speaking of love(of
which Who knows the
meaning;or how dreaming
becomes

if your heart’s mind)i
guess a grassblade
Thinks beyond or
around(as poems are

made)Our picking it. this
caress that laugh
both quickly signify
life’s only half(through

deep weather then
or none let’s feel
all)mind in mind flesh
In flesh succeeding disappear

(via eecummings)

m-shapes:

Poetry had left me several days before—
left our whole damn apartment a mess.
“Thees” and “thous” were strung across the ceiling
like spit wads, a careless collage of phrases—
his last big bash, before our eventual collapse.

He didn’t even bother to clean up the ink smears
across the wooden floor where he kissed me—
my knees, elbows, and nose—and when he kissed my mouth,
his words swelled as they slid down my throat,
causing me to choke.

I rushed to the toilet, huck-yacking
“halcyon”, “scintilla”, “mellifluous” and the final letters of “ethereal”
came out with a projectile splat on the side of the bowl.

“Eh,” I flushed, “Prose is a better lover, anyway.”

poetry365:

Light, your light,

slides

across the uneven skin of the earth-

longing to be waves;

to swell and surge like curled waves

caught in a horizontal ring.

_

Unlike the son of humanity;

not rising, divine,

a vertical reprimand,

accentuating the stark, defiant trunks of trees—

marking the slanted backs of men,

and their grotesque, handwritten notes

filed away in their brains.

_

Their shadows lengthen then,

like clockwork,

shrink into dark halos,

stagnant.

-

But Light,

your light magnifies,

washes out into infinity,

the flakes of daylight,

as dew on spring leaves, surprisingly—

about to blot me out.

-http://scribble-scrawl.tumblr.com/

Yay, Micah!

I am reading this right now. I purchased it for Rebecca a couple years ago for her birthday, and now I totally wish I had it for myself. I swear I want to quote every poem in this book and fill my Tumblr with Rumi. I can’t even handle it.

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It’s a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

m-shapes:

Light, your light,
slides
across the uneven skin of the earth-
longing to be waves;
to swell and surge like curled waves
caught in a horizontal ring.

Unlike the son of humanity;
not rising, divine,
a vertical reprimand,
accentuating the stark, defiant trunks of trees—
marking the slanted backs of men,
and their grotesque, handwritten notes
filed away in their brains.

Their shadows lengthen then,
like clockwork,
shrink into dark halos,
stagnant.

But Light,
your light magnifies,
washes out into infinity,
the flakes of daylight,
as dew on spring leaves, surprisingly—
about to blot me out.

poetry365:

1
We are reading the story of our lives
which takes place in a room.
The room looks out on a street.
There is no one there,
no sound of anything.
The trees are heavy with leaves,
the parked cars never more.
We keep turning pages,
hoping for something,
something like mercy or change,
a black line that would bind us
or keep us apart.
The way it is, it would seem
the book of our lives is empty.
The furniture in the room is never shifted,
and the rugs become darker each time
our shadows pass over them.
It is almost as if the room were the world.
We sit beside each other on the couch,
reading about the couch.
We say it is ideal.
It is ideal.

2
We are reading the story of our lives
as though we were in it,
as though we had written it.
This comes up again and again.
In one of the chapters
I lean back and push the book aside
because the book says
it is what I am doing.
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book,
beyond my life into another life.
I put the pen down.
The book says: He put the pen down
and turned and watched her reading
the part about herself falling in love.
The book is more accurate than we can imagine.
I lean back and watch you read
about the man across the street.
They built a house there,
and one day a man walking out of it.
You fell in love with him
because you knew that he would never visit you,
would never know you were waiting.
Night after night you would say
that he was like me.
I lean back and watch you grow older without me.
Sunlight falls on your silver hair.
The rugs, the furniture,
seem almost imaginary now.
She continued to read.
She seemed to consider his absence
of no special importance,
as someone on a perfect day will consider
the weather a failure
because it did not change his mind.
You narrow your eyes.
You have the impulse to close the book
which described my resistance:
how when I lean back I imagine
my life without you, imagine moving
into another life, another book.
It described your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
The book describes much more than it should.
It wants to divide us.

3
This morning I woke and believed
there was no more to our lives
than the story of our lives.
When you disagreed, I pointed
to the place in the book where you disagreed.
You fell back to sleep and I began to read
those mysterious parts you used to guess at
while they were being written
and lose interest in after they became
part of the story.
In one of them cold dresses of moonlight
are draped over the chairs in a man’s room.
He dreams of a woman whose dresses are lost,
who sits in a garden and waits.
She believes that love is a sacrifice.
The part describes her death
and she is never named,
which is one of the things
you could not stand about her.
A little later we learn
that the dreaming man lives
in the new house across the street.
This morning after you fell back to sleep
I began to turn pages early in the book:
it was like dreaming of childhood,
so much seemed to vanish,
so much seemed to come to life again.
I did not know what to do.
The book said: In those moments it was his book.
A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.
He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,
anxious in his own kingdom.

4
Before you woke
I read another part that described your absence
and told how you sleep to reverse
the progress of your life.
I was touched by my own loneliness as I read,
knowing that what I feel is often the crude
and unsuccessful form of a story
that may never be told.
I read and was moved by a desire to offer myself
to the house of your sleep.
He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,
to see her in the refuse, the discarded
plots of old dreams, the costumes and masks
of unattainable states.
It was as if he were drawn
irresistibly to failure.
It was hard to keep reading.
I was tired and wanted to give up.
The book seemed aware of this.
It hinted at changing the subject.
I waited for you to wake not knowing
how long I waited,
and it seemed that I was no longer reading.
I heard the wind passing
like a stream of sighs
and I heard the shiver of leaves
in the trees outside the window.
It would be in the book.
Everything would be there.
I looked at your face
and I read the eyes, the nose, the mouth…

5
If only there were a perfect moment in the book;
if only we could live in that moment,
we could begin the book again
as if we had not written it,
as if we were not in it.
But the dark approaches
to any page are too numerous
and the escapes are too narrow.
We read through the day.
Each page turning is like a candle
moving through the mind.
Each moment is like a hopeless cause.
If only we could stop reading.
He never wanted to read another book
and she kept staring into the street.
The cars were still there,
the deep shade of the trees covered them.
The shades were drawn in the new house.
Maybe the man who lived there„
the man she loved, was reading
the story of another life.
She imagined a bare parlor,
a cold fireplace, a man sitting
writing a letter to a woman
who has sacrificed her life for love.
If there were a perfect moment in the book,
it would be the last.
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.

6
The day goes on.
We study what we remember.
We look into the mirror across the room.
We cannot bear to be alone.
The book goes on.
They became silent and did not know how to begin
the dialogue which was necessary.
It was words that created divisions in the first place,
that created loneliness.
They waited.
They would turn the pages, hoping
something would happen.
They would patch up their lives in secret:
each defeat forgiven because it could not be tested,
each pain rewarded because it was unreal.
They did nothing.

7
The book will not survive.
We are the living proof of that.
It is dark outside, in the room it is darker.
I hear your breathing.
You are asking me if I am tired,
if I want to keep reading.
Yes, I am tired.
Yes, I want to keep reading.
I say yes to everything.
You cannot hear me.
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were copies, the tired phantoms
of something they had been before.
The attitudes they took were jaded.
They stared into the book
ad were horrified by their innocence,
their reluctance to give up.
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were determined to accept the truth.
Whatever it was they would accept it.
The book would have to be read.
They are the book and they are
nothing else.

I’m glad I took the time to read this. It’s well worth it.

poetry365:

i remember learning you jump
in your sleep and smile
when you wake up

at first you cuddle
then one arm across my stomach
then one leg touching my leg then
you turn your back

but you smile when you wake up

i was surprised to know you don’t care
if your amp burns all night and that you could
play ohmeohmy over and over again just
because you remembered

i discovered you don’t like hair
in your bathroom sink and never step
your wet feet onto a clean rug

you will answer your phone
but you don’t talk too long and you do
rub my toes and make faces
while you talk
and your voice told her anyway
that i was there

you can get up at three and make sandwiches
and orange juice and tell jokes
you sometimes make incoherent sentences
you snore
and you smile when you wake up

i know you cry when you’re hurt
and curse when you’re angry
and try when you don’t feel
like it and smile at me
when you wake up

these things i learned through
a simple single touch
when fleshes clashed

poetry365:

Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone’s bees.

You can’t untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through this life without fear.

For us, all that’s left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

Deep in the transparent night they’re still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.

poetry365:

Today when I woke
you were gone
and I
was like a salesman
in a small-town hotel room
drunk on loneliness
and listening to laughter
next door
and I was
a boy scout marooned
in a dry-rotted cabin
by the greatest snowstorm
even seen in northern Vermont
listening to strange birds
scratching the roof
and I was
a man coming home
to his house full of children
and finding nothing there
but the echoes of his scream.

I am going out now
to look at
the green ducks
paddle nowhere
on the river
but if you should return
while I’m out marking time
this is to tell you
I’m home.

sosafe: I see your Martins Ferry, Ohio and raise you Saint Judas (I was gonna post this anyway)

When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

I delayed a response to this, because I was having trouble deciding on a poem. Let’s go with “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960.” This one is from his later work, after he stopped caring so strongly for meter and rhyme. It took me a little bit before I realized yours was in iambic pentameter.

After dark
Near the South Dakota border,
The moon is out hunting, everywhere,
Delivering fire,
And walking down hallways
Of a diamond.

Behind a tree,
It lights on the ruins
Of a white city
Frost, frost.

Where are they gone
Who lived there?

Bundled away under wings
And dark faces.

I am sick
Of it, and I go on
Living, alone, alone,
Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves
Of Chippewas and Norwegians.

This cold winter
Moon spills the inhuman fire
Of jewels
Into my hands.

Dead riches, dead hands, the moon
Darkens,
And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins
Of America.

Related: I forgot how much I loved James Wright.

poetry365:

I have no illusions.
When I roll towards you at dawn,
I can’t see you in the fog.
We’ve simply memorized each other.
I read a story about a giant
who couldn’t see his tiny wife
for all the clouds
drifting around his huge, sad head.
He’d stroke the tops of fir trees
thinking he’d found her hair.
In another version, his wife
turned into an egret,
her strong wings
brushing her husband’s face;
then she fell into the sea
weighted down by his immense tear.
Let me tell you this:
I miss your shadow, too,
but I know it waits above the fog
black as the shadow of the oak
you saw in your dream
when you woke up, almost happy.
I know our town’s invisible.
The pilots on the way to Alaska
think they’re over the sea.
Even if they glimpsed a light
through a rift in the clouds
they’d call it a ship
loaded with timber for the south.
Still, I hear those planes.
Last night on the satellite map
I saw land without clouds.
Remember, I groped for your hand.
Suppose the men go barefoot?
Suppose the women own fans?