sometimes a friend takes your hand in the dark...

Song for Connie

BY BILL BERKSON

The sun met the moon at the corner

           noon in thin air

Commotion you later

           choose to notice

Love shapes the heart

           that once was pieces

You take in hand

           the heart in mind

Your fate’s consistent

           alongside mine

Unless a mess

           your best guess

That is right, thanks, the intimate

           fact that you elect it

At corners, dressed or naked, with lips taste        

           full body, time thick or thin, fixated

Love, take heart

           as heart takes shape

And recognition

           ceases to be obscure

One line down the center

           another flying outward enters

Bill Berkson, "Song for Connie" from Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2009 by Bill Berkson.  Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press.

Take You Away

Thanks to Rafa

What the Bones Know 

What the Bones Know 

BY CAROLYN KIZER

Remembering the past

And gloating at it now,

I know the frozen brow

And shaking sides of lust

Will dog me at my death

To catch my ghostly breath.

 

          I think that Yeats was right,

          That lust and love are one.

          The body of this night

          May beggar me to death,

          But we are not undone

          Who love with all our breath.

 

                     I know that Proust was wrong,

                     His wheeze: love, to survive,

                     Needs jealousy, and death

                     And lust, to make it strong

                     Or goose it back alive.

                     Proust took away my breath.

                                  The later Yeats was right

                                 To think of sex and death

                                 And nothing else. Why wait

                                 Till we are turning old?

                                 My thoughts are hot and cold.

                                 I do not waste my breath.

 

Willy Ronis

A Song

BY ANNE FINCH, COUNTAnnie FincESS OF WINCHILSEA

Love, thou art best of Human Joys,

    Our chiefest Happiness below;

All other Pleasures are but Toys,

Musick without Thee is but Noise,

       And Beauty but an empty show.

Heav’n , who knew best what Man wou’d move,

    And raise his Thoughts above the Brute;

Said, Let him Be, and Let him Love;

That must alone his Soul improve,

       Howe’er Philosophers dispute.

something told me to wait...

Proud Flesh

This is the photography of Sally Mann

“It’s not a lack of confidence because I can’t argue with the fact that I’ve taken some good pictures,” Sally says. “But it’s just a raw fear that you’ve taken the last one.” – Sally Mann

What I want

I want to live beyond your scorn...
to be touched in those places only you can touch.

What I Want


I want

I want

I want a look that does not make fun of my lungs

I want a spring that has not matured

I want to share a Spring

I am the queen of my heart thanks love

I want when I wake up sleepers participant

I want a spring that does not want the summer

And a spring that takes me by surprise

To soothe my moods

I want the blood which is not without injury

And injuries not blinded by the blood

I want

I want

I want the darkness to reveal themselves to me

And a light that I do not discover

I want to exile a way that the return does not cross

I want a free Iliad Odyssey

I want poems that go beyond the shame of surprise

In consumption and other poems

That nestle in the shadow of words

I want a word that takes care of my silence

and peace which are equivalent excuse and pity

I want a question that does not take my answers

I want a father who does not forget me and a father that I forget

I want

I want

I want a race between freedom and sighs

I want to celebrate the kings who lost their crown

I want birds that do not jeopardize their wings

In the hermitage of the grain

I want a language that does not disturb the future

I want a polished stone in the silence of the well

I want to laugh at the roots of despotism branches

I want a howl that will shake up the wolves

I want high roofs to small towns

I want to thunder that does not deal kindly

In a flash of lightning and not rush into the clouds

I want

I want

I want to hold the ashes of a fire

I want a word that sounds collide

I want a long winding attracts dreams

I want all Arab women who hope to love

And men loyal to their man's name

I want

I want

I want the streets like ships and space

Where my soul can remember of my flesh

Abdul Rahman al-Touhmazi 1946 (Samarra, Iraq)

Photography by, Evgeniy Shaman