I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist… Continue reading Jack Spicer
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplicaton of lives and objects. And… Continue reading Theodore Roethke
I feel like moonlight Abiding a dark lake You’re soft as deep water Everywhere like the stars When I lean down Kiss you I bloody my lips With the good dirt of the earth — Frank Stanford, from “The Earth in You,” What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2015)
The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone. ― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real. (New Directions; 1 edition, January 17, 1970) Originally published 1948) Originally published 1948.
I need these dark waves pulsing in my sleep. How else make up for the pungency of that carnation’s breath freshened over us, night on night? Just to lie next to love was to have the garden in all its seasons. I see that now. Gently, and without the false lustre of pain meant to… Continue reading Tess Gallagher
It’s finally late enough that all sounds are the sounds of water. If you die tonight I’ll wash your feet. I’ll remove the batteries from the clocks. And the two moths that drown in the lakes of your eyes will manage the rest. — Michael McGriff, from “Invocation,” Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)
