(no subject)

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"60"
The forced forsythia wet on the counter
because the first vase she chose was broken

The stirring in the tight buds when winter's
seal on the storehouse of daylight is broken

The meal without you I eat with my fingers
The slick give when the shrimp shells are broken

I carry this watch because the face tells
the time although the hands are broken

The emperor's men who thought the rebellion
would stop if the children's arms were broken

For the emperor's windows hurled stones made
from the stone houses the emperor left broken

The emperor's squads of heroic women
who touch the stripped men and deliver them broken

In my pockets bits of unused tickets
Smelling of smoke Borrowed Blue Broken

How she scrabbled on the floor to assemble
the pieces of what my sons had broken

Forgive me my stranger Whose eyes I can't meet
For what's beyond healing now What's broken

Shall I stop with the dumb leaper in my chest
On and on Keeping bad time Faithful Broken
--Suzanne Gardinier, from Today: 101 Ghazals

(no subject)

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Happiness"
I have been taught never to brag but now
I cannot help it: I keep
a beautiful garden, all abundance,
indiscriminate, pulling itself
from the stubborn earth: does it offend you
to watch me working in it,
touching my hands to the greening tips or
tearing the yellow stalk back, so wild
the living and the dead both
snap off in my hands?
The neighbor with his stuttering
fingers, the neighbor with his broken
love: each comes up my drive
to receive his pitying,
accustomed consolations, watches me
work in silence awhile, rises in anger,
walks back. Does it offend them to watch me
not mourning with them but working
fitfully, fruitlessly, working
the way the bees work, which is to say
by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure?
I can stand for hours among the sweet
narcissus, silent as a point of bone.
I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer
than your grief. It is such a small thing
to be proud of, a garden. Today
there were scrub jays, quail,
a woodpecker knocking at the white-
and-black shapes of trees, and someone's lost rabbit
scratching under the barberry: is it
( indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither, )

Catherine Pierce, “Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean”

[pergyleneism.livejournal.com]

Catherine Pierce, “Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean”

Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling
all around me, and me unable to stomach
that I might catch five but never ten thousand.
So I drop my hands to my sides and wait
to be buried. I open a book and the words
spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary,
piranha—of every story, every poem I’ll never
know well enough to conjure in sleep.
What’s the point of words if I can’t
own them all? I toss book after book
into my imaginary trashcan fire.
Or I think I’ll learn piano. At the first lesson,
we’re clapping whole and half notes
and this is childish, I’m better than this.
I’d like to leave playing Ravel. I’d like
to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit.
I have standards. Then on Saturday,
I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or
we watch a documentary on Antarctica.
The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin.
Everyone speaks English. Everyone names
a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft
on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once
and swore it was a great adventure. It was.
I think of how I’ll never go to Antarctica,
mainly because I don’t much want to. But
I should want to. I should be the girl
with a raft on her back. When I think
of all the mountains and monuments
and skyscapes I haven’t seen, all the trains
I should take, all the camels and mopeds
and ferries I should ride, all the scorching
hikes I should nearly die on, I press
my body down, down into the vast green
couch. If I step out the door, the infinity
of what I’ve missed will zorro me across
the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes
I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small
suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself.
Metaphorically, of course. I’m no loon.
Look—even my awestruck is half-assed.
But I’m so tired of the small steps—
the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer
hoarding, the one exquisite sentence
in a forest of exquisite sentences.
There is a globe welling up inside of me.
Mountain ranges ridging my skin,
oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still
long enough, I could become my own world.