Summer Nocturne

By Stephen Dunn

Let us love this distance, since those
who do not love each other are
not separated.
- Simone Weil


Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence,
no doubt at what's in the silence,
a deer perhaps pruning the rhododendron
or that raccoon with its brilliant fingers
testing the garbage can lid by the shed.

Night I've chosen a book to help me think
about the long that's in longing, "the space across
which desire reaches." Night that finally needs music
to quiet the dog and whatever enormous animal
night itself is, appetite without limit.

Since I seem to want to be hurt a little,
it's Stan Getz and "It Never Entered My Mind,"
and to back him up Johnnie Walker Black
coming down now from the cabinet to sing
of its twelve lonely years in the dark.

Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort.
Starting to love this distance.
Starting to feel how present you are in it.

What Goes On

By Stephen Dunn

After the affair and the moving out,
after the destructive revivifying passion,
we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more
on its periphery. She spent many nights
alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television. When she got cancer
she kept it to herself until she couldn’t
keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated
and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back—
his wife, who after all had only fallen
in love as anyone might
who hadn’t been in love in a while—

and he held her, so different now,
so thin, her hair just partially
grown back. He held her like a new woman

and what she felt
felt almost as good as love had,
and each of them called it love
because precision didn’t matter anymore.

And we who’d been part of it,
often rejoicing with one
and consoling the other,

we who had seen her truly alive
and then merely alive,
what could we do but revise
our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

Lament for the Makers

By Frank Bidart


Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father's ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

                   •

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.


(From 'Star Dust')

The Last Hours

By Stephen Dunn

There's some innocence left,
and these are the last hours of an empty afternoon
at the office, and there's the clock
on the wall, and my friend Frank
in the adjacent cubicle selling himself
on the phone.
                            I'm twenty-five, on the shaky
ladder up, my father's son, corporate,
clean-shaven, and I know only what I don't want,
which is almost everything I have.
                            A meeting ends.
Men in serious suits, intelligent men
who've been thinking hard about marketing snacks,
move back now to their window offices, worried
or proud. The big boss, Horace,
had called them in to approve this, reject that—
the big boss, a first-name, how's-your-family
kind of assassin, who likes me.
                            It's 1964.
The sixties haven't begun yet. Cuba is a larger name
than Vietnam. The Soviets are behind
everything that could be wrong. Where I sit
it's exactly nineteen minutes to five. My phone rings.
Horace would like me to stop in
before I leave. Stop in. Code words,
leisurely words, that mean now.
                           Would I be willing
to take on this? Would X's office, who by the way
is no longer with us, be satisfactory?
About money, will this be enough?
I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,
but—I don't know from what calm place
this comes—I'm translating
his beneficence into a lifetime, a life
of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,
thinking snack thoughts.
                           On the elevator down
it's a small knot, I'd like to say, of joy.
That's how I tell it now, here in the future,
the fear long gone.
By the time I reach the subway it's grown,
it's outsized, an attitude finally come round,
and I say it quietly to myself, I quit,
and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure
of nothing else but.


From 'What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009'

Scheherazade

By Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
                                                                      and dress them in warm clothes again.
        How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
                  It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
        it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
                          how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
                                                                                                          to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means
        we're inconsolable.
                                                    Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
                                                                              Tell me we'll never get used to it.


From 'Crush'

Boot Theory

By Richard Siken

A man walks into a bar and says:
                                                   Take my wife—please.
                                                                                                So you do.
    You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her
                                                          and she leaves you and you're desolate.
You're on your back in your undershirt, a broken man
                      on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains
                                                                                                                on the ceiling
        And you can hear the man in the apartment above you
                                          taking off his shoes.
You hear the first boot hit the floor and you're looking up,
                                                                                                    you're waiting
        because you thought it would follow you, you thought there would be
                          some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together
                but here we are in the weeds again,
                                                                                                    here we are
in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn't make sense.
                          And then the second boot falls.
                                                                      And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.

        A man walks into a bar and says:
                                                   Take my wife—please.
                                                                                But you take him instead.
You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,
            and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you
                                                                                                and he keeps on kicking you.
    You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don't work.
                      Boots continue to fall to the floor
                                                                                in the apartment above you.
You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.
            Your co-workers ask
                                      if everything's okay and you tell them
                                                                            you're just tired.
    And you're trying to smile. And they're trying to smile.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
                                         Make it a double.
            A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
                                                                                Walk a mile in my shoes.
A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:
                              I only wanted something simple, something generic...
    But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.
A man takes his sadness down the river and throws it in the river
            but then he's still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                      but then he's still left with his hands.


From 'Crush'

The Hollow Men

By T.S. Eliot


Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

          A penny for the Old Guy



          I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


          II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


          III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


          IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


          V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                                                        For Thine is the Kingdom


Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                                                                        Life is very long


Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                                                        For Thine is the Kingdom


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the


This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


************


From 'Collected Poems: 1909-1962'
Read about T.S. Eliot

No Long Way Round

By Jorie Graham


Evening. Not quite. High winds again.
                                                                        I have time, my time, as you also do, there, feel
                                                                        it. And a heart, my heart, as you do,
remember it. Also am sure of things, there are errands, this was a voyage, one
                                                                        has an ordained part to play....This will turn out to be
                                                                        not true
but is operative here for me this evening as the dusk settles. One has to believe
                                                                        furthermore in the voyage of others. The dark
                                                                        gathers. It is advancing but there is no
progress. It is advancing with its bellyful of minutes. It seems to chew as it
                                                                        darkens. There was, in such a time, in addition,
an obligation to what we called telling
                                                                        the truth. We
                                                                        liked
                                                                        the feeling
                                                                        of it—truth—whatever we mean by it—I can still
feel it in my gaze, tonight, long after it is gone, that finding of all the fine discriminations,
                                                                        the edges, purse holding the goods, snap shut, there
you got it, there, it is yours it is true—hold on to it as
                                                                        light thins
                                                                        holding the lavender in its heart, firm, slow, beginning to
hide it, to steal it, to pretend it never had
                                                                        existence. At the window, I stand spell-
bound. Your excellency the evening, I begin. What is this trickiness. I am passing
                                                                        through your checkpoint to a nation that is
disappearing, is disappearance. My high-ceilinged room (I look
                                                                        up) is going to survive
                                                                        invisibility
                                                                        for the while longer we
                                                                        have the means
to keep it. I look at the pools of light in it. The carpet shining-up its weave—
burgundy, gold, aqua, black. It is an emergency actually, this waking and doing and
cleaning up afterwards, & then sleep again, & then up you go, the whole 15,000 years of
the inter-
                                                                        glacial period, & the orders & the getting done &
the getting back in time & the turning it back on, & did you remember, did you pass, did
you lose the address again, didn't the machine spit it up, did you follow the machine—
yes, yes, did, & the
                                                                        wall behind it
                                                                        pronounced the large bush then took it
back. I can almost summon it. Like changing a tense. I peer back through this time to
                                                                        that one. You will not believe it
                                                                        when the time
comes. Also how we mourned our dead—had
                                                                        ample earth, took time, opened it, closed
                                                                        it—"our earth, our
                                                                        dead" we called
                                                                        them, & lived
bereavement, & had strict understanding of defeat and victory....Evening,
                                                                        what are the betrayals that are left,
                                                                        and whose? I ask now
as the sensation of what is coming places its shoulders on the whole horizon, I see it
                                                                        though it is headless, intent
                                                                        fuzzy, possible outcomes
unimaginable. You have your imagination, says the evening. It is all you have
                                                                        left, but its neck is open, the throat is
cut, you have forgotten how to sing, or to want
                                                                        to sing. It is
                                                                        strange but you still
                                                                        need to tell
your story—how you met, the coat one wore, the shadow of which war, and how it lifted,
                                                                        and how peace began again
                                                                        for that part of
the planet, & the first Spring after your war, & how "life" began again, what
                                                                        normal was—thousands of times
                                                                        you want to say this—normal—holding another's
hand—& the poplars when you saw how much they had grown while you were
                                                                        away—
                                                                        the height of them! & the paper lantern you were
                                                                        given to hold—the lightness of it, of its
fire, how it lit the room—it was your room—you were alone in it and free to sleep
                                                                        without worry and to
dream—winter outside and the embroidered tablecloth—fruit and water—you didn't
even wonder where was the tree that gave such fruit, you lay in blankets as if they were
non-existent, heat was a given, the rain coming down hard now, what a nice sound—you
could ruminate, the mind traveled back in those days, at ease, it recalled the evening's
con-
                                                                        versation, the light that fell on x's face, how he
turned when a certain person entered the room—you saw him turn—saw shyness then
jealousy enter his eyes as he looked away—and did he see you see him—and the em-
broidered linen handkerchief you saw a frightened woman in the subway slide from her
pocket, use and replace—then sleep was near—somewhere you were a child and then this
now, nightfall and ease, hospitality—
                                                                        there are sounds the planet will always make, even
if there is no one to hear them.


From 'Sea Change'

In the Café

By Louise Glück

It's natural to be tired of earth.
When you've been dead this long, you'll probably be tired of heaven.
You do what you can do in a place
but after a while you exhaust that place,
so you long for rescue.

My friend falls in love a little too easily.
Every year or so a new girl—
If they have children he doesn't mind;
he can fall in love with children also.

So the rest of us get sour and he stays the same,
full of adventure, always making new discoveries.
But he hates moving, so the women have to come from here, or near here.

Every month or so, we meet for coffee.
In summer, we'll walk around the meadow, sometimes as far as the mountain.
Even when he suffers, he's thriving, happy in his body.
It's partly the women, of course, but not that only.

He moves into their houses, learns to like the movies they like.
It's not an act—he really does learn,
the way someone goes to cooking school and learns to cook.

He sees everything with their eyes.
He becomes not what they are but what they could be
if they weren't trapped in their characters.
For him, this new self of his is liberating because it's invented—

he absorbs the fundamental needs in which their souls are rooted,
he experiences as his own the rituals and preferences these give rise to—
but as he lives with each woman, he inhabits each version of himself
fully, because it isn't compromised by the normal shame and anxiety.

When he leaves, the women are devastated.
Finally they met a man who answered all their needs—
there was nothing they couldn't tell him.
When they meet him now, he's a cipher—
the person they knew didn't exist anymore.
He came into existence when they met,
he vanished when it ended, when he walked away.

After a few years, they get over him.
They tell their new boyfriends how amazing it was,
like living with another woman, but without the spite, the envy,
and with a man's strength, a man's clarity of mind.

And the men tolerate this, they even smile.
They stroke the woman's hair—
they know this man doesn't exist; it's hard for them to feel competitive.

You couldn't ask, though, for a better friend,
a more subtle observer. When we talk, he's candid and open,
he's kept the intensity we all had when we were young.
He talks openly of fear, of the qualities he detests in himself.
And he's generous—he knows how I am just by looking.
If I'm frustrated or angry, he'll listen for hours,
not because he's forcing himself, because he's interested.

I guess that's how he is with the women.
But the friends he never leaves—
with them, he's trying to stand outside his life, to see it clearly—

Today he wants to sit; there's a lot to say,
too much for the meadow. He wants to be face to face,
talking to someone he's known forever.

He's on the verge of a new life.
His eyes glow, he isn't interested in the coffee.
Even though it's sunset, for him
the sun is rising again, and the fields are flushed with dawn light,
rose colored and tentative.

He's himself in these moments, not pieces of the women
he's slept with. He enters their lives as you enter a dream,
without volition, and he lives there as you live in a dream,
however long it lasts. And in the morning, you remember
nothing of the dream at all, nothing at all.


From 'A Village Life'

The Clerk's Tale

By Spencer Reece

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call "Sir".
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped -
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
One of my fellow-workers is an old homosexual
who works hard and wears bracelets with jewels.
No one can rival his commission checks.
On his break he smokes a Benson & Hedges cigarette,
puffing expectantly as a Hollywood starlet.
He has carefully applied a layer of Clinique bronzer
to enhance the tan on his face and neck.
His hair is gone except for a few strands
which are combed across his scalp.
He examines his manicured lacquered nails.
I admire his studied attention to details:
his tie stuck to his shirt with masking tape,
his teeth capped, his breath mint in place.
The old homosexual and I laugh in the back
over a coarse joke involving an octopus.
Our banter is staccato, staged and close
like those "Spanish Dances" by Granados.
I sometimes feel we are in a musical -
gossiping backstage between our numbers.
He drags deeply on his cigarette.
Most of his life is over.
Often he refers to himself as "an old faggot".
He does this bemusedly, yet timidly.
I know why he does this.
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete -
and complete acceptance is always
bittersweet. Our hours are long. Our backs bent.
We are more gracious than English royalty.
We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.
Watch us face into the merchandise.
How we set up and take apart mannequins
as if we were performing autopsies.
A naked body, without pretense, is of no use.
It grows late.
I hear the front metal gate close down.
We begin folding the ties correctly according to color.
The shirts - Oxfords, broadcloths, pinpoints -
must be sized, stacked, or rehashed.
The old homosexual removes his right shoe,
allowing his gigantic bunion to swell.
There is the sound of cash being counted -
coins clinking, bills swishing, numbers whispered -
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. . .
We are changed when the transactions are done -
older, dirtier, dwarfed.
A few late customers gawk in at us.
We say nothing. Our silence will not be breached.
The lights go off, one by one -
the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.
Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?
We move to the gate. It goes up.
The gate's grating checkers our cheeks.
This is the Mall of America.
The light is bright and artificial,
yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.
You must travel down the long hallways to the exits
before you encounter natural light.
One final formality: the manager checks out bags.
The old homosexual reaches into his over-the-shoulder leather bag -
the one he bought on his European travels
with his companion of many years.
He finds a stick of lip balm and applies it to his lips
liberally, as if shellacking them.
Then he inserts one last breath mint
and offers one to me. The gesture is fraternal
and occurs between us many times.
At last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot,
where the thousands of cars have come
and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits,
disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul;
Minneapolis is sleek and St. Paul,
named after the man who had to be shown,
is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.