billy collins

[cinderellahips.livejournal.com]

forgetfulness

Miguel Hernandez, 'Death's Neighbor'

[the-grynne.livejournal.com]

DEATH'S NEIGHBOR

Neighborhood patio that nobody rents
like a town of arid honeycombs,
adorned with memories and shit, the walls
exude silence and blinkers for my sight.

Within, here walked my neighbor Death
resting the the shadow of gravediggers,
fawned upon by a servile guardian of tombs,
here, well protected from the few and worries
the dead argue obstinately among themselves
competing in their bones as in their memorials.

I hear a voice of funereal tone,
some crows that inform my grieving heart
making me swallow obscenities,
flinging in my face uncertain illusions
which anxiety reflects in its mirror.

What remains of this sequestered field,
in these mines of coal and lead,
of so many imprisoned by inexorable order?

There is nothing without an exploited hill of wealth.
Those buried with crook and mitre,
the aristocracy of death,
those girls who died of arid chastity
whose thighs never knew the plough,
the harshly lavish thrusts of the picador's goad,
corpses with wounds surrounded by horns,
all those deprived of air and love
are suckled now with lodging-house dust.

( For whom are the living epitaphs )

Fireflies - Karl Kirchwey

[jastenreadsmuch.livejournal.com]

Those nights the fireflies love best—
windless and a little humid—
when they are current in the pasture,
busy in their greeny traffic,
signaling beneath the stars
("Like a nightclub's marquee," she says,
remembering Fifty-Second Street),
then I think pleasure is like this,
accomplished in a perfect silence
undeceived by loneliness.

And in the morning on the lawn,
seedpods of Eastern cottonwood
lie scattered open, white and brilliant,
as if true to some child's account
of what pleasure becomes with daylight.