Sailing through: blessing the boats by Lucille Clifton

blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

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What Work Is by Phillip Levine

In times of crisis, we learn, and love wins.

What Work Is
by Phillip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

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When Brevity is Brilliance–Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

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Concordance (Working Backward in Sleep) by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Concordance (Working Backward in Sleep)
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Working backward in sleep, the
last thing you numbed to is what
wakes you.

What if that image were Eros as
words?

What would it be like if you
contemplated my words and I felt
you?

Animals, an owl, frog, open their
eyes, and a mirror forms on the
ground.

When insight comes in a dream,
and events the next day
illuminate it, this begins your
streaming consciousness,
synchronicity, asymptotic lines
of the flights of concordances.

An owl opens its eyes in deep
woods.

For the first time, I write and you
don’t know me.

Milkweed I touch floats.

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For the Executive Director of the Fallen

For the Executive Director of the Fallen
by Tom Sleigh

In memoriam Liam Rector

The little boy crying out
Weenie Weenie
in self-panicking delight,
waving his little cock
under the banner

of the sun, seemed pure Blake,
all anarchy and energy,
an innocence unfrightened
of itself that shook the lake’s
waters and unsettled

the strained composures
and appointed certainties
of whatever Absolute Speaker
had been ranting in my brain:
Peace Through Strength

Justice Must Be Ours–
so many demon faces
in the glass city.
Each pubic triangle
seemed, under the bathing suits,

to grow electrical and crackle
with a sexual shock
that made me turn my face away:
and who should be there
but you, my dear Lord of Misrule,

blowing smoke in all our faces,
the clean bullet hole in your forehead
above your self-ironic smile:
Don’t let the monkeys
stop typing–

and after I swam
and I was sitting on the bank,
after the boy and his parents
had picked up and gone home,
I played the Noh play over for you

in the tape loop of the void
where your voice and laughter
so casually reside:
how the mother
gone searching for her

missing son finds him dancing
by the lake, and as she tries
to hold him he slips through
her arms just as she slips
through his arms–

and as she cries out
in perfect pitch in perfect time
to the shrieking bamboo flute
that her boy has drowned
she understands that she too

has drowned, that she too
is a ghost returning
to dance as they
dance together in a tighter
and tighter round.

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Poor Boy Long Way From Home–In Memory of Liam Rector

Liam Rector 1949-2007

(Painting by Curt Pilgrim)

Cheers, Big Dog. As always, in awe…………

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The Hour and What is Dead Li Young Lee

The Hour and What is Dead
by Li Young Lee

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.

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In Memory: Mahmoud Darwish

Poet Mahmoud Darwish dies at 67

Mahmoud Darwish, the world’s most recognized Palestinian poet, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died yesterday in Houston, Texas. He was 67. He died following open heart surgery.

Born to a Muslim family in historical Palestine, he emerged as a Palestinian cultural icon who eloquently described his people’s struggle for independence, and as a vocal critic of both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. He gave voice to the Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their declaration of independence and helped forge a Palestinian national identity. Darwish first gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, Bird without Wings.

In Jerusalem
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy . . . ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t believe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Mohammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me . . . and I forgot, like you, to die.

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“Father of that silence”–Larry Levis

From “Linnets” by Larry Levis

This is a good page.
It is blank,
and getting blanker.
My mother and father
are falling asleep over it.
My brother is finishing a cigarette;
he looks at the blank moon.
My sisters walk gravely in circles.
My wife sees through it, through blankness.
My friends stop laughing, they listen
to the wind in a room in Fresno, to the wind
of this page, which is theirs,
which is blank.

They are all tired of reading,
they want to go home,
they won’t be saying goodbye.

When they are gone,
the page will be crumpled,
thrown into the street.
Around it, sparrows will be feeding
on bits of garbage.
The linnets will be singing.
A man will awaken on his deathbed,
not yet cured.

I will not have written these words,
I will be that silence slipping around the bend
in the river, where it curves out of sight among weeds,
the silence in which a car backfires and drives away,
and the father of that silence.

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Nothing Twice by Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Twice
by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

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