[Sven2]

Maelstrom: One Drop Makes the Whole World Kin


All the world is one, like an angry deity's essence dropped in the ocean
becoming monstrous: what happens Mumbai happens Paris
What happens Vicenza U.S. Base or Prodi, Kyoto Accord, XL Pipeline
advanced warplanes to Japan—what happens?  Egypt, Yemen, Syria
NASA's five space probes or Aurora Borealis where we study shimmering light
What happens on the Lunar New Year
I want to know, Professor, are there names for these mercurial moves?
A lexicon & vibration touch the complexity of gestural motion
What happened with Augustine & his mother in Ostia?
I want to know what happens Nicea 325 perhaps God creates the                     world!
Let's go back and check this out: Ex nihilio ardore/splendore
Europe still riding the pull of Zeus a nuclear reactor not dismantled
Heads coming off in cruelest acts, unspeakable
And how that is part of your story too—flooding in Mozambique,
in Morocco, in Indonesia a part of you all suffering a part of you
What happens Rwanda, Darfur, Chad, Ukraine, glaciers shrinking what happens
when carbon-capped bombs fall on Natanz? on Bushehr
What is the poet's job out of numbed slumber?
Entering post-poet-modernity I gave my larynx a workout
Started chanting for the redemption of Irreparable
Om Ah Hum for the Year of the Shy but Cunning Metal Rabbit,
Inshallah O Peace Brutal Year of the Wooden Horse
The Gentle Sheep Year O Help us Now, Shalom Ah Hum, Shanti

--Anne Waldman

[Sven2]

Holy Cosmos


We've been told space
is like two dark lips colliding

like science fiction
it outlines a small cosmos

where fear hides in a glow
where negative space

becomes a place for wishing
a constellation of hazy tunes

of faint sharp vowels
a glossary of meteors

a telescope to god
a cold bright white

maybe distance damages us
maybe Jupiter

will suddenly surprise us
with a notion of holiness

but instead an old planet
takes over all the space

and we are reminded
of the traces of fire

in our gaze
defining our infidelities


--Nathalie Handal

[Sven2]

Doors opening, closing on us


Maybe there is more of the magical
in the idea of a door than in the door
itself. It's always a matter of going
through into something else. But



while some doors lead to cathedrals
arching up overhead like stormy skies
and some to sumptuous auditoriums
and some to caves of nuclear monsters



most just yield a bathroom or a closet.
Still, the image of a door is liminal,
passing from one place into another
one state to the other, boundaries



and promises and threats. Inside
to outside, light into dark, dark into
light, cold into warm, known into
strange, safe into terror, wind



into stillness, silence into noise
or music. We slice our life into
segments by rituals, each a door
to a presumed new phase. We see



ourselves progressing from room
to room perhaps dragging our toys
along until the last door opens
and we pass at last into was.


--Marge Piercy

[Sven2]

Vestiges


I would like to swim in the Atlantic,
to swim with someone who understood
why my fear of drowning plays less dire

than my fear of bones, walking the ocean floor.
I would like to sync my stroke with a beloved.
I'd like to stand on deck on a boat

and jump in the sea and say, follow me,
and know you would. The sea is cold
and it's deep, too, I'd joke,

standing at the edge of the boat's bow.
A wind breathes across the sea,
joining gently the edges of time.

With a dog paddling behind me,
I want to crawl across the water
without thinking about a future.

I have set my eyes upon the shore
and I hold you there—steady, in focus—
but let you go when, from below,

a voice breaks to the surface.

--A. Van Jordan

[Sven2]

Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms


The trees alongside the fence
bear fruit, the limbs and leaves speeches
to you and me. They promise to give the world
back to itself. The apple apologizes
for those whose hearts bear too much zest
for heaven, the pomegranate
for the change that did not come
soon enough. Every seed is a heart, every heart
a minefield, and the bees and butterflies
swarm the flowers on its grave.
The thorn bushes instruct us
to tell our sons and daughters
who carry sticks and stones
to mend their ways.
The oak tree says to eat
only fruits and vegetables;
the pine says to eat all the stirring things.
My neighbor left long ago and did not hear
any of this. In a big country
the leader warns the leader of a small country
there must be change or else.
Birds are the same way, coming and going,
wobbling thin branches.
The warblers express pain, the crows regret,
or is it the other way around?
The mantra today is the same as yesterday.
We must become different.
The plants must, the animals,
and the ants and worms, just like the carmakers,
the soap makers before them,
and the manufacturers of rubber
and the sellers of tea, tobacco, and salt.
Such an ancient habit, making ourselves new.
My neighbor looks like my mother
who left a long time ago
and did not hear any of this.
Just for a minute, give her back to me,
before she died, kneeling
in the dirt under the sun, calling me darling
in Arabic, which no one has since.

--Hayan Charara

[Sven2]

At the Edge

     
we are having tea at the edge of the abyss . . .
      Raymond Farina


It's a long way down
to darkness and fire

and the wings of night birds
making unruly sounds.

To dismantled clocks.
To shoes filled with tears

and garments torn
in boredom and grief.

But here at the edge
of the abyss

the tea is the amber color
of comfort,

the biscuits are crisp
and sweet

as you feed them to me
with loving hands.


--Linda Pastan

[Sven2]

Summer Triptych


1.
The world is water
to these bronzed boys
on their surfboards,
riding the sexual waves
of Maui
like so many fearless
cowboys, challenging
death on bucking
broncos of foam.



2.
On the beach at Santorini
we ate those tiny silverfish
grilled straight from the sea,
and when the sun went down
in the flaming west
there was applause
from all the sated diners,
as if it had done its acrobatic plunge
just for them.



3.
Swathed from head to toe
in seeming veils of muslin,
the figure in the Nantucket fog
poles along the shoreline on a flat barge.
It could be Charon transporting souls
across the River Styx, or just
another fisherman in a hoodie,
trolling for bluefish
on the outgoing tide.


--Linda Pastan

[Sven2]

          *   *   *

And another question.
And another
for it is not the answers that are important. Only
by questions is the man empowered. And no final summary,
just no rounding off,
in the name of God!

--Abba Kovner

[Sven2]

Still Life with Invisible Canoe


Levinas asked if we have the right
To be        the way I ask my sons
If they'd like to be trees       


The way the word tree
Makes them a little animal
Dancing up and down
Like bears in movies
                 
Bears I have to say
Pretend we are children     


At a river one of them says
So we sip it    pivot in the hallway   
Call it a canoe


It is noon in the living room
We are rowing through a blue
That is a feeling mostly


The way drifting greenly
Under real trees
Is a feeling near holy


--Idra Novey

[sven]

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."



Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 - 1822

[Sven2]

Only as the Day Is Long

Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a street where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.
Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body's
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?

--Dorianne Laux

[Sven2]

Dream of Heaven


I'd smoke cigars all day and into the night
while I wrote and wrote without
any hope or slightest assurance
that anything I'd written actually mattered
or rose to a standard of literary merit.
I'd languish in the smoke that did me in
and call it the cloud of my unknowing,
so sweet in its taste, such as it was,
of Cuban soil. That would be paradise
in heaven that's so overrated as endless
bliss it kills to imagine as a place for living
forever, no less, with nothing to do
or lips to kiss. I'd curse, therefore,
with the best of them—the legion
of Saved—as I sharpened my pencils
and smoked my Punches in the simple room
that I'd be given with a desk for writing
and bed for remembering the things
I'd forgotten. And reading too, I almost
forgot. I'd read and read since I'd be done
with sleeping, but dreaming, no, still dreaming
a lot. I'd live to live again with moments
of dying to see how "lucky" I was. I'd use
my body as an eidolon with invisible wings
that fluttered in the void as if it were air
and hummed in the dark in which I could see.

--Chard deNiord

[Sven2]

Another of the Happiness Poems


It's not that we're not dying.
Everything is dying.
We hear these rumors of the planet's end
none of us will be around to watch.


It's not that we're not ugly.
We're ugly.
Look at your feet, now that your shoes are off.
You could be a duck,


no, duck-billed platypus,
your feet distraction from your ugly nose.
It's not that we're not traveling,
we're traveling.


But it's not the broadback Mediterranean
carrying us against the world's current.
It's the imagined sea, imagined street,
the winged breakers, the waters we confuse with sky


willingly, so someone out there asks
are you flying or swimming?
That someone envies mortal happiness
like everyone on the other side, the dead


who stand in watch, who would give up their bliss,
their low tide eternity rippleless
for one day back here, alive again with us.
They know the sea and sky I'm walking on


or swimming, flying, they know it's none of these,
this dancing-standing-still, this turning, turning,
these constant transformations of the wind
I can bring down by singing to myself,


the newborn mornings, these continuals—


--Peter Cooley

[Sven2]

Characteristics of Life
           
            A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
            —BBC Nature News


Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
                          speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                        of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                                                        I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
                        one thing today and another tomorrow
        and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

                        I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
        between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                                                        I will speak
                        the impossible hope of the firefly.

                                                You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
        such wordless desire.

                                To say it is mindless is missing the point.


--Camille T. Dungy

[Sven2]

Circle

So when I arrived in hell, the sign said,
If you lived here, you'd be home by now,
and while I did not get the joke, I read
the language reading me. I knew it knew
great suffering can feel a little homeless,
and then the smell of hair in the distance.
And I followed, the way one life follows
one man and grows long as the sun goes down.
That's me, looking for a chance to call
home and say, I have not abandoned you,
Hope. The prison architecture of hell
is, as comedies go, a nightmare, true.
But dreams open what they close. Like circles.
And we, on fire, are only passing through.

--Bruce Bond