Are the faithful the only ones who can recognize
what they have never seen or is this spilt milk
in my sink what it seems—a ragged host
reaching out to me as if it’s not too late
but for which of us her shape
will not hold but who knows the shape
of the abyss—it’s white like old eyes
failing and in reaching out it diminishes
shredding from the edges
towards the center which come
to find out can hold quite a lot
that thing you hold is
no less real for his death that
thing that I hold is no less
real for the distance
As soon as I have finished reading this poem
to you, you will begin forgetting it.
I have written it many times
but it can be read only once.
You are thinking if you read it
and I read it then that is more
Than once only but those
are different poems. This one
Is for you alone. Take a moment
to enjoy being in the middle of it.
I will even skip a line for you to take it all in:
And when you have read it the words
will fall away almost
immediately though the poem never
will nor old love and what travels with it
the line you’ll never forget
after all will be the one I skipped for you
For the first time you see the rough draft of your life
complete. You now know—it’s a whale; it’s a shark;
It’s a school of fish. Silt in a tidal pool.
It’s a shadow of the plane passing overhead,
of the cloud into which the plane disappears.
For a moment there is no telling which direction
it is going, but it is all there; or whether its depth
Is imagined but it is all there is. Imagined or not.
Haven’t seen the moon
for a week. Are you there with
me, beyond all cloud?
The sagging bottom of the sky tears on the mountain
and the gray spilling down ten miles away eventually
obscures the entire ridgeline. I’m out here to see the first
full moon rising on a Friday the thirteenth in June
in a hundred years, and now the horizon is missing.
In the highest branches of the old walnut tree
the leaves are flinging the last rays of sun away
with such chaotic gusto I can’t tell where the wind
is coming from. Closer to the ground the silver maple
holds its leaves out completely level, motionless
as if confirming that, somewhere, here for
the moment anyway, all is calm. The mist arrives
on slender legs ten minutes later, apologetically calm
and thinning the distance: the mountains have moved closer
like how a memory of someone far away suddenly appears
as a thing you want to climb, or a barrier on the path.
And still there is no moon. In bed before midnight
I feel a sudden rush of love for you
as if I myself had just broken through life’s haze,
glowing and spherical, irreducible, reaching without
fail. While the most I see out my window later
is a wedge of pure light through the shifting clouds
I will remember that moon and who I was suddenly,
how love shone off me from light’s source.
The sea has examined me into this shape
I have come so far only because of what is left
How can I not accept it gratefully how can you not
if the entire sea can do it I would say give it a try
I do not have the power to observe you into love
but something of us both has been examined
Wave by wave into a lean slightness no vessel
because it goes all directions at once having come so far
with its hollows and whorls soothing to the waves
no difference between inside and outside
It no longer matters what is missing it never did it turns
out it was always this floating thing and never that
Liz Doyle
Night had already begun to hug the lowlands
when his back to the pale faces of the outbuildings
their remnant glow against the forgetting day
I thought I saw Turner out there
tying himself to a piece of sky shadow
to ride out the violent vault into night
A mile up the day was still swirling
like love thundering in the chest well after
the details have been lost still Turner
tearing clouds with his brush into the idea
of clouds wonders if he’s leaving
something out he’s never believed
the details mattered although they meant
all the moment could form into and change
From the cumulonimbus he sees an old man
preparing a thatch hut against the wind
And a town lobbing light into the sky
The man’s thoughts are fireworks reflected
In the village fountain and to Turner who feels
the clouds free him who feels he let go first
the fireworks in the fountain some times
are clearer than the fireworks in the sky
Ann Koplow
Like an important moment slid on its edge
or a memory blocked mostly by the dark present
Something seeming to shine as it descends
but not shining really but reflecting instead
this larger brilliance from the other direction
entirely and not descending but circling
as love circles and predators circle and
the confused prey circles and for all that
knowledge still it is the moon setting
over a local hill in early evening before
the first firefly I have seen all spring
lights up in my room on this moonless night
The sea monster of 16th century Italian origin
looks in bronze like a freak show dog with scales
and a half human face. Its webbed hands arched
delicately like a lawyer’s on a witness stand just before
cross examination. A tail that could be a dinner bell.
Coming up for air from another dream of drowning
I think the tiny dog standing on my chest looks more sea
monsterly, and I wonder if I’m exchanging
one depth for a murkier other, of waking.
it’s only at the surface that we’re surprised
by what breaks through, in the shallows
that things get stranded between tides
like this hideous thought splishing about
that in the deep would be graceful, near invisible, at home.
Translations from the English 