The Wild Iris

[Louise Glück]

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

On a False Spring

[Joseph Massey]

The names
we don't
remember, how

they flower—
smeared a-
long the field's

edge—
beyond our
mouths.

DIRIGIBLE. DOG BREATH. TIMBUKTU.

[Matt Hart]

If you are a lava lamp, then I am a broken
heating element, then the freezer stays cooler
and we are preserved as smoldering finches
and blood oranges.

If a balloon in your mouth feels like hooray
followed by a cotton seed. followed by a tumor,
then the sanitarium is unnecessary
as you are deeply exploding.

If the report comes back, No intelligent life,
then no breath, no maraschino cherries, no
antennae, no win.

Here, I can only think: clog, puff of smoke,
abstract blob of burned plastic bags.

everything in this house of ants and lizards,
from the firecrackers down to the fat lady smoking
cigarettes on the buckling ice rink,
is conditional.

If I'm the one who never forgets, then you two
never remember.

Re-Statement of Romance

[Wallace Stevens]

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

LOVE IS WHEN A BOAT IS BUILT FROM ALL THE EYELASHES IN THE OCEAN

[Zachary Schomburg]

When the bats
break
from the mouth of
the cave
hold on tight
at my waist.

If I fall
into the ocean
bury what washes up
beneath the mattress
of my first bed.

When our eyelashes fall out
it does not mean we are about to die
it means we are about to be saved.

We should look
directly into the sun.

We should
expect a boat.

A RETURN

[Matthew Zupruder]

My hair is white.
So the journey was long.

I must have visited many ports.

Or just one,
where I stayed a long time
forgetting my language.

I bring you no fine scraps of cloth
in my empty hands.

And this bird on my shoulder
who remembers your name.

One of the Butterflies

[W.S. Merwin]

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn into pain

Selected Recent and New Errors

[Dean Young]

My books are full of mistakes
but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out
as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt
the new kid caught his arm in.
Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred
legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office
with an ignored view of the river
pretending to be asleep, pretending
to have insight into its muddy self.
You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,
try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm
in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know
it’s the quickness of its death that reveals
the quality of the product, its proof.
I don’t know what I’m talking about either.
Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself
I’ve got these words that mean completely
different things inside myself
and it’s tearing me apart?
My errors are even bigger than that.
You start taking down the walls of your house,
sooner or later it’ll collapse
but not before you can walk around
with your eyes closed, rolled backwards
and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker
and your own damn self hanging there.
Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight
in snow that lasts about twenty minutes
longer than a life held together
by the twisted silver baling wire
of deception and stealth.
But I ain’t confessing nothing.
On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds
that don’t have names either.
I do not remember the word dew.
I do not remember what I told you
with your ear in my teeth.
Further and further into the weeds.
We have absolutely no proof
god isn’t an insect
rubbing her hind legs together to sing.
Or boring into us like a yellow jacket
into a fallen, overripe pear.
Or an assassin bug squatting over us,
shoving a proboscis right through
our breast plate then sipping.
How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

Guide to Nowhere

[Jeffrey McDaniel]

I wear a patch
over my right eye.
Not because
it's damaged.
I'm saving the eye
for a rainy day,
saving it from
all this crap.
One day I'll
go to the desert,
and I'll switch
the patch to my
left eye. And
I'll only look
at cacti, and
butterflies, and
jackrabbits, but
never in the mirror
and never at
the sky, and like
this I'll train
myself to see
the difference
between what's real
and manmade.