Misstep

Descending

the stairs

she misses

a step

and the world

beneath her feet

rises up to punish her

with a series of smacks

and thuds

that send her

tumbling into the cellar.

The concrete floor

is cool and gritty under her cheek

stars rise before her eyes

bumps bud beneath

tender flesh

bruises bloom

like pansies

Purple. Blue. Black.

Green.

Darkness sits beside her

and whispers in her ear.

She accepts the heavy covers

it lays on her shoulders

and closes her eyes,

waiting for Strength

to call.

July 24, 2008

Bonnard's Nudes

by Raymond Carver

His wife. Forty years he painted her.

Again and again. The nude in the last painting

the same young nude as the the first. His wife

As he remembered her young. As she was young.

His wife in her bath. At her dressing table

in front of the mirror. Undressed.

His wife with her hands under her breasts

looking out on the garden.

The sun bestowing warmth and color.

Every living thing in bloom there.

She young and tremulous and most desirable.

When she died, he painted a while longer.

A few landscapes. Then died.

And was put down next to her.

His young wife.

July 22, 2008

My Erotic Double

by John Ashbery

He says he doesn't feel like working today.

It's just as well. Here in the shade

Behind the house, protected from street noises,

One can go over all kinds of old feelings,

Throw some away,  keep others.

                                        The wordplay

Between us gets very intense when there are

Fewer feelings around to confuse things.

Another go-round? No, but the last things

You always find to say are charming, and rescue me

Before the night does. We are afloat

On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,

Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight

That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams

As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.

Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.

Thank you. You are too.

July 10, 2008

For strong women

by Marge Piercy

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn't mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

(From her book  The Moon is Always Female)

July 5, 2008

In Broken Images

by Robert Graves

He is quick, thinking in clear images;

I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;

Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;

Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;

When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;

I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion.

June 17, 2008

Coming to This

by Mark Strand

We have done what we wanted.

We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry

of each other, and we have welcomed grief

and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.

The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.

The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.

The wine waits.

Coming to this

has its rewards:  nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.

We have no heart or saving grace,

no place to go, no reason to remain.

June 5, 2008

Why silence is a kind of truth

Window shades drawn, messages under lock and key, so many stone walls, a lamp not lit...

A Secret Life

Why you need to have one

is not much more mysterous than

why you don't say what you think

at the birth of an ugly baby.

Or, you've just made love

and feel you'd rather have been

in a dark booth where your partner

was nodding, whispering, yes, yes

you're brilliant. The secret life

begins early, is kept alive

by all that's unpopular

in you, all that you know

a Baptist, say, or some other

accountant would object to.

It becomes what you'd most protect

if the government said you can protect

one thing, all else is ours.

When you write late at night

it's like a small fire

in a clearing, it's what

radiates and what can hurt

if you get too close to it.

It's why your silence is a kind of truth.

Even when you speak to your best friend,

the one who'll never betray you,

you always leave out one thing;

a secret life is that important.

--Stephen Dunn

On a Tree Fallen Across the Road

(To Hear Us Talk)

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood

Throws down in front of us is not to bar

Our passage to our journey's end for good,

But just to ask us who we think we are.

Insisting always on our own way so,

She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,

And make us get down in a foot of snow

Debating what to do without an axe.

And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:

We will not be put off the final goal

We have it hidden in us to attain,

Not though we have to seize earth by the pole.

And, tired of aimless circling in one place,

Steer straight off after something into space.

--Robert Frost

In the Evening

The heads of the roses begin to droop.

The bee who has been hauling his gold

all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

the last few darting birds,

watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.

The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.

I take another sip of wine.

I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?

Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

--Billy Collins

May 8, 2008

Saturday Morning

Everyone who made love the night before

was walking around with flashing red lights

on top of their heads--a white-haired old gentleman,

a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman

who smiled at me from across the street

and gave a little secret shrug,

as if the flashing red light on her head

was a small price to pay for what she knew.

Hugo Williams

April 26, 2008