Where are you now,my poems,my sleepwalkers?No mumbles tonight?Where are you, thirst,fever, humming tedium?The sodium streetlightsburr outside my window,steadfast, unreachable,little astonishmentslighting the way uphill.Where are you now,when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias. —W.S. Di Piero, “Nocturne,” Tombo. (McSweeney’s January 7, 2014)
Nocturne Tonight all the leaves are paper spoonsin a broth of wind. Last weekthey made a darker sky below the sky. The houses have swallowed their colors,and each car moves in the blind sackof its sound like the slipping of water. Flowing means falling very slowly—the river passing under the tracks,the tracks then buried beneath… Continue reading Wayne Miller
Night and nightshade, yes, but also the night-blooming cereus, itself a cloak of nameless fragrance, its face an hours-long brightness in the desert, crumpling under morning’s fist—yes, the night-bloomers and also the nightingale, night- song, night-dew, the nightside of the heart as if it were a moon, the privacy, how… Continue reading Claire Wahmanholm
Under Two Windows I. AUBADE The dawn is here—and the long night through I have never seen thy face, Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate of thy dwelling-place. While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found the far world edge, No leaflet stirred of the leaves… Continue reading Schuyler Van Rensselaer
But there is no oblivion, no dream: raw flesh. Kisses tie mouths in a tangle of new veins and those who are hurt will hurt without rest and those who are frightened by death will carry it on their shoulders. — Federico Garcia Lorca, from “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne),” Poet In New York. (Grove… Continue reading Federico Garcia Lorca
Nocturne That scraping of iron on iron when the wind rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t quit with, but drags back and forth. Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just beyond the screened door, as if someone there squats in the dark honing his wares against my threshold.… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonish- ment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings, failing to distinguish between them. I have grown tired of so… Continue reading Mark Strand
The Vale of Soul-Making 