nightlibrary

[nightlibrary]

Don’t Tell Anyone by Tony Hoagland

We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool where she does laps every other day.  

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been concealing anything, not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming, nor as if we should perform an act of therapy   right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me, and I could see her turn her square face up to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious. For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret that it is not all fun to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology, to be dipped down again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate pleasure you can sometimes find is the wet kiss 

of your own pain. There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps back and forth in the community pool; 

—what discipline she has! Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages, that will never be read by anyone.

[nightlibrary]

Persephone Writes to Her Mother by Tara Mae Mulroy

Mother, he is a gentleman. He is a builder with bricks of moonlight. He knows the secret places of the earth. He washes the sleep from the eyes of the souls. He lets them look on beauty. He lets them tell him they hate him. In the mornings, I gather berries and apples. I scrub his back with rind. I weave spider-spit, eyelash. He talks in his sleep: pudding, fire, discus, the things he misses. He breathes, Your body is my orchard. I am undulating grass. I am a field of wheat he parts with his fingers. Poppies bloom in my veins. When he kisses me, he tastes pomegranate. The night crawls nearer. The moans of the dead roll and swell. Mother, we are well.

[nightlibrary]

Beggar’s Song by Gregory Orr

Here’s a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me.

Small then, and smaller. My desire’s to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart. 

And if the heart’s a rock I’ll whack it with this tin cup and eat the sparks, always screaming, always screaming for more.

[nightlibrary]

All Objects Reveal Something About the Body by Catie Rosemurgy

Crisp is to the apple what flexed is to the body.

Poor apple.

Being bitten is to the crisp apple what walking is to the ripe body, but it’s more complicated than that:

the apple of the face has been given to the running juice of the body

and the body, which is often gracious, makes it shine.

Lucky apple.

Having a core is to the apple what having a core is to the body, city, method, circumstance, endeavor.

Having a core is flower-shaped and hurts in the way that having a shape hurts, which is to say

it hurts ironically, because to have limits is not just to make a declaration upon a mountainside,

it is also to be the mountainside. Having a flowering core also hurts in the way that being flower-like always hurts,

which is to say sexually, as if the whole self has exceeded the skin, which it hasn’t, which means

we always seem to be opening but never ever do. Both these types of suffering color the air

when we pause to have them. The affected atoms are hard to see amongst the billions

of sofa atoms, newsprint atoms but, like the illnesses in the crystalline sea, they are there.

Red apple sliced, quartered, salted. Green apple,

alone in the basket. Anything left on the shelf becomes weak,

suggestible, vulnerable to other shapes, hungry to be refilled by something other than itself,

a poison apple. The joining we do with others needs containing.

Apple pie. Imagine the mess. Imagine a finger touching the sack of the heart.

Imagine being stopped, controlled that powerfully. Imagine nothing like that being possible. Nothing ever stopping you

at the root of the breath. Huge apple. The world in reference to you. How you move. Time a backdrop.

Or close the other eye: you in reference to the world. How it varies and happens simultaneously.

Good morning. Little apple.

[nightlibrary]

I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone by Stephen Dunn The dogs greet me, I descend into their world of fur and tongues and then my wife and I embrace as if we’d just closed the door in a motel, our two girls slip in between us and we’re all saying each other’s names and the dogs Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs, people-style, seeking more love. I’ve come home wanting to touch everyone, everything; usually I turn the key and they’re all lost in food or homework, even the dogs are preoccupied with themselves, I desire only to ease back in, the mail, a drink, but tonight the body-hungers have sent out their long-range signals or love itself has risen from its squalor of neglect. Everytime the kids turn their backs I touch my wife’s breasts and when she checks the dinner the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher wants to rub heads, starts to speak with his little motor and violin– everything, everyone is intelligible in the language of touch, and we sit down to dinner inarticulate as blood, all difficulties postponed because the weather is so good.

[nightlibrary]

I Don’t Miss It by Tracy K. Smith

But sometimes I forget where I am, Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps, Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left, The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall. Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door. And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like. Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs, Knowing perfectly well what they know.

[nightlibrary]

The Last Poem About the Snow Queen by Sandra M. Gilbert

You wanted to know “love” in all its habitats, wanted to catalog the joints, the parts, the motions, wanted to be a scientist of romance: you said you had to study everything, go everywhere, even here, even this ice palace in the far north.

You said you were ready, you’d be careful. Smart girl, you wore two cardigans, a turtleneck, furlined boots, scarves, a stocking cap with jinglebells. And over the ice you came, gay as Santa, singing and bringing gifts.

Ah, but the journey was long, so much longer than you’d expected, and the air so thin, the sky so high and black. What are these cold needles, what are these shafts of ice, you wondered on the fourteenth day. What are those tracks that glitter overhead?

The one you came to see was silent, he wouldn’t say “stars” or “snow,” wouldn’t point south, wouldn’t teach survival. And you’d lost your boots, your furs, now you were barefoot on the ice floes, fingers blue, tears freezing and fusing your eyelids.

Now you know: this is the place where water insists on being ice, where wind insists on breathlessness, where the will of the cold is so strong that even the stone’s desire for heat is driven into the eye of night.

What will you do now, little Gerda? Kay and the Snow Queen are one, they’re a single pillar of ice, a throne of silence— and they love you the way the teeth of winter love the last red shred of November.

[nightlibrary]

No by Mark Doty

The children have brought their wood turtle into the dining hall because they want us to feel

the power they have when they hold a house in their own hands, want us to feel

alien lacquer and the little thrill that he might, like God, show his face. He’s the color of ruined wallpaper,

of cognac, and he’s closed, pulled in as though he’ll never come out; nothing shows but the plummy leather

of the legs, his claws resembling clusters of diminutive raspberries. They know he makes night

anytime he wants, so perhaps he feels at the center of everything, as they do. His age,

greater than that of anyone around the table, in a room from which they are excluded,

though they don’t mind, since they can carry this perfect building anywhere. They love

that he he might poke out his old, old face, but doesn’t. I think the children smell unopened,

like unlit candles, as they heft him around the table, praise his secrecy, holding to each adult face

his prayer, the single word of the shell,

which is no.

[nightlibrary]

The Fascination of What’s Difficult by William Butler Yeats

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men. I swear before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt. 

[nightlibrary]

Onset by Kim Addonizio

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers, bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications. Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing. And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs, even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me, the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything, my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you, beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs, don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own; I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

[nightlibrary]

Death, The Last Visit by Marie Howe

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started. It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long as you ever wanted. Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go. Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you’ll smell mud and hair and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with. Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face, or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me give it to me until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard. At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone. Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop, you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt this good.

[nightlibrary]

A Hunger So Honed by Tracy K. Smith

Driving home late through town He woke me for a deer in the road, The light smudge of it fragile in the distance, Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh– His hand on my hand, even the weight Of our voices not speaking. I watched a long time And a long time after we were too far to see, Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs, All phantom and shadow, so silent It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened, But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream– The mind a dark city, a disappearing, A handkerchief Swallowed by a fist. I thought of the animal’s mouth And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger So honed the green leaves merely maintain it. We want so much, When perhaps we live best In the spaces between loves, That unconscious roving, The heart its own rough animal. Unfettered. The second time, There were two that faced us a moment The way deer will in their Greek perfection, As though we were just some offering The night had delivered. They disappeared between two houses, And we drove on, our own limbs Sloppy after that, our need for one another Greedy, weak

[nightlibrary]

Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper by Richard Siken

Close the blinds and kill the birds, I surrender my desire for a logical culmination. I surrender my desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive. Take it or leave it, and for the most part you take it. Not just the idea of it but the ramifications of it. People love to hate themselves, avoiding the necessary recalibrations. Shame comes from vanity. Shame means you’re guilty, like the rest of us, but you think you’re better than we are. Maybe you are. What would a better me paint? There is no new me, there is no old me, there’s just me, the same me, the whole time. Vanity, vanity, forcing your will on the world. Don’t try to make a stronger wind, you’ll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You want to solve something? Get out of your own way. What’s the difference between me and the world? Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t know what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to being loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening? Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard to make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severely and slept through all of my appointments. I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work. Admirable? Not really. I hate my friends. And when I hate my friends I’ve failed myself, failed to share my compassion. I shine a light on them of my own making: septic, ugly, the wrong yellow. I mean, maybe it’s better if my opponent wins.

[nightlibrary]

The Mania Speaks by Jeanann Verlee

You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil. I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein? Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER? I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed was a shredded sweater and a police warning? You should be legend by now. Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline. I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon. Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull. I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots. Now you want out? Think you’ll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions? A good man’s good love and some breathing exercises? You think I can’t tame that? I always come home. Always. Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody: I’m bigger than God.

[nightlibrary]

No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats

Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

[nightlibrary]

The Double Truth by Chard deNiord

I still taste you from the time you painted my tongue with your scarlet finger. It cured my heart of innocence, that single dose, and I have tasted it— the double truth—ever since: the bittersweet in the words I cannot speak but stick in my mouth like stones I’ve learned to talk around.

[nightlibrary]

Essay on Adam by Robert Bringhurst

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth, fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth, nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these

is only an issue of whether the demons work from the inside out or from the outside in: the one theological question.