After, Then

There will be no return, woman. 
No knock on your door, my once beloved.
We both are too weary to attempt 
Any more old familiar dance.
Any better man knows, there really is
No more having back what was lost.
What was lost impossibly scattered now.
Irretrievable. Irredeemable.
All that we have left, you and I
Are the remains. Only another form
Of ashes. Arms wrapped around yourself
Standing by the closed front door. 
I, looking back at you, at the porch, 
The yard, the house, the neighborhood, 
The curb, the life,
From the rearview mirror.

what we left behind in love

Who, what we left behind in love.
Left behind out of love. 
All reasons into one final tangible thing--
The leaving. Who truly understands it

Not even fully the one leaving, 
Feeling only that which comes first
As feeling before any knowing--
Feeling being the very first language

Of that that cannot be enclosed
Into any simple names.
Who, what we left behind in love.
Left behind out of love.

Others, as well as our own selves--
Versions of the less or more of
What we now are.

what is not real-- a true

One long marriage after, do you still believe?
I want to, if still possible now. But I am no
Longer the same from that many years ago.
What has been broken, remains

Weathered and less than the one who dreamt.
Who still dares to tread the narrow?
The young, the fool, the brave.

I watch them admirably, listening to
The pounding of my own unbelieving.

The Poor

Who are the poor? It depends
who is defining the abstruse lot
that continually grows
no end, all children
of an absentee god.

The ways we go

Two nights ago, I dreamed of pulling a tooth---
two, an incisor and a molar.  There would have been
third, but in the dream it stopped being loose---

and I woke up distraught.  Dreams of teeth

are not good in this country of dreamers, they mean
death.  I spent the rest of the hours watching
for light.  Morning, she tells me, 

death in the family, but it could also mean simply

change

exactly the way I was told the first time
a reader explained the cards before reading.
A transition, she had said, gesturing at a cup.

What do I know?  What do I know?

I called my mother in the dark of morning
she replied, pray.
In the corner I watch the stillness and the quiet

Who knows?  Who knows?

J-- had a stroke of luck right after our meeting, 
and passed away.  A woman with terminal cancer
brought her oxygen tank to listen to a poetry reading.

The Danish neighbour hit the truck at the freeway

the same day my new motorcycle arrived.
His wife and months-old child I had greeted just that morning,
and she had spoken kindly to the dogs.

Who knows?  Who knows?

There is an envelope upstairs waiting for the last paper.
There could be a leaving, but do I dare 
finally go?

burning

there must be a reason why, valentine
why

they all share the same
patron 

Oh!  of lovers
love, epilepsy, and plague!

i woke up shivering

Any one can comment about the strange weather these days.  One country can talk about their drought and heat wave, another about intense cold, these happening all at once.  It is the middle of January, 

and none of the things we used to know apply.  In this humid country, for instance, closer to the ring of fire than others, typhoons are keeping themselves at  bay, watching the too many dead and the grief-

stricken. Now coldness has come, temperatures dropping lower than people can imagine.  In the mountains, animals are dying and the whiff of their death like pollen everywhere, she said, 

commenting on my state over an elaborate breakfast of fluids.  I had woken up in the middle of the dark morning, shivering with fever. Now she looks outside the window and listens to the sound of the river.  

birth-day

Here it is a travesty.
That life goes on for a number.
That celebrations are called 
for some other reasons
if one does not care to remember.
In another place, entire towns
and cities are awashed.
Only the memory have names.
Too many bodies are found,
cold and strange. The loved ones
remain missing.  Underneath
all the mud and debris where 
those who survive must stand 
go on living.





(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)




by shane





















 

where to be

There has been talk these days of retirement and retiring.  As if one has, inevitably, arrived at the one place, or time, meant for waiting in whatever way we may so choose to wait.

Ralph, he says, "in my dotage", and dotage is the word he did use, "I will stay here in B*."  We are in a cab, familiars and visitors of B*.  I look through the cab's rain pelted windows, to what I imagine as mountain folds hidden in the fog.  The world outside is wet.

We pass by a park and I'm randomly reminded of firewood, fire trees, and fireplaces; and the persistent mist that covers the windows, the drafts that let themselves in in rooms.  Early mornings at the hotel, I stay in the sunroom.  

I tell Ralph what would he do in such cold a place.  Will he be writing?  Be with a new, younger lover?

I say I write better too in a cold place, preferably with rain.

But I do not say I'd like to stay close to sea.  No matter how much I love keeping hands on a garden; maybe, no matter even that I'd want to tend bonsais the way my mother used to do when I was so very small I can hardly remember.  Teach a potted old tree to bear flowers, or to bend an arm like this to catch the sun this way.

We arrive at the fellowship dinner place early.  Jay, still quite unstable after the afternoon vodka, and I decide to take a walk.  B* is a beautiful place.  I wish I had a cigarette.  We talk about politics.  And B*.  And retiring.

Maybe not here, Jay says, I'd like to see fields after fields of sugarcane when I wake up in the morning.

I laugh and say "You sure take after ---*." 

He shrugs, still looking pink because of vodka.

My own literary parents are retired.  When I visited M* she showed me her garden of herbs and gave me turmeric and local varieties of basil.  J* too wants to farm:  Like my father before me, he said.

What I'd want to do in my last waiting days is to always see the moon, rise gold, rise silver, rise quiet.  And maybe instead of running with dogs, I will be paddling a boat out to sea.














 





     

Blake on graying streets

Blake




I watch William Blake, who spotted angels
every day in treetops
and met God on the staircase
of his little house and found light in grimy alleys--

Blake, who died
singing gleefully
in a London thronged
with streetwalkers, admirals, and miracles,

William Blake, engraver, who labored
and lived in poverty, but not despair,
who received burning signs
from the sea and from the starry sky,

who never lost hope, since hope
was always born anew like breath,
I see those who walked like him on graying streets,
headed toward the dawn's rosy orchid.










by Adam Zagajewski

translated by Clare Cavanagh 

when the lovers are dead

it may be worth to think about why two dead lovers are the best lovers.  one, their love is as eternal as their youth, their passion as steady as in the Grecian Urn.  then: no hunger will tear them apart, no sickness, no need for health.  why then wish to be alive?  perhaps it why too many wanted to love and be loved in Twilight.
but, 
what about boredom?  the ebbs and tides that make for joy and laughter?
and unpredictability that make for those rarest, temporal moments we have when the world and the universe, and life itself, despite everything else, is simply beautiful...

on friendship and love

a most gentle poem.  
for those who share their lives with dogs.




My Dog




His large black body lies on his bed across the room,
under the French doors, where he used to sleep, watching me.
The vet said to cover him with a blanket, but I can't.

Two hours ago he moaned loudly and let go of his life.
My wife dreamed of his death in Paris but didn't tell me.
I drove home from the airport imagining him at the door,

tail wagging.  He introduced me to my wife in a dog run,
stood proudly beside me at our wedding, handsome
in a red bow tie.  He faced wherever I was, sat staring out

the window if I was away.  If you haven't loved a dog
you'll find it hard to believe he knew it was time to die
but wanted to wait two weeks for me to come home.

I'll spread his ashes at the beach where we walked nearly
every day for twelve years, this gentle creature following me
the mile and a half to the breakers and then back to our car.





by Philip Schultz

go to Indonesia

and take the offer, i want to tell G.  as if it is the easiest thing in the world.  

when asked, "when is M.A. coming back?"  G said M.A. is playing it by ear.  there are no pre-booked flights, nothing on the calendar.  just plans, vaguest possible.  and M.A., wanting to earn more, intends to move further. 

i want to tell G the obvious:  the plans do not include you.  but maybe i am not the best person to say so.  being unreliable, being an unbeliever.

my point is:  if it is love, with all its trappings, it is not impossible to mark the calendar.  if it is love, with all its trappings, the plans must be measurable, must be for two.

Indonesia is worlds away from M.A.  too far, G says.  what if M.A. calls?  what if there suddenly is a plan?  i say nothing.  what to tell G?  take the offer and go to Indonesia.  go to another world.  for now, without her, there is nothing in this old city but lonely.

G says i can take it.  G says i will carry on (while i wait).
i say nothing over coffee, lukewarm, without hazelnut.
















  

what to tell G

1.  M.A. should have arrived in another world by now.  G left behind.  what G must be feeling, not unimaginable.  possibly beyond comfort at the moment.  time when words fall short.  fall into being nothing.  suddenly empty and hollow.  without weight.  what to tell G?  nothing.  there is no need to reiterate what is already known.  a given: how we change moment to moment, how more so, changing moment to moment from across such distance.

2.  when H passed away, R was inconsolable.  a performance artist, a solo dancer, a poet, R has read and heard all the words of comfort, they have become trite.  they all mean nothing, she said again and again and again.  crying there, in her white mourning dress, on a bench beside a convenience store.  i realized there are no words of comfort for a writer who comforts others with words.  in need of comfort, a loss.  i sat across her and listened, a rewinding, again and again of memory until exhaustion.

3.  who is unfamiliar with loss, and change?  and who does not survive?

4.  there is a scar in my memory and it is all healed.  'though it has rendered me cynical, hopeful, gentle, and resigned.   

days of disquiet

while running on this foggy early morning, ravens.



how does one write political literature?  it is to be at heart an idealist and a radical, an optimist.  it is to be by blood, brave.  and uncompromising.  and brave.  

no matter some, many, never few, of your friends will be gone without a trace.  no body.  no trail.  save your own memory.  some photos.  stories you retell and retell.  that has no ending, no. it couldn't have any.

to this day, families and friends still look for their missing.  and to this day, there still are families and friends missing.























    

on writing from memory

Memory is a bulk.  swaying 
like a big elephant, graceful only
when inconspicuous.  this entirety

of a universe, a dimension, 
a self and that of others' 
similar to that of the now, only

then
i was a child.  and you--
the world a glass terrarium.