Having a Coke with You
By Frank O’Hara 1926 – 1966
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
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Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs bum like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
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I Have Gone Marking
by Pablo Neruda
tr. W.S. Merwin
I have gone marking the atlas of your body
with crosses of fire.
My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide.
In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.
Stories to tell you on the shore of evening,
sad and gentle doll, so that you should not be sad.
A swan, a tree, something far away and happy.
The season of grapes, the ripe and fruitful season.
I who lived in a harbour from which I loved you.
The solitude crossed with dream and with silence.
Penned up between the sea and sadness.
Soundless, delirious, between two motionless gondoliers.
Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.
My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling.
Even so, something sings in these fugitive words.
Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth.
Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy.
Sing, burn, flee, like a belfry at the hands of a madman.
My sad tenderness, what comes over you all at once?
When I have reached the most awesome and the coldest summit
my heart closes like a nocturnal flower.
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April
by Mary Oliver
I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a
full moon and --
but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the
Frogs are singing.
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Stars
by Louise Glück
I’m awake; I am in the world —
I expect
no further assurance.
No protection, no promise.
Solace of the night sky,
the hardly moving
face of the clock.
I’m alone — all
my riches surround me.
I have a bed, a room.
I have a bed, a vase
of flowers beside it.
And a nightlight, a book.
I’m awake; I am safe.
The darkness like a shield, the dreams
put off, maybe
vanished forever.
And the day —
the unsatisfying morning that says
I am your future,
here is your cargo of sorrow:
Do you reject me? Do you mean
to send me away because I am not
full, in your word,
because you see
the black shape already implicit?
I will never be banished. I am the light,
your personal anguish and humiliation.
Do you dare
send me away as though
you were waiting for something better?
There is no better.
Only (for a short space)
the night sky like
a quarantine that sets you
apart from your task.
Only (softly, fiercely)
the stars shining. Here,
in the room, the bedroom.
Saying I was brave, I resisted,
I set myself on fire.
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I kneel into a dream where I
am good & loved. I am
good. I am loved. My hands have made
some good mistakes. They can always
make better ones.
Natalie Wee, “Least of All,” Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (Amazon / Goodreads)
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Once Upon a Poolside by The National
Don't make this any harder
Everybody's waiting
Walk on's almost over
Teenagers on ice
Try to keep my distance
Talking of forgiveness
Once upon a poolside
Underneath the lights
What was the worried thing you said to me?
I'll follow you everywhere
While you work the room
I don't know how you do it
Tangerine perfume
I'm not doing anyone
Any kind of favors
Watching airplanes land
And sink into the pavement
What was the worried thing you said to me?
I can't keep talking, I can't stop shaking
I can't keep track of everything I'm taking
Everything is different, why do I feel the same?
Am I asking for too much?
Can't hear what you're saying
What was the worried thing you said to me?
I thought we could make it through anything
This is the closest we've ever been
And I have no idea what's happening
Is this how this whole thing is gonna end?
This is the closest we've ever been
Don't make this any harder
Everybody's waiting
Walk on's almost over
Teenagers on ice
Try to keep my distance
Talking of forgiveness
Once upon a poolside
Underneath the lights
What was the worried thing you said to me?
I thought we could make it through anything
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Anne Frank Huis by Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion, born 26 October 1952, UK Poet Laureate 1999-2009.
---
Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
And anger in the very place, whoever comes
To climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
The bookcase slides aside, then walks through
Shadow into sunlit rooms, can never help
But break her secrecy again. Just listening
Is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats
Itself outside, as if all time worked round
Towards her fear, and made each stroke
Die down on guarded streets. Imagine it–
Three years of whispering and loneliness
And plotting, day by day, the Allied line
In Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope
She had for ordinary love and interest
Survives her here, displayed above the bed
As pictures of her family; some actors;
Fashions chosen by Patricia Elizabeth.
And those who stoop to seem them find
Not only patience missing its reward,
But one enduring wish for chances
Like my own: to leave as simply
As I do, and walk at ease
Up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
A silent barge come clear of bridges
Settling their reflections in the blue canal.
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Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz, 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004, 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature winner.
---
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's word.
Warsaw, 1943
"Campo dei Fiori" from The Collected Poems 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002 by Marvin Bell
Marvin Bell, August 1937-December 2020, first Poet Laureate of Iowa
---
The interrogation celebrated spikes and cuffs,
the inky blue that invades a blackened eye,
the eyeball that bulges like a radish,
that incarnadine only blood can create.
They asked the young taxi driver questions
he could not answer, and they beat his legs
until he could no longer kneel on their command.
They chained him by the wrists to the ceiling.
They may have admired the human form then,
stretched out, for the soldiers were also athletes
trained to shout in unison and be buddies.
By the time his legs had stiffened, a blood clot
was already tracing a vein into his heart.
They said he was dead when they cut him down,
but he was dead the day they arrested him.
Are they feeding the prisoners gravel now?
To make them skillful orators as they confess?
Here stands Demosthenes in the military court,
unable to form the words “my country.” What
shall we do, we who are at war but are asked
to pretend we are not? Do we need another
naive apologist to crown us with clichés
that would turn the grass brown above a grave?
They called the carcass Mr. Dilawar. They
believed he was innocent. Their orders were
to step on the necks of the prisoners, to
break their will, to make them say something
in a sleep-deprived delirium of fractures,
rising to the occasion, or, like Mr. Dilawar,
leaving his few possessions and his body.
From Mars Being Red by Marvin Bell. Copyright © 2007 by Marvin Bell. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
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Kurosawa Champagne by Derrick Brown
Come on, love,
You'd sleep much better
If you'd just open my letter.
When you read sleight of hand in your sweater,
Pretend I'm there.
Tonight your body shook, hurling your nightmares back to Cambodia, and your nightgown wisped off into Ursula Minor, and I was left here on earth feeling alone, paranoid about the rapture.
Tonight, I think it's safe to say we drank way too much.
Should I apologize for the volume in my slobber?
Must I apologize for the best dance moves ever?
No.
I won’t.
Booze is my tuition to clown college.
And that night we swerved home on black laughter,
Leading from forgettable boxing.
I asked you to sleep in the shape of a trench so that I may know shelter.
I drew the word surrender in the mist of your breath,
Waving a white sheet around your body.
I said, “Dear, in the morning, let me put on your makeup for you. Loading your gems with mascara, and then I'll tell you the truth."
I watched black ropes of tears ramble down your face.
Lady war paint.
A squad of tiny men rappelled down the snaking lines,
And you said: "Oh, thank you for releasing all those fuckers from my life."
You have a daily pill case
But there are no pills inside.
It holds the ashes of people who died the moment they saw you.
And the cinema we built together was to play the greats but we could never afford the power.
So instead, in that dark cinema, you just painted pictures of Kurosawa, and I just stared at you like Orson Wells,
Getting fat off your style.
You are a movie that keeps exploding.
You are Dante’s fireplace.
We were so broke I'd pour tap water into your mouth,
Burp against your lips so you could have champagne.
You loved the champagne.
Sparring in the candlelight,
I said to you, "Listen, the mathematical equivalent of a woman's beauty is directly relational to the amount that other women hate her."
And you, dear, are hated.
A lot.
Your boots are a soundtrack to adultery.
Thank God your feet follow the rhythm of loyalty.
I said if this thing kills me,
If this feeling…
Why don't you slice me open, julienne,
Uncurl my veins and fashion myself a noose
So I can hold you once more.
Come on, love,
In case you missed it.
When you dance alone,
I feel you twisting.
You cut your lip
That's why I kissed it.
Pretend I'm there.
And it doesn't even, even matter how far away my senses catch you.
And it doesn't even, even matter how far away my senses catch you.
I hope they cut you.
I am your blood. I am your blood. I am your blood.
I am your blood.
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Happy birthday, Adrienne Rich!
Adrienne Cecile Rich, born May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died March 27, 2012, in Santa Cruz, California, was an American poet, essayist, and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum," which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by renowned poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the introduction to the published volume. She famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
---
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 1963
1
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peach bud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
Nervy, glowering, your daughter
wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.
2
Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.
The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she's let the tap stream scald her arm,
a match burn to her thumbnail,
or held her hand above the kettle's snout
right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.
3
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.
Two handsome women, gripped in argument,
each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam, all the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur!
4
Knowing themselves too well in one another:
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn...
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
5
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.
6
When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping
over her cheek, only the song
of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in reflections of an eye.
Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine--
is this fertillisante douleur? Pinned down
by love, for you the only natural action,
are you edged more keen
to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?
7
"To have in this uncertain world some stay
which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence."
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.
8
"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
all that we were--fire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition--
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.
9
Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all? Yes, think
of the odds! or shrug them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time's precious chronic invalid,--
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us--
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.
Sigh no more, ladies.
Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.
For that, solitary confinement,
tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.
10
Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince
but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.
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Litany by Billy Collins
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.
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The Spirit and the Soul by Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert, February 18, 1925 – November 13, 2012, born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, died in Berkeley, CA.
---
It should have been the family that lasted.
Should have been my sister and my peasant mother.
But it was not. They were the affection,
not the journey. It could have been my father,
but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg
and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me,
and the newness after that, and newness again.
It was the important love and the serious lust.
It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog
and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl,
but the black-and-white winters with their girth
and geological length of cold. Streets ripped
apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when
the snow finally left in April. Freight trains
with their steam locomotives working at night.
Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy,
I saw downtown a large camera standing in front
of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s
Department Store. Usually around midnight,
but the people still going by. The camera set
slow enough that cars and people left no trace.
The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan
did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia,
my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn
Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna
in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs
on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying
Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit.
The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul
is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.
The way a child knows the world by putting it
part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw
my way into the Lord, working to put my heart
against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night,
letting the rain after all the dry months have me.
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Imagine the Angels of Bread by Martín Espada
Martín Espada, born 7 August 1957 in Brooklyn, NY
---
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
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Bad Language by Dan Albergotti
Dan Albergotti is a professor at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. The author of one book of poetry, The Boatloads, and two chapbooks, Charon's Manifest and The Use of the World.
---
We fear to speak, and silence coats the night air.
So we are dumb, as quiet as the kitchen pans
hanging on their cabinet hooks. What words
do we even have? The root of fuck is as much
to strike as to copulate. And sometimes ravish
is to rape. But when you’re ravishing, you’re
beautiful. Strikingly beautiful. Other tongues
do not help. Try saying “kiss me” on the streets
of Paris. God does not help. The Bible is full
of prohibition. Thou shalt not, saith the lord.
No sounds like know. To know is to understand.
In the Bible to know is to fuck. What do you mean
when you say no? I think I know. I want to know.
Understand me. You’re ravishing. I want to know
you. Strike me. Don’t leave me alone with self-
knowledge and these rich, fruitless, unspoken words.
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