Water Glasses

They were perched 

On the stand

When I woke up today,

Your water glass

And mine,

Still sitting from just

Two evenings past,

When our mouths

Were dry

And emptied of

Their secrets.

I stared at them and

Thought of all

I said and did

Not say

And wondered if 

You were somewhere

Thinking the same.

They looked so natural,

Resting there.

We were quite 

The attractive pair.

But there is no need

For sets of two

In this room of one,

So I washed them off

And put them up 

Where they can be

Upside-down and empty,

No longer streaked

With foretastes of

Our separate, salty

Tears.

For Atlas, When She's Tired

It's all in the knuckles, 

You see,

And that knot 

In the middle 

Of your back.

As long as you 

Focus

And keep it still 

And taut

And controlled

When the water 

Starts to creep 

From your eyes

And your lip 

Twitches 

Like a mutinous

Little spy - 

That's when you have to

Squeeze tighter 

And harder

Just a little bit 

Longer.

Because it's all resting

On you, 

You see,

And you won't break 

If you don't want to,

And if you falter

Then everything, 

Everything,

Falls to the floor 

With a splash 

And a thud

And the crowd 

Just stares at their shoes

While you stand there, 

Shivering -

Just another naked girl

With nothing to hold on to.

"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer --

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

"I Am Not Yours" by Sara Teasdale

I am not yours, not lost in you,

Not lost, although I long to be

Lost as a candle lit at noon,

Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still

A spirit beautiful and bright,

Yet I am I, who long to be

Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out

My senses, leave me deaf and blind,

Swept by the tempest of your love,

A taper in a rushing wind. 

"Kiss the Quivering Lip" by Stephan Bauman

Families
Wrapped their loved ones
In linens beautiful.
Some wrote epithets
Of grief
Of love
And attached it
To their feet.

Some
Desperate
Some opportunistic
Stole the shoes and clothes
Of the dead.
Naked we come
Naked we go.

There was man
I know him
He rescued
Two, three
And then four more.

I was told a mother ran in
As others ran out.
She flung her body
Across her child.
None greater
They say
Than she who gives her life
For another.

Thamar
Had a baby today
She named her
Jesula,
"God with us".
Her family waited
Until after birth
To tell of her firstborn son:
"He's gone
To where Jesula
Has come."
She wailed, "Please, no, please
Bring him to me,
Please?"

Chase this crowded room
This press of humanity
This weight of history;
Triage the punctured soul
Wash the suffering wound
And breathe the dying flicker.

Lay
Your gentle head
O Mercy
Upon this Haitian bosom
Of anguish
Of grief
And kiss the quivering lip
Of mother
Of child
Of sinner
Of saint.

(from underthemango.com)

"Gacela of Unforeseen Love" by Federico García Lorca

No one understood the fragrance
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
No one knew how you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand Persian ponies bedded down
in the moonlit plaza of your forehead
while for four nights I lassoed
your waist, the enemy of snow.

Between gypsum and jasmine, your glance
was a pale branchful of seeds.
I searched my breast to give you
the ivory letters that spell always,

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body forever fugitive,
the blood of your veins in my mouth
and your mouth already my tomb, emptied of light

"A Prodigal" by Elizabeth Bishop

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home.

"Women" by Adrienne Rich

My three sisters are sitting

on rocks of black obsidian.
For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.

My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.
She is going as the Transparent lady
and all her nerves will be visible.

My second sister is also sewing,
at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely,
At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.

My third sister is gazing
at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.
Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.

Hippie Love

He looked homeless

in his yellowed beard

and torn khakis.

When the quartet played,

he yelled, "Bravo!"

and swayed

with bliss-closed eyes.

Then in she walked

with teasing hips

and thick eyebrows -

all purple and laughing and lovely.

Pulled close,

he kissed her
smitten

to whisper

"I'm so glad you're here."

"The Lovers of the Poor" by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Lovers of the Poor

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You'd better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault
Anew and dearly in the innocence
With which they baffle nature. Who are full,
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor--passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is--something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle's bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
But it's all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they're told,
Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
Note homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left,
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars
Must presently restore them. When they're done
With dullards and distortions of this fistic
Patience of the poor and put-upon.
They've never seen such a make-do-ness as
Newspaper rugs before! In this, this "flat,"
Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich
Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered . . . ),
Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.
Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,
In horror, behind a substantial citizeness
Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.
Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-
Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .
They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin "hangings,"
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies'
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!--
Where loathe-lover likelier may be invested.
Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.