Winter Syntax

[watashi.livejournal.com]

Cross posted to my journal
( Winter Syntax )

(no subject)

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

Our Other Sister
For Ellen

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who'd gone away.
What my motives were I can't recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she'd stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I'd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.


Harrison, Jeffrey. Feeding the Fire. (Sarabande Books - 2001).

Jeffrey Harrison is a contemporary American author who has published three volumes of poetry, including his most recent book, Feeding the Fire. His first volume of poems, The Singing Underneath, was selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series. Jeffrey Harrison has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at several universities and at Philips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence.

Empyrean

[ex-fireandea353.livejournal.com]

Empyrean

Endlessly not heaven the sky
Goes on and on and the problem
With human life is that
Although there is nothing
Behind the blue but more
Blue we can’t see as far
As it goes. Or if we had a ship
We can’t go there, although
It’s the same as here
So who cares?

Or if we had a rocket we can’t
Go there. Or if we had a rocket
And a thousand years.
Or if we could ride a light ray
And had a thousand
Thousand years and our cells
Never broke down and our hearts
Never broke down and our eyes
Stayed fixed on that far blue,
Which isn’t blue, and didn’t dim

For a thousand thousand years—
Still we could never go there
And even if we could land
On that final blue beach,
Then what? Your cells would burst
At last, your heart break
Remembering me gone mortal
So long ago and so far away,
As mine breaks now, bearing this
Immensity of blue.

--Mary Baine Campbell

Denise Levertov, "The Quest"

[rachigurl5.livejournal.com]

The Quest
High, hollowed in green
above the rocks of reason
lies the crater lake
whose ice the dreamer breaks
to find a summer season.

'He will plunge like a plummet down
far into hungry tides'
they cry, but as the sea
climbs to a luner magnet
so the dreamer pursues
the lake where loves resides.

Insomnia

[joseishijin.livejournal.com]

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

- Elizabeth Bishop