"Another September," by Thomas Kinsella

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

Dreams fled away, this country bedroom, raw
With the touch of the dawn, wrapped in a minor peace,
Hears through an open window the garden draw
Long pitch black breaths, lay bare its apple trees,
Ripe pear trees, brambles, windfall-sweetened soil,
Exhale rough sweetness against the starry slates.
Nearer the river sleeps St. John's, all toil
Locked fast inside a dream with iron gates.

Domestic Autumn, like an animal
Long used to handling by those countrymen,
Rubs her kind hide against the bedroom wall
Sensing a fragrant child come back again
--Not this half-tolerated consciousness
That plants its grammar in her yielding weather
But that unspeaking daughter, growing less
Familiar where we fell asleep together.

Wakeful moth wings blunder near a chair,
Toss their light shell at the glass, and go
To inhabit the living starlight. Stranded hair
Stirs on still linen. It is as though
The black breathing that billows her sleep, her name,
Drugged under judgement, waned and--bearing daggers
And balances--down the lampless darkness they came,
Moving like women: Justice, Truth, such figures.

We Were Emergencies by Buddy Wakefield

[scovilleunit.livejournal.com]

We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.

But tonight let us not become tragedies.

We are not funeral homes

with propane tanks in our windows

lookin’ like cemeteries.

Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.

Let go.

Tonight, poets, let’s turn our wrists so far backwards

the razor blades in our pencil tips

can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.

Step into this.

With your airplane parts.

Move forward.

And repeat after me with your heart:

I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.

Make love to me

like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.

Go slow.

I’m new to this,

but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop

without jumping.

I have realized that the moon

did not have to be full for us to love it.

That we are not tragedies

stranded here beneath it.

That if our hearts

really broke

every time we fell from love

I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.

But hearts don’t break, y’all,

they bruise and get better.

We were never tragedies.

We were emergencies.

You call 9 – 1 – 1.

Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.