / House Fire by Becca Stadtlander / Back to the Old House - The Smiths / How’d Your Parents Die Again by Fatimah Asghar / Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (2) / Disco Elysium (2) / The Four Generations of Chang E by Zen Cho

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“But the ache for him is stronger than my anger. I want to speak of something not dead or divine. I want him to live. … This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”

— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

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Escape

By Zeina Hashem Beck [x]

Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease. — Naguib Mahfouz

more & more, home is the escape we run from one room to another there are no corridors we look for locks find wooden doors with no latches no keys this room has divine textiles this room has jasmine domes this room has cans of spray paint this room has kalashnikovs this room has a phone booth with one button it says mother we do not press it we are tired of our mothers crying our mothers are tired of being gods we run we run from one language to another this language has endless words for love هيام is to want the labyrinth شغف is what opens the heart’s wall plants grass inside it this language twists our tongues clumsily inside our mouths like a third kiss we try but keep hitting the wrong notes all languages suicide us they fill our throats with words say we did it on purpose say we speak in what chokes us say we threw away the fish flesh & placed the bones on a plate & feasted we run we run from one city to another this city is wrapped in flags this city is lacquered with movies this city is heaped with trash this city shows us birth certificates asks us to look at our purple thumbs for proof all cities kill Antigone some do it by rope some do it by apology some do it by promise we run we run I wonder how is it I am not panting how is it I am not limping how come I am not thinking of my children & who are you stranger with familiar hurt running alongside me we laugh we laugh this is the last gate this is a key leave it outside like a doormat

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Blue Rotunda

by Louise Glück

I am tired of having hands she said I want wings—

But what will you do without your hands to be human?

I am tired of human she said I want to live on the sun—

Pointing to herself:

Not here. There is not enough warmth in this place. Blue sky, blue ice

the blue rotunda lifted over the flat street—

and then, after a silence:

I want my heart back I want to feel everything again—

That’s what the sun meant: it meant scorched—

It is not finally interesting to remember. The damage

is not interesting. No one who knew me then is still alive.

My mother was a beautiful woman— they all said so.

I have to imagine everything she said

I have to act as though there is actually a map to that place:

when you were a child—

And then:

I’m here because it wasn’t true; I

distorted it—

I want she said a theory that explains everything

in the mother’s eye the invisible splinter of foil

the blue ice locked in the iris—

Then:

I want it to be my fault she said so I can fix it—

Blue sky, blue ice, street like a frozen river

you’re talking about my life she said

except she said you have to fix it

in the right order not touching the father until you solve the mother

a black space showing where the word ends

like a crossword saying you should take a breath now

the black space meaning when you were a child—

And then:

the ice was there for your own protection

to teach you not to feel—

the truth she said

I thought it would be like a target, you would see

the center—

Cold light filling the room.

I know where we are she said that’s the window when I was a child

That’s my first home, she said that square box— go ahead and laugh.

Like the inside of my head: you can see out but you can’t go out—

Just think the sun was there, in that bare place

the winter sun not close enough to reach the children’s hearts

the light saying you can see out but you can’t go out

Here, it says, here is where everything belongs

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Ulysses

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson [x]

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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You Can Have It

Philip Levine [x]

My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labors, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds, wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.

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in warsaw by Czesław Miłosz

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Against Still Life

by Margaret Atwood

Orange in the middle of a table: It isn’t enough to walk around it at a distance, saying it’s an orange: nothing to do with us, nothing else: leave it alone I want to pick it up in my hand I want to peel the skin off; I want more to be said to me than just Orange: want to be told everything it has to say And you, sitting across the table, at a distance, with your smile contained, and like the orange in the sun: silent:

Your silence isn’t enough for me now, no matter with what contentment you fold your hands together; I want anything you can say in the sunlight: stories of your various childhoods, aimless journeyings, your loves; your articulate skeleton; your posturings; your lies. These orange silences (sunlight and hidden smile) make me want to wrench you into saying; now I’d crack your skull like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin to make you talk, or get a look inside But quietly: if I take the orange with care enough and hold it gently I may find an egg a sun an orange moon perhaps a skull; center of all energy resting in my hand can change it to whatever I desire it to be and you, man, orange afternoon lover, wherever you sit across from me (tables, trains, buses) if I watch quietly enough and long enough at last, you will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all I need to know tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

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For Grace, After a Party

By Frank O'Hara

You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't interest me, it was love for you that set me afire, and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn't there an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed? And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn't you like the eggs a little different today? And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.

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Oh Stay at Home, My Lad, and Plough

by A.E. Housman

Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough The land and not the sea, And leave the soldiers at their drill, And all about the idle hill Shepherd your sheep with me. Oh stay with company and mirth And daylight and the air; Too full already is the grave Of fellows that were good and brave And died because they were.

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Axe

By Anthony Joseph [x]

My father, God bless his axe. He grooved deep in pitch pine. He spun his charm like bachelor galvanise in hurricane. Once I saw him peep through torrential rain like a saint at a killing. And when the wind broke his cassava trees, and the water overcame his eight-track machine, and his clothes were swept away in the flood, his Hail Mary fell upon a fortress of bone. So he crossed his chest with appointed finger and hissed a prayer in glossolalic verse. He may grand-charge and growl but he woundeth not, nor cursed the storm that Pape God send to wash away the wish of him and every dream he built.

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The Road to Derry

By Seamus Heaney

Along Glenshane and Foreglen and the cold woods of Hillhead: A wet wind in the hedges and a dark cloud on the mountain And flags like black frost mourning that the thirteen men were dead The Roe wept at Dungiven and the Foyle cried out to heaven, Burntollet’s old wound opened and again the Bogside bled; By Shipquay Gate I shivered and by Lone Moor I enquired Where I might find the coffins where the thirteen men lay dead. My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger. I walked among their old haunts. the home ground where they bled; And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in the winter Till its oak would sprout in Derry where the thirteen men lay dead.