The Design

--Michael Longley

Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings, the design

Made up of stitches and the shadows case by stitches.

And the quilts of funerals? How do you sew the night?

 

The Linen Industry

--Michael Longley

Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen

And laying our handfuls in the peaty water

To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks

That recall the skirts of an invisible dancer,

We become a part of the linen industry

And follow its processes to the grubby town

Where fields are compacted into window-boxes

And there is little room among the big machines.

But even in our attic under the skylight

We make love on a bleach green, the whole meadow

Draped with material turning white in the sun

As though snow reluctant to melt were our attire.

What's passion but a battering of stubborn stalks,

Then a gentle combing out of fibres like hair

And a weaving of these into christening robes,

Into garments for a marriage or funeral?

Since it's like a bereavement once the labour's done

To find ourselves last workers in a dying trade,

Let flax be our matchmaker, our undertaker,

The provider of sheets for whatever the bed -

And be shy of your breasts in the presence of death,

Say that you look more beautiful in linen

Wearing white petticoats, the bow on your bodice

A butterfly attending the embroidered flowers.

 

[ Haunted by a Fragile Dawn ; Jaroslav Serpan (1947) ]

 

 

For a Farrier

--Matthew Rohrer

Reading a kind of  laborious

poem about rural things

and a horse is shot

for breaking its leg.

I still don’t get it.

Surely there’s a way

to heal a horse.

I text my friend

who is a farrier

(you know—

someone who shoes horses)

I say surely there’s a way

to heal a horse.

                        And I wait

but he doesn’t text back

he’s busy with the pounding

and clanging.

Raising his hammer

over a bright orange horseshoe

and pausing

because in his head

a line by Issa

can be heard.

 

Street Sonnet (Ghost Bike)

--Richard Rohrer

A ghost bike display slows me down for a sec

I think Forgive Me but I can’t bear to learn your name

hardly do I remember all the others

we used to spend all night laughing

on a couch at the end of this street

and in a dream there an alien in the kitchen

spoke to me and handed me a drink

I shake myself, the dream is over, a woman with blue lips

tries to smile walking by, earning a D

bright sunlight in November is a tonic

or something but I choose the side in the shade

and walk for miles and recognize a truck

from hours before, the guy in the cab and I lock eyes

but everything else, the whole world, is in turmoil

 

Poem for Friends

--Matthew Rohrer

On someone else’s estate

running through it to avoid

the outdoor wedding there is a grave

in a little copse of trees

so panting we hang out there

How beautiful to lie down

not to be the dead ones there

their eye sockets filled with dirt

nothing is theirs anymore

you pass me a crumpled joint

swaying a little like a poem

while black birds wail in the air

and the commuter train wails

all we have to do is make tacos

tonight and be friends

 

[ Statue in a Cemetery ; Endre Balint (1959) ]

 

 

The Grave-Digger

--Kahlil Gibran

Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, “Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.”

 

Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?”

 

“Because,” said he, “They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”

Halloween

--Lindsay Turner

Some yellow sunflowers open down the street,

A ladder is open beneath someone’s apple tree.

Beneath a dead sky the contours are flattened.

So the land of the dead is closer today.

The land of the dead, they say, is closer.

But what if my lot lies with the living?

Out in the yard a long-billed bird eats something from dust.

Its throat has a dark patch in the shape of a smile

But full, as if its throat had been slit open.

But look, the bird is still pecking and alive.

Elsewhere, a sports game, ropes of rain come down and open the earth.

Here it’s so dry they’d just roll off the dust.

But what if my loves, like the bird, are living?

What if my loves, like the bird, are living for now?

Most of the apples have already fallen.

The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls.

But what if my land is the land of the living?

The bird from the dust takes flight

Then turns multiple—

A handful of birds rising in the dead sky

Opened to receive them. 

But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them.

Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust.

 

Ghost

--Bruce Bond

The guard dog at the wrecking yard, chained

to a garage, sleeps right through his shift.

He has been briefed, but what do you need

to know. He is a prince of shadows now,

of accidental loss and whatever ghost

comes this way to comb the parking lot

of death machines, looking for survivors.

If anyone, a dog would know. No matter.

In a place like this, all dreams are good

dreams now, however grim and unresolved.

Why howl at the soul who comes and goes.

If not here, where, where if not in the great

hereafter in which, come dawn, a dog will raise

his eye, and sigh, and close it down again.

 

[ Avenue of Plain Trees ; Santiago Rusinol (1916) ]

 

Yellow Goblins

--Fanny Howe

Yellow goblins

and a god I can swallow:

Eyes in the evergreens

under ice.

Interior monologue

and some voice.

Weary fears, the

usual trials and

a place to surmise

blessedness.

 

The Cenotaph

--Fanny Howe

I want to leave this place

unremembered.

The gas stove is leaking

and the door of the refrigerator

stained with rust.

The mugs are ugly

and there are only two forks.

The walls are black

and soft, the bed a balloon

of night-clothing.

The stairwell sloped

to a dragger’s pace.

There are big windows

with blind-slats dusty

and gray. Street life

goes all night and at dawn

freedmen shout and

laugh outside the kitchen.

Where does life begin and end?

In the lamb or the cotton?

My pillow is my friend.

 

Everything

-Fanny Howe

Infinite nesting

pushes all matter

towards emptiness:

child-nodes,

tree-droppings

with a root element of null.

None is always included

in every cluster

of children.

Nothing in nothing

prepares us.

Yet a fresh light was shed

on immortality

for me climbing the stairs

firm foot first.

Everything was in the banister:

crows on branches, crickets,

architects, handsaws and democrats.

Red moon at 3 am.

 

[ October Gold ; Franklin Carmichael (1922) ]

 

This Only

--Czesław Miłosz (transl. by Robert Hass)

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.

A voyager arrives, a map led him here.

Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,

When the first snow fell, riding this way

He felt joy, strong, without reason,

Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm

Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,

Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.

He returns years later, has no demands.

He wants only one, most precious thing:

To see, purely and simply, without name,

Without expectations, fears, or hopes,

At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

 

 

from October

--Louise Glück

4.

The light has changed;

middle C is tuned darker now.

And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. 

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.

The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable

has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says

I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.

This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:

the ideal burns in you like a fever.

Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.

They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them.

The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;

it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be passionately

clinging to what you love;

the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.

Surely it is a privilege to approach the end

still believing in something.

 

Rich Days

--William Henry Davies

Welcome to you rich Autumn days,

Ere comes the cold, leaf-picking wind;

When golden stocks are seen in fields,

All standing arm-in-arm entwined;

And gallons of sweet cider seen

On trees in apples red and green.

With mellow pears that cheat our teeth,

Which melt that tongues may suck them in;

With blue-black damsons, yellow plums,

Now sweet and soft from stone to skin;

And woodnuts rich, to make us go

Into the loneliest lanes we know.

 

[ Autumn ; Hans Richter (1917) ]

 

With a Line

--Norma Cole

measure how silence

sits on the ground

 

the same rills, clay tablets,

gravel and stones, frozen

 

moments measure displacement

consequence the records of

 

common consent, displacement

sugar pills killing time now or

 

how the most euphonious cadence

a reed stylus, rosewater and

 

mint, the slope, distortion

meaning stay safe, tenderness

 

the fleeting constraints, sites

of conscription expanding

 

meeting control at the site

of precipitous inquiry

 

could it take the weight of

a frozen moment

 

Take a Look

--Norma Cole

Take history

Take power

 

At no point sufficient

Accident of memory

 

The common truth

Conditions of visibility

 

Unstable orbits

Explain nothing

 

In the history

Of contestation

 

Truth cure—it’s a start

Unfit for use

 

Nescio, not knowing

Task or matter

 

Insufficient uncertainties

Pose limits of understanding

 

The commission

Memory itself

 

The Matter

--Norma Cole

       The chatter of the world is just a breath

       Dante, Purgatorio

Conditions in the moment

conditions in the present moment

conditions are melting in the present moment

 

loss in different tempi, a striking

concentration of them, in it and

of it, but when the state withdraws

 

from the social contract, a walking dream

the armature a striking concentration

removes system from sound

 

some day will mean these large scale

stained glass windows seem essential

to private time: moon in Scorpio

 

fallen asleep but not where you

wake up: can you place this photo

from the broken old bible? Tell us

 

the end and ruin everything, the pink

cloud, the ridgeline and everything

grassland, aspen groves, stand of

 

redwoods, trees make the light

sense of distance, prospect

everchanging feverish refraction

 

mind not inclined for the story’s

not found here

 

[ Black Grouse ; Theodor Severin Kittelsen (1900) ]

 

So Tell Me How It Ends (excerpt)

--Andrew Hemmert

But stars aren’t cold, no matter the distance, no matter what

we want to believe. The coldest one we’ve yet found is still

warmer than a cup of coffee left sitting for a minute.

There’s an iceberg frigidity we inject into our gods—

something like the Arctic Ocean, something like a parade

of the dismembered bodies of glaciers. I remember

seeing the scattering fleets of ice and thinking churches

floating out into space. So hello universe! My name

is temporary and my bones are made of you, you

with your far mountaining nebulas, you with your fires

that have shown us the way, that show us how there is no way

except where we already dream of going. October

and the nights are growing cold. October and the nights

are full of stars saying there is nowhere left to go.

 

So Long, Oblivion

--Andrew Hemmert

Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time.

Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon 

on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar 

I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam.

Like the earth sometimes in love with turning away from all light 

though never really leaving. Like a beach I have wanted 

to spend years softening though not always wanting the footprints 

which to ghost crabs are craters. Like a paleontologist 

resisting always the impulse to ransack my skeletons  

for drumsticks, though here is the gong, here is the timpani 

like a bird bath full of absinthe before me. So so long 

oblivion with your small dreams of silence. I am going 

to the bank of myself with my pockets hanging out 

like two ruined countries, like two broken and gorgeous wings.

 

What Kind of Bird Changes Its Name

--Andrew Hemmert

was what the search engine recommended before I could

finish my intended question—what kind of bird changes

its song? The bird in the old oak over my parents' pool

goes through phrases in approximately five second

intervals. It is a busy song. It is nothing special

says a hanger full of blinking servers whose thinking requires

a mountain full of coal be dynamited every day.

Some mountains were once considered gods. Some kings were considered

gods, then carved up in the public square. This is progress

towards democracy, which is a name America

has never worn well. The search engines eat what we feed them

and shit out tailored advertisements. These advertisements

perhaps are more evocative of ourselves than our names

though don't we go on saying our names, mockingbird?

 

[ Large Pine and Red Earth ; Paul Cezanne ]

 

 

 

Love's Last

--Christian Wiman

Love's last urgency is earth

and grief is all gravity

and the long fall always

back to earliest hours

that exist nowhere

but in one's brain.

From the hard-packed

pile of old-mown grass,

from boredom, from pain,

a boy's random slash

unlocks a dark ardor

of angry bees

that link the trees

and block his way home.

I like to hold him holding me,

mystery mastering fear,

so young, standing unstung

under what survives of sky.

 

Rhymes for a Watertower

--Christian Wiman

A town so flat a grave's a hill,

            A dusk the color of beer.

A row of schooldesks shadows fill,

            A row of houses near.

A courthouse spreading to its lawn,

            A bank clock's lingering heat.

A gleam of storefronts not quite gone,

            A courthouse in the street.

A different element, almost,

            A dry creek brimming black.

A light to lure the darkness close,

            A light to keep it back.

A time so still a heart's a sound,

            A moon the color of skin.

A pumpjack bowing to the ground,

            Again, again, again.

 

All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs

--Christian Wiman

All my friends are finding new beliefs.

This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.

In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew

God whomps on like a genetic generator.

Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.

Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.

One man marries a woman twenty years younger

and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;

another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles

into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases

like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,

decides to die.

Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,

high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,

sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being ...

All my friends are finding new beliefs

and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track

of the new gods and the new loves,

and the old gods and the old loves,

and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,

and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,

and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,

my beautiful, credible friends.