The Story of Madame Chevalier

The Story of Madame Chevalier

by Ciarán Carson

You remember the Incredible Shrinking Man? I said.

Well, last night I dreamed I was him. It began the same way.

 

The shirt cuffs were the first thing that came to my attention,

drooping down over my knuckles in the bedroom mirror.      

 

And my waistband and shoes were getting looser by the day.

Within weeks you could perch me on your knee like a male doll.

 

Later you would put me to bed in the empty matchbox.

You failed to watch for the spider that came to explore me.

 

I fought her with a darning needle, a button my shield.

She retreated from me on a thread. I followed her down

 

to the cellar. How I made my way back I'll never know.

It took me days to travel over the quilt to your hand.

 

No longer a hand but an Alpine range of sleeping flesh.

I crawled into an open pore and entered your bloodstream.

Bernal Hill

Bernal Hill

by Randall Mann

Something has to give.

We stand above it all.

Below, the buildings' tall

but tiny narrative.

The water's always near,

you say. And so are you,

for now. It has to do.

There's little left to fear.

A wind so cold, one might

forget that winter's gone.

The city lights are on

for us, to us, tonight.

To the Harbormaster

To the Harbormaster

by Frank O'Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught   

in some moorings. I am always tying up   

and then deciding to depart. In storms and   

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   

around my fathomless arms, I am unable   

to understand the forms of my vanity   

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   

in my hand and the sun sinking. To   

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   

of my will. The terrible channels where   

the wind drives me against the brown lips   

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   

if it sinks, it may well be in answer   

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Mixed Media

Mixed Media

by Duane Niatum

The stars grow lemon

in the field, spread

like tea leaves in

a cup; red-wing

blackbirds fold themselves

into the fence,

corn dreamers.

The sky undulating

with clouds returns

gold-throated arpeggios

to the one walking

at sunrise, sunfall.

Light as the air

I sit on my

cottage steps;

a tom cat come

home to die for

the day.

Therapy from the Garden

Therapy from the Garden

by Glenn Morazzini

Panic attacks your pain-porous skin?   

Imagine the layers of onion, Sufi-circling   

and circling until there is no tear-making body.   

If the issue is anorexia, taking starvation's   

dark spirit-flight, or anhedonia, running from   

the skin's having fun, consider the mushroom's   

fleshy erection, and the pumpkins, earth goddesses   

and rotund Buddhas sprawled by compost's funky aerosol.   

For social phobia, desensitize among the rows   

of corn's parade, ticker tape leaves and Rasta tassels   

that wind-strut and bring on the crows' hop and rap.   

Too much affect: meditate on potatoes, taciturn   

as overturned stones. Too little: visualize the hanging   

tomatoes' insides, the soft hearts, sentimental ornaments.   

From the lettuce there is common sense for narcissism:   

acceptance as side dish, garnish for a meaty sandwich.   

If that leaf isn't the dose, there's always the soil   

people shovel and level, rake and make wishful with seed,   

feed leftovers from the compost's vegan sewer,   

the soil that wants for nothing and yields and yields.

Meadowlark West

Meadowlark West

by Philip Lamantia

Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought

Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought

Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought

The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land

Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojavé Ohlone

Market Street of "The Mad Doctor" via the occult centers

A gang of fox spirits at the crossroads

Bandoleros set between the obliteration of grizzly bears painted by an Arcimboldist and the monstrance of bleeding chains

Montezuma's feathery headdress torn up in the boondocks of the Rosy Cross

Coyote girls in myth-time

At the central dream of edenic treasures

The irrevocable annihilation of christian civilization is taking shape with carnivorous flowers of volcanic thought

Summer Solstice

Summer Solstice

by Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it's you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn't say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper's bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

Bad Sheep

Bad Sheep

by Hailey Leithauser

Midnight's merely blue,

but me, me, me, I'm

through

and through

sloe, cracked soot-

on-a-boot,

nicotine spat, licorice whip.

You can scratch, scratch, scratch

but I stay underskin true

to ebony, ink, crowberry, pitch;

hoist me up by my hooves

and shake till I'm shook, I'm still

chock full of coke, fuliginous

murk.

O there's swart in my soul,

coal by the bag,

cinders and slag,

scoriac grit, so please

come, comb

through my fleece with hands pallid

as snow and watch

how they grow tarry, raven,

stygian, ashed—

or, if you wish, clean me with bleach

I won't

flinch, just char

down to a core of caliginous

marrow,

pure carbon, atramentous,

utterly piceous,

shadowed, and starless,

each clumpity clump

and eclipse of my heart raptly

re-burnishing

a woolgather dark.

Parenthesis

Parenthesis

by Valerie Mejer

Nothing's in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens.

Maybe something like night in the deep hollow,

an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup.

Nothing's in the nest. No thread. No webs of words.

Maybe something like my navel, the eclipse of a magnifying glass.

A slice, mute with regard to its empty depths.

In the nest, nothing. The web unwoven. Dismembered.

In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags

taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes, my eyes

which, cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there.

On Marriage

On Marriage

by Meghan O'Rourke

Stone by stone, body by body in the grass:

For this we trade our lone compass,

Become swans instead, adrift in glaze-

Light, kilned in the arms of each other

Into vessel-vassal new. Or shrew,

As the case may be. What would you do?   

Listen to the footsteps in the thistles.

Put the kettle on for tea, and whisper it to me.

The Love Cook

The Love Cook

by Ron Padgett

Let me cook you some dinner.   

Sit down and take off your shoes   

and socks and in fact the rest   

of your clothes, have a daquiri,   

turn on some music and dance   

around the house, inside and out,   

it's night and the neighbors   

are sleeping, those dolts, and   

the stars are shining bright,   

and I've got the burners lit   

for you, you hungry thing.

The Amulet

The Amulet

by Donald (Grady) Davidson

Thou twist of gold, woven so curiously,

Be filled with warmth and urgent tenderness,

And cool not on her throat's white nakedness,

Like metal death, but burn insistently,

Reminding her of me!

To save her from the serpent's little eye

I set a stone of blue chalcedony

Within a cunning loop—so it shall be

Aware and mindful when her lashes lie

Untaught of danger nigh.

To keep her from the dragon's hungry tooth

In seven laps the quorls were subtly twined;

From seven rivers grains of gold were mined,

Hammered by black elves' mauls, and tempered sooth

In hissing brews uncouth.

So lie within my satchel, Amulet,

With many another dull and boughten thing,

Till I am done with all my wandering

And fix thee pendant on the carcanet

Around her white neck set.

For I have graven some small incantation

In feathery lines upon this rounded wire—

King Solomon made such for his desire,

And Sheba's throat was warm for subjugation

Hearing the King's translation.

The Gift

The Gift

by Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he'd removed

the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man

planting something in a boy's palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife's right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this,

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

I did what a child does

when he's given something to keep.

I kissed my father.

My Secret Flag

My Secret Flag

by Rachel Loden

   What a giant I must seem to them, an exhausted giant who dozes above her sewing.

 

   Asleep in mid-stitch, sorting the day's haul of cinders, rubies, griefs—

 

   They were laughing and carrying on, their tiny silver needles flying in and out, tiny silver thimbles on their fingers.

 

   It's no use of course, keeping secrets from them, when chattering is almost their religion.

 

   Some held corners of the flag like an enormous quilt, and some danced on little shelves above the workshop.

 

   They were so merrie that I fell asleep again.

 

   In the morning my beautiful flag was finished, every stitch in place and every seam.

 

   So now I raise it—slowly, underneath a secret sky.

 

   Near the door to the half-daft and the cradle of kleptocracy.

 

   Where it rips and shivers, rips and shivers once more

 

   And makes me furiously glad, and fills me up with serious pleasure.

Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn

Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn

by Charles Wright

Three years ago, in the afternoons,

                                            I used to sit back here and try

To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,

But never could figure it—

This object and that object

Never contained the landscape

                                                          nor all of its implications,

This tree and that shrub

Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient

I took from or carried to,

                                               nor do they do so now,

Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate,

Looking to see what adds up.

Everything comes from something,

                                           only something comes from nothing,

Lao Tzu says, more or less.

Eminently sensible, I say,

Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers.

Delicate as an earring,

                                          it carries its emptiness like a child

It would be rid of.

I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything

Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise—

But one and one make nothing, he adds,

                                                                           endless and everywhere,

The shadow that everything casts.

The Elephant

The Elephant

by Dan Chiasson

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel

          that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy.

Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion,

          once I was not the elephant I find I am.

My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched

          trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was

somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness

          and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me

to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it

          in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind

I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man

          of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers   

breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments

          with balance, the high-wire act and cones.

We elephants are images of humility, as when we

          undertake our melancholy migrations to die.

Did you know, though, that elephants were taught

          to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves?

Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,

          tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer.

That's not humility you see on our long final journeys:

          it's procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

An Ode to Himself

An Ode to Himself

by Ben Jonson

Where dost thou careless lie,

Buried in ease and sloth?

Knowledge that sleeps doth die;

And this security,

It is the common moth

That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.

Are all th' Aonian springs

Dried up? lies Thespia waste?

Doth Clarius' harp want strings,

That not a nymph now sings?

Or droop they as disgrac'd,

To see their seats and bowers by chatt'ring pies defac'd?

If hence thy silence be,

As 'tis too just a cause,

Let this thought quicken thee:

Minds that are great and free

Should not on fortune pause;

'Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause.

What though the greedy fry

Be taken with false baites

Of worded balladry,

And think it poesy?

They die with their conceits,

And only piteous scorn upon their folly waits.

Then take in hand thy lyre,

Strike in thy proper strain,

With Japhet's line aspire

Sol's chariot for new fire,

To give the world again;

Who aided him will thee, the issue of Jove's brain.

And since our dainty age

Cannot endure reproof,

Make not thyself a page

To that strumpet, the stage,

But sing high and aloof,

Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof.

Ghost of a Trance

Ghost of a Trance

by Nathaniel Mackey

 

    Gray morning, blue morning, a

feather blown between. Mashed

  earth incumbent, gone up from,

                                                             never

      more naked if ever to be naked,

        brink what it was to be on...

  Where next we came stick-figure

    people greeted us. Abstract

                                                       was

abstract, also something else. Line,

    shape, extension each other

   than itself, of number we'd have

       said the same... Aspect arrested

     us, riveted we stood... Stick-

   figure epiphany held us in our

                                                           tracks,

       everyone's bones in full view...

                                                               Gray

     morning, blue morning, an unheard

string between. Bad heads' morning

   reluctance, ennui's next-day dispatch...

                                                                           We

       were chill, shiver, exegetic sweat, backed-

     up interpreters put upon by sluff, none

of us could say what was what. Pale

  admonishment poised upon lack,

                                                               like

     to unlike, pale strain recumbent, re-

       combinant, rude amniotic straw...

   Took leave, leave long since taken,

                                                                  awoke

       to what would otherwise not have been.

We contested birth, we wanted to be pre-

  andoumboulouous, done-dead gnostics

                                                                           again...

     Sound bubbled up, it kept bubbling, sonic

   residue, sonic remit. A fickle sonance,

fraught sonance, warning we knew nothing,

    stick-figure entourage otherwise issue-

  less, beginning to be remiss it seemed...

                                                                           Erst-

 while ecstatics' lapsed enchantment, trance

     gone none could say since when...

                                                                    Ghost

        of what lifted us, ghost what lifted us,

                                                                             erstwhile

      enchantment between... Fell back, full-out

  extended. Pilgrim someone called me, I said

    no, then I said yes... Brax was on the box

was what it was, toned uncertainty Stick-figure

       counsel all air, edge, angle, down from where

                                                                                          we'd

      been and we were again where the Alone lived,

          adage, had it not been so abstract, it might've

        been... Long day of the abalone-shell sunset...

                                                                                            Stood

           among redwoods expecting the worst... What

        was of note and what abjured nothing. What

                                                                                          was

      all, none, one, all the

   same

                   _________________

      It was a ghost of a trance. I was a

guest of the trance. What went on we

  blamed on the ghost... It was the

        ghost of a trance, each of us a 

                                                               guest

    of the trance. No two times were the

                                                                       same...

       When we hit a wrong not we said

   nothing. When we hit the right note

      we said so what... Tell my horse,

        we were told, fluke solace, horse

                                                                    we

       were mounted by... What was done

        was done by the ghost, gray morning,

                                                                             blue

     morning, eternity be-

   tween

The Waning Moon

The Waning Moon

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky East,

A white and shapeless mass.

The Whitsun Weddings

The Whitsun Weddings

by Philip Larkin

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

    Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   

The river's level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   

    For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and   

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped   

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass   

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth   

Until the next town, new and nondescript,   

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise

    The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys   

The interest of what's happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls   

I took for porters larking with the mails,   

And went on reading. Once we started, though,   

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

    Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   

More promptly out next time, more curiously,   

And saw it all again in different terms:   

The fathers with broad belts under their suits   

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;   

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.   

    Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define   

Just what it saw departing: children frowned   

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

    The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast   

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say

    I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   

And someone running up to bowl—and none   

Thought of the others they would never meet   

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   

    Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   

Travelling coincidence; and what it held   

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.