More Lies by Karin Gottshall

Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sister at the café—
even though I have no sister—just because it’s such
a beautiful thing to say. I’ve always thought so, ever since

I read a novel in which two sisters were constantly meeting
in cafés. Today, for example, I walked alone
on the wet sidewalk, wearing my rain boots, expecting

someone might ask where I was headed. I bought
a steno pad and a watch battery, the store windows
fogged up. Rain in April is a kind of promise, and it costs

nothing. I carried a bag of books to the café and ordered
tea. I like a place that’s lit by lamps. I like a place
where you can hear people talk about small things,

like the difference between azure and cerulean,
and the price of tulips. It’s going down. I watched
someone who could be my sister walk in, shaking the rain

from her hair. I thought, even now florists are filling
their coolers with tulips, five dollars a bundle. All over
the city there are sisters. Any one of them could be mine.

*****

Lose Something Everyday by Elizabeth Bishop

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.
None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look!
My last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

——-

- Elizabeth Bishop

WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

How the Body Prepares Itself by Gary Hardaway

My death is close enough now

that it corrupts the smells

and flavors of the world

and plants its swollen face

at the edge of every

view and vista.

So this is how the body

prepares itself to leave—

by spoiling the here and now

with chronic ill at ease.

http://fictionaut.com/stories/gary-hardaway/how-the-body-prepares-itself

TWELVE KINDS OF POEM by George Szirtes

http://dmdujour.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/twelve-kinds-of-poem/

T

Standard

from George Szirtes…

1. There are poems one feels a certain satisfaction in solving, but then the clues vanish in the snow and the rest is faultless snow.

2. There are poems that skip around like stoned goats: now you see me, now you don’t. Zap. Zowie. They come on goat feet and are goats.

3. There are poems with pain in their eyes. They haven’t slept for months. They need you. They are extraordinarily grateful to have found you.

4. There are poems with wrinkled brows and slow, hesitant hands. They point at sky, water, earth and suggest you kneel and pray with them.

5. There are poems that bare their painted breasts. These are my breasts, they declare! I painted them myself. I am proud, you hear. Proud!

6. There are poems so drunk on language they keep tripping over. That’s the point, you fool, they declare as they spill another drink over you.

7. There are poems that pretend they’re not poems. They smile ironically and ask: Did you think I was a poem? I am, but not the way you think.

8. There are poems that are genuinely angry. They grimace, snarl and threaten, but they’re awfully pally once you get to know them.

9. There are poems so quiet, so dreamlike, so full of whispers you think they are actually the ghosts of other poems lurking behind them.

10. There are poems so desperate for you to like them they keep offering you bouquets as though you had earned them. You haven’t.

11. There are poems that are spectacular disasters. They are very expensive. The sets are wonderful. It’s the make-up artists who win the Oscars.

12. There are poems that address you as though you were in a lecture theatre. They lose patience with you and throw their lecture notes at you. You lose them.

CAN YOU by Nicolas Guillen

Can You

                     For Lumir Civrny, in Prague

Can you sell me the air that passes through your fingers

and hits your face and undoes your hair?

Maybe you could sell me five dollars’ worth of wind,

or more, perhaps sell me a cyclone?

Maybe you would sell me

the thin air, the air

(not all of it) that sweeps

into your garden blossom on blossom

into your garden for the birds,

ten dollars of pure air.

                               

                                The air it turns and passes

                                with butterfly-like spins.

                                No one owns it,no one.

Can you sell me some sky,

the sky that’s blue at times,

or gray again at times,

a small part of your sky,

the one you bought – you think –with all the trees

of your orchard, as one who buys the ceiling with the house?

Can you sell me a dollar’s worth

of sky, two miles

of sky, a fragment of your sky,

whatever piece you can?

                                The sky is in the clouds.

                                The clouds are high, they pass.

                                No one owns them, no one.

Can you sell me some rain, the water

that has given you your tears and wets your tongue?

Can you sell me a dollar’s worth of water

from the spring, a pregnant cloud,

as soft and graceful as a lamb,

or even water fallen on the mountain,

or water gathered in the ponds

abandoned to the dogs,

or one league of the sea, a lake perhaps,

a hundred dollars’ worth of lake?

                                The water falls, it runs.

                                The water runs, it passes.

                                No one holds it, no one.

Can you sell me some land, the deep night

of the roots, the teeth of

dinosaurs and the scattered lime

of distant skeletons?

Can you sell me long since buried jungles,

                                birds now extinct,

fish fossilized, the sulphur

of volcanoes, a thousand million years

rising in spiral? Can you

sell me some land, can you

sell me some land, can you?

                                The land that’s yours is mine.

                                The feet of all walk on it.

                                No one owns it, no one.

                                                                                Nicolas Guillen

Li-Young Lee's: "Praise Them"

The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We’re the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn’t hear
what singing completes us?