Jorge Luis Borges
Who will you be tonight, in the dark thrallof sleep, when you have slipped across its wall? — Jorge Luis Borges, Poetry (June 1993)
Who will you be tonight, in the dark thrallof sleep, when you have slipped across its wall? — Jorge Luis Borges, Poetry (June 1993)
My words verge on silencelike great birds that disappearinto the early evening: theirstrenuous white wingscarry off the intense sweetnessof dusk, visible thenin starlight.My words turn toward the nightwith no look backat what is lost or won, orwhat is missing, — Cinto Vitier, from “Greater Solitude,” transl. Kathleen Weaver, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery (no. 65, Spring… Continue reading Cinto Vitier
DANCE there upon the shore;What need have you to careFor wind or water’s roar?And tumble out your hairThat the salt drops have wet;Being young you have not knownThe fool’s triumph, nor yetLove lost as soon as won,Nor the best labourer deadAnd all the sheaves to bind.What need have you to dreadThe monstrous crying of wind!… Continue reading W.B. Yeats
[When sunlight becomes an object] When sunlight becomes an object, my echo creates a hole in sound:a thousand doors, many handshakes of air. Like the snapping hazel flings its yellows into the woods,my coming and going is marked in the ear of the hearer. When the hazel dormouse hides, she hides for months at a… Continue reading Jennifer Moore
How deep we met in the sea, my love,My double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery,Fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black nudge,How flat and reflective my eye reflecting youBlue, gorgeous in the weaving grassesI wound round for your crown, how I loved your touchOn my fair, speckled breast, or was it my own turning;How nobly you… Continue reading Jean Valentine
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,Lest you should think he never could recaptureThe first fine careless rapture! — Robert Browning, from “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” Poetry Magazine
Forgive me if I forgetwith the birdsong and the day’slast glow folding into the handsof the trees, forgive me the fewsyllables of the autumn crickets,the year’s last firefly winkinglike a penny in the shoulder’s weeds,if I forget the hour, if I forgetthe day as the evening starpours out its whiskey over the graveland asphalt I’ve… Continue reading Jake Adam York
we are / split sentences finding meanings to each / letter of our lives. — Jonathan Endurance, from “Celebrating Love in the Time of Drowning,” Up the Stairs Quarterly (no. 47, 2019)
I don’t tell her that I’m looking at heras a painting has asked me to, or that I want to paint my poemsfrom now on, or hold her face between my handsas if she were falling snow. This is my mind thinkingthat in the movie version of the painting,that impossible light and the manwould find… Continue reading Bob Hicok
What you love is what you hurt.You cut the flowers to keep them close.Standing in the yellow field, you bluntedthe rain like a blade against your body.You shattered the sunwhen it returned.A voice called to you, oneneedful, oneyou knew. Thenlong quiet. Long quiet:you knew then,Needful one.A voice called to you once.When it returned,you shattered. The… Continue reading Leila Chatti,