What Remains, by Ellery Akers

[sandokai.livejournal.com]

What Remains
by Ellery Akers


Years ago, one night when I was sad, I asked for a sign;
I've forgotten why.
All I remember now
is that two deer stepped onto the beach below:
their hooves clinked when they crossed the shale,
and when they walked up the beach,
their hoof prints filled with seawater.
Each pool held a moon.
I sat on that rock and tried to understand what it meant.
The stink of kelp floated closer;
coarse fronds washed back and forth
while the sea breathed below me.
Now I know it wasn't a sign.
It was just thirty or forty holes, shining.

Purna Bahadur Vaidya, "Water Is Water"

[the-grynne.livejournal.com]

WATER IS WATER

Water--
never blocks the light--
its ever moving skin
radiates; its single vision parsed into colors
explicates what's embodied
within light

That rainbow
water sketches on a blue slate
is a disquisition--
--what is and what is seen
borne forth in their fullness
by light

Me?--That very drop!
that attempts to write of light:
self emergent; the enlivened heat of it,
and the gentleness
resplendent on its surface
To express that
in the vastness outside itself


PURNA BAHADUR VAIDYA

Translated from the Nepal Bhasa (Newari) by Wayne Amtzis

A request and Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

[telnaf.livejournal.com]

I am graduating from high school in two weeks and I am looking for some poems about moving on in life or about adventure or taking a risk? Thanks!
And now, a poem that was given to me on my last day of classes:

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sen and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

crossroads in the past // john ashbery

[turnyourankle.livejournal.com]

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,
but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.
"That's silly. How can there be a wrong direction?
'It bloweth where it listeth,' as you know, just as we do
when we make love or do something there are no rules for."

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.
Just don't ask me what it was. Pretend I've dropped the subject.
No, now you've got me interested, I want to know
exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?
I'm sitting here dialing my cellphone
with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel
with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.
We've got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,
talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know
that's probably what's wrong -- the beginnings concept, I mean.
I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some
sometime. We'd stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards
drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves
sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly
crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn't fully
know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly
amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

E-MAIL - Reetika Vazirani

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

E-MAIL

Lastly, D, I wanted to be rich.
I would give you money to visit
and pay the taxi driver twice the fare.

That's a lie!
It was only a partly charitable wish.
I wanted to eat and dress like a pharoah or rani,
to be part of that drama in the elevator at Tiffany's.

Do I covet money?
Of course! To fly over.
Wouldn't it be nice to get in bed,
listen to Ella and Louis, and neck all night?

What a wonderful century
think of all its glory
and how we met over coffee
we ate cake all evening.
We didn't do anything for anybody else
on that fateful day.

-- Reetika Vazirani