This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

( Read more... )

 I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t ( Read more... )

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the ( Read more... )

Burn all your bridges
just so that you can build them again
with thicker ropes.

Hurt all the people you love
and then commit every felony to win them back.

Drown yourself in bleach until not even Heaven's light
can compare to how bright you can burn.

Turn yourself inside out
and paint your organs the color of what you see
in your dreams.

This is the art ( Read more... )

 Your first time out of the country
of your own skin, I didn’t bring a map.

You always hated that I’d been lucky
enough to pick my way through streets

I couldn’t pronounce to find cathedrals,
graveyards. If you were a city, you said,

I’d only like to know your suburbs.

If you were a city, I said, I’d like to know
your poor neighborhoods, your inner ( Read more... )

for John Fogelman

There are some things we just don't talk about--
Not even in the morning, when we're waking,
When your calloused fingers tentatively walk
The slope of my waist:
                                How love's a rust-worn boat,
Abandoned at the dock--and who could doubt
Waves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We're taking
Our wreckage as a ( Read more... )

Even if I now saw you
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.

- Izumi Shikibu (976-1030), in The Ink Dark Moon, translated by Jane Hirshfield

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would ( Read more... )

"Song of Five Friends ( Read more... )

  "We are hard on each other"

Margaret Atwood

i)

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are 
true; it is our crooked 
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.

ii)

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
( Read more... )