The Laughter of the Sphinx

The laughter of the Sphinx
caused my eyes to bleed

The blood from my eyes
flowed onto that ancient map

of sand
Ridiculous as I am

often have I been drawn
to such lands

rippling oceans of silence
and the distant, enigmatic glow

of burning shops and burning scrolls
overseen by river birds and mitered beasts

sad-eyed scholars and mournful scribes
omniscient ibises

and in the dust-clogged air
the laughter of the Sphinx

endlessly riddling, endlessly echoing,
loosing the blood's engulfing tide

Michael Palmer

Elektra in Mycenae

After Iphigenia dies it's a lot of where's Iphi?

A lot of where's Dad?

A lot of crawling into your mother's bed

A lot of Mom, I need you right now

A lot of nothing at all

A lot of clutching your brother's small hand at the grocery store

three green twenties and two eight-year-olds walk into a cereal aisle

A lot of dreams

hordes of deer

the war on cable blaring through the house

A lot of When Iphigenia was your age…

A lot of I'll do it myself

When your father comes home from the war (and he will) you will leap into his soldier arms and he will tell you how much he loves you because you are his smartest, alivest daughter and even if he did kill you it would be for the love of the gods who talk to you when you're asleep and you'd be happy to let him spill your blood for something that important especially if you got to look up at him while he did it

At night you stare at the sizzling television and watch men kill each other to see his face for a half-second

Casey J. King

Scientific Method

Picture the ocean. No.

Picture the entire thing,

all at once.

You are not doing it.

It's okay.

One day something terrible will happen,

and I will not be prepared.

James Tadd Adcox

Come. And Be My Baby

The highway is full of big cars

going nowhere fast

And folks is smoking anything that'll burn

Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass

And you sit wondering

where you're going to turn.

I got it.

Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow

But others say we've got a week or two

The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror

And you sit wondering

What you're gonna do

I got it.

Come. And be my baby.

Maya Angelou

Magdalene: The Woman Taken in Adultery

Teacher, they said to Jesus, The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say? —John 8:5

You know how it is when your speeding car spins on the ice at night

and you think here it is?

When the deer spring across the headlights?

When you begin to slip down the steep and icy steps?

Now imagine someone is about to push you, someone you know

and then they don't.

Marie Howe

The Eulogy I Didn't Give (XXIV)

My younger brother was afraid of thunder,

lightning. My father bought a recording of storms,

put it on the stereo, and rocked on the love seat

with my brother over and over,

until the sound meant comfort, warmth.

Much later, my brother became obsessed with meteorology

and dreamed of becoming a weatherman.

When I finally connected the early fear

with the later passion,

we were looking down at my father in his coffin.

Not my father but his body. More like an echo

of his flesh. No weather on his face.

I'd seen him often in a suit but never wearing a vest.

Pajamas would have made more sense.

The soft rain of the talking all around us

was a cocoon I wanted to live inside.

I heard the metronome of my heart

and thought of Quakers waiting for silence

to open its mouth. Of the hope

just below the surface of the phrase, keeping time.

Bob Hicok

Sad

It is sad to tip the kettle over the cup & discover there is no more tea in the kettle. It is sad when the diner is closed. It is sad when the hawk seizes the rat & sad when the hawk misses. It is sad when the child encounters too early. It is sad when a mother apologizes. It is sad when the aphids have chewed holes in the lacinato kale. It is sad when there is a shopping list taped to a refrigerator. It is sad in the morning, Bach or no Bach. It is sad in winter & depending on the city sadder in summer. It is sad to finish a book & sad to not finish. It is sad to make love imperfectly. it is sad when the body is ready but not the mind. It is sad when [ ] has left the group chat. It is sad when the wrong thing dies. It is sad when it is three in the morning & the wind is howling & the moon is like a burning umbrella oh god who will put up with me

Jeremy Radin

Elms

All day I tried to distinguish

need from desire. Now, in the dark,

I feel only bitter sadness for us,

the builders, the planers of wood,

because I have been looking

steadily at these elms

and seen the process that creates

the writhing, stationary tree

is torment, and have understood

it will make no forms but twisted forms.

Louise Gluck

Threadsuns

Threadsuns

above the grayblack wastes.

A tree-

high thought

grasps the light-tone: there are

still songs to sing beyond

mankind

Paul Celan
trans. Pierre Joris

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch's cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards.

Her tongue shrivels into gas...

Now, far from women's arms

and memory of women, in our father's hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you meant to leave,

as though it never happened.

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,

the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness, Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Louise Gluck

Sometimes I Pretend

I'm not me,

I only work for me.

This feels like

a secret motor

chirring inside my pocket.

I think, She will be so glad

when she sees the homework

neatly written.

She will be relieved

someone sharpened pencils,

folded clothes.

Naomi Shihab Nye

On Walking Backwards

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Anne Carson

"Who Remembers the Armenians?"

I remember them

and I ride the nightmare bus with them

each night

and my coffee, this morning

I'm drinking it with them

You, murderer—

Who remembers you?

Najwan Darwish

So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans

O Yes? Do they come on horses

with rifles, and say,

Ese gringo, gimmee your job?

And do you, gringo, take off your ring,

drop your wallet into a blanket

spread over the ground, and walk away?

I hear Mexicans are taking your jobs away.

Do they sneak into town at night,

and as you're walking home with a whore,

do they mug you, a knife at your throat,

saying, I want your job?

Even on TV, an asthmatic leader

crawls turtle heavy, leaning on an assistant,

and from a nest of wrinkles on his face,

a tongue paddles through flashing waves

of lightbulbs, of cameramen, rasping

"They're taking our jobs away."

Well, I've gone about trying to find them,

asking just where the hell are these fighters.

The rifles I hear sound in the night

are white farmers shooting blacks and browns

whose ribs I see jutting out

and starving children,

I see the poor marching for a little work,

I see small white farmers selling out

to clean-suited farmers living in New York,

who've never been on a farm,

don't know the look of a hoof or a the smell

of a woman's body bending all day long in fields.

I see this, and I hear only a few people

got all the money in this world, the rest

count their pennies to buy bread and butter.

Below that cool green sea of money,

millions and millions of people fight to live,

search for pearls in the darkest depths

of their dreams, hold their breath for years

trying to cross poverty to just having something.

The children are dead already. We are killing them,

that is what America should be saying;

on TV, in the streets, in offices, should be saying,

"We aren't giving the children a chance to live."

Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead.

What they really say is, let them die,

and the children too.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

At Pingshan Temple

It's the third time I pass by Pingshan Hall.

Half of my life went by with a snap

of the fingers. My teacher, Ouyang Xiu,

has been dead for ten years.

After ten years, his cursive calligraphy remains

breathing on the walls like a dragon

slaughtering a battalion of snakes.

I am supposed to come and write an elegy

to memorialize his literary legacy.

Instead, I insist on singing

about the poplars and willows in the spring breeze.

Don't say that whenever you turn back,

everything becomes emptiness.

What's ahead of you remains an illusion.

Su Shi

trans. Shangyang Fang