Dwelling, by Li-Young Lee

As though touching her
might make him known to himself,

as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country

his hand’s traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth.

And the places on her body have no names.
She is what’s immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged
for forgetfulness.

The Woman at the Washington Zoo by Randall Jarrell

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon.  Cloth from another planet. 

They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I… .

          this print of mine, that has kept its color

Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null

Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so

To my bed, so to my grave, with no

Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,

The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—

Only I complain… . this serviceable

Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses

But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,

Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining

In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped

As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,

Aging, but without knowledge of their age,

Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—

Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.

And there come not to me, as come to these,

The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,

Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards

Tearing the meat the flies have clouded… .

                                               Vulture,

When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,

Take off the red helmet of your head, the black

Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:

The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,

To whose hand of power the great lioness

Stalks, purring… .

                       You know what I was,

You see what I am: change me, change me!

Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

stay with me.

thedustdancestoo:

every night

around this time,

i watch the sun fall

into the open arms

of an oak tree,

and i hear it

whisper:

stay with me,

stay with me

for longer than a minute,

stay with me

and i’ll hold you

through the night,

but the oak is too weak

and the sun

slips away,

silently

dripping

through its fingers

into the darkness.

(Source: thedustdancestoo)

Ezra Pound, “The Garden”

sharingpoetry:

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
 
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
 
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
 
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Halina Poświatowska, Untitled

sharingpoetry:

be near me close
because only then
i am not chilled

the cold roars in from space

when i think
how big she is
as compared to me

then i am in need
of your two interlocked arms
two rays of the universe

translated by Marek Lugowski

(submitted by panzerschreck)

e.e. cummings, “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”

sharingpoetry:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

(submitted by ou-bliee)