The 1001st Kiss (How Men Love) -- Greg Kimura

Tonight I wish to kiss your lips a thousand times
so that the thousand and first is as melodic and sweet

as the first time I saw your swing and felt your
sweep.
Your beauty fits my eyes as a key to an ancient lock
smoothly swirling to unclasp the hasp of the heart.
The soul weeps for such beauty,
worshiping its presence,
and most men live for its pursuit
until age or death slowly
tear them away.
But other men kill such beauty,
first in themselves, and then in the world,
the fear of their exposed soul too much for them to
bear.
Still others seek to own such beauty
like another key at the end of a chinking ring
used to open a tight-fisted heart.
But some men will
open the lock to their heart and throw away the key,
and anything--a tulip sky,
an orange leaf, the sound of a daughter’s grieving
cry--is beauty to bring them tears.
Such is the way I wish to touch your beauty
tonight on the 1001st kiss.

XXXI/Question Book | Pablo Neruda

Whom can I ask
what I meant to achieve in this world?

Why do I move without wanting to,
Why Can't I stand still?

Why do I roll aound without wheels
and fly without feathers or wings?

And how can I talk transmigration
if my bones live in Chile?

--- Robert Hass

crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

Cyberspace Theology -- Glen A. Mazis

Aphrodite lurks somewhere in the sites of the internet. If
we seek the root directory, all the goddesses can be found,

dancing around the labyrinthine algorithm that generates
perfect bodies and transparent minds. The gods are there,

too, riding search engines on heroic quests. We want our
will translated into binary values. All the ones, we will add

up, but delete the zeroes. Some build fortunes through post-
modern pixel castles in the air, money made truly from

nothing. We no longer believe in heaven above earthly space
or in infinite mercy, so we seek salvation in more megabytes,

from e-mails from the furthest reaches, and maybe beyond,
counting files instead of sins, and cleanse not our souls, but

our hard drives. Cyberspace exists nowhere within real time
or space--the same location where the old heaven was supposed

to be. Its revelation is no burning bush or walking on water,
since these feats are only beginner's level on our kids' video

games. We no longer want a higher reality. We'd rather gossip
in Plato's cave of moving shadows and winking virtuality.

The Second Voyage -- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Odysseus rested on his oar and saw
The ruffled foreheads of the waves
Crocodiling and mincing past: he rammed
The oar between their jaws and looked down
In the simmering sea where scribbles of weed defined
Uncertain depth, and the slim fishes progressed
In fatal formation, and thought
                                            If there was a single
Streak of decency in these waves now, they'd be ridged
Pocked and dented with the battering they've had,
And we could name them as Adam named the beasts,
Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one
With admiration; they'd notice us passing
And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these
Have less character than sheep and need more patience. I know what I'll do he said;
I'll park my ship in the crook of a long pier
(And I'll take you with me he said to the oar)
I'll face the rising ground and walk away
From tidal waters, up riverbeds
Where herons parcel out the miles of stream,
Over gaps in the hills, through warm
Silent valleys, and when I meet a farmer
Bold enough to look me in the eye
With 'where are you off to with that long
Winnowing fan over your shoulder?'
There I will stand still
And I'll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post
And leave you as a tidemark. I can go back
And organise my house then.
                                          But the profound
Unfenced valleys of the ocean still held him;
He had only the oar to make them keep their distance;
The sea was still frying under the ship's side. He considered the water-lilies, and thought about fountains
Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares,
The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,
The flat lakes bisecting the rushes. He remembered spiders and frogs
Housekeeping at the roadside in brown trickles floored with mud,
Horsetroughs, the black canal, pale swans at dark:
His face grew damp with tears that tasted
Like his own sweat or the insults of the sea.

Persephone Again -- Dorothy Walters

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth--nine months
of fertility and sun,
three of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

People Like Us Are Dangerous -- Martin Espada

In Brooklyn days, I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz, lightweight champion
of the world from Ponce, Puerto Rico. I gazed at the radiance
of the black and white television till it spoke to me in tongues,
a boy spellbound by the grainy spirits who stalked each other in the ring.
I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz when twenty thousand people
at Shea Stadium chanted his name. For fifteen rounds the jazz
percussion of his punches beat the sweat from Ismael Laguna,
El Tigre de Santa Isabel, who lurched off the ropes,
backpedaled and swallowed blood till the last bell.
I wanted to crouch and dip into the arc of my uppercut
like Carlos Ortiz on the cover of The Ring magazine,
where they called him a pugilist with clever hands.
I wanted to be a pugilist with clever hands. My father
bought me boxing gloves and I reddened my brother’s face.
I shadowboxed all the way down the hall.
I wanted something from the clever hand of Carlos Ortiz.
My mother and my father’s sister, dressed for the dance floor
at the Club Tropicoro, tracked the champ to the men’s room
and offered him a cocktail napkin to sign for me.
He grinned like the general of a people’s army
greeting the crowd from a balcony at the presidential palace.
I told everyone in the streets of Brooklyn I wanted to be
a Puerto Rican fighter like Carlos Ortiz. Every day I sparred
in the schoolyard until a boy I did not know waved his hands
in a circle, mesmerizing as a hypnotist, then kicked me
with his hard-soled shoe in a place I could not bring myself to name.
The blood crusted between my legs. I threw away my underwear.
Years later, I met Carlos Ortiz stirring milk into his coffee
at a McDonald’s off the New York Thruway.
The black curls on his forehead had disappeared, along
with the Club Tropicoro and the eighty thousand dollars
he counted out in cash to build his palace of trumpets in the Bronx.
Year by year, the whiskey and the beer wore away the levees
of his brain till he walked like a man underwater. One night
at Madison Square Garden, unable to move his arms or legs,
he stared at the canvas and quit on his stool. Carlos Ortiz drove
a cab on graveyard shift to keep away from all the bars on the avenue,
far from the backslappers who wanted to buy the champ a drink.
Carlos Ortiz is sober now. He thinks of Ismael Laguna, who cannot
pry open his hands, selling souvenir newspapers with headlines about
El Tigre de Santa Isabel. Carlos Ortiz says: People like us are dangerous.

A Dream of Burning -- Francis Weller

To lift this wanting up out of dead wood.

 Something, someone reaches up to stop this rising

as though the movement up is treasonous.

This wanting has been frozen, caught in the grain

of the fallen log for ten thousand years: Memories

of ice ages and mastodons.

But in the wood is the dream of burning--of flames,

heat and tongues of orange/red/leaping up into

the night, warming those who come close by.

This wanting breaks open the wood. The sow bugs,

spiders, beetles and the invisible captains of decay

are relieved of duty.

This wood is for fire and it is time to burn.

The Curator -- Miller Williams

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come, 
were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,
the youngest assistant curator in the country.
I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes 
precisely built to every size of canvas.
We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in, 
we got each painting put in the proper box
and out of Leningrad in less than a week.
They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes 
waiting in the basement, which was fine,
a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—
but what we did was leave the frames hanging, 
so after the war it would be a simple thing 
to put the paintings back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again 
compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble
after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—
You know it lasted nine hundred days.
Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie 
sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,
but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you. 
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside, 
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold. 
They told us this: in three homes far from here 
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad 
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed 
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing. 
Now they had been sent to defend the city, 
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger 
than all of us being here in the first place, 
inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms, 
what they could take the time for, wall by wall. 
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings. 
I told them how those colors would come together, 
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there, 
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout 
and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waited for us,
then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes. 
Each of us took a group in a different direction: 
Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse, 
Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,
Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper. 
We pointed to more details about the paintings, 
I venture to say, than if we had had them there, 
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces 
the same way we’d done it every morning 
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact 
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned 
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention 
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to forget the war
a little while. Maybe more than that.
Whatever it was, the people continued to come. 
It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.

Slowly, blind people began to come.
A few at first then more of them every morning, 
some led and some alone, some swaying a little.
They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces, 
they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them, 
to see better what was being said.
And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left
and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places, 
the blind never came again. Not like before.
This seems strange, but what I think it was,
they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.
They could still have listened, but the lectures became 
a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?
Confluences come when they will and they go away.

Having It Out With Melancholy -- Jane Kenyon

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.

A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard

1  FROM THE NURSERY


When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.


And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad -- even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along a spindle on my crib.


You taught me to exist without gratitude. 
You ruined my manners toward God:
"We're here simply to wait for death; 
the pleasures of earth are overrated."


I only appeared to belong to my mother, 
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts 
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. 
I was already yours -- the anti-urge, 
the mutilator of souls.



           2  BOTTLES


Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 
The coated ones smell sweet or have 
no smell; the powdery ones smell 
like the chemistry lab at school 
that made me hold my breath.



3  SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND


You wouldn't be so depressed
if you really believed in God.



           4  OFTEN


Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep's 
frail wicker coracle.



5  ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT


Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.


I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors -- those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few


moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.


Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear 
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.



       6  IN AND OUT


The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter 
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing 
saves my life -- in and out, in 
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 



           7  PARDON


A piece of burned meat 
wears my clothes, speaks 
in my voice, dispatches obligations 
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying 
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.


We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night 
I feel as if I had drunk six cups 
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder 
and bitterness of someone pardoned 
for a crime she did not commit 
I come back to marriage and friends, 
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back 
to my desk, books, and chair.



           8  CREDO


Pharmaceutical wonders are at work 
but I believe only in this moment 
of well-being. Unholy ghost, 
you are certain to come again.


Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet 
on the coffee table, lean back, 
and turn me into someone who can't 
take the trouble to speak; someone 
who can't sleep, or who does nothing 
but sleep; can't read, or call 
for an appointment for help.


There is nothing I can do 
against your coming. 
When I awake, I am still with thee.



  9  WOOD THRUSH


High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome


by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.