"Autobiography [Polish it Like a Piece of Silver]" by Richard Brautigan

I am standing in the cemetery at Byrds, Texas.
What did Judy say? "God-forsaken is beautiful, too."
A very old man who has cancer on his face and takes
care of the cemetery, is raking a grave in such a
manner as to almost polish it like a piece of silver.

An old dog stands beside him. It's a hot day: 105.
What am I doing out here in west Texas, standing in
a cemetery? The old man wonders about that, too.
My presence has become a part of his raking. I know
that he is also polishing me.

Recommended: "Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]" by William Carlos Williams

I

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind.  Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.  All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens:  clarity, outline of leaf


But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them:  rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken




Recommended by Adina Johnson.

 

Recommended: "Humanity I Love You" by E.E. Cummings

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

Recommended by Adina Johnson.

"The Genius" by Leonard Cohen

For you 
I will be a ghetto Jew 
and dance 
and put white stockings 
on my twisted limbs 
and poison wells 
across the town 

For you 
I will be an apostate Jew 
and tell the Spanish priest 
of the blood vow 
in the Talmud 
and where the bones 
of the child are hid 
For you 
I will be a banker Jew 
and bring to ruin 
a proud old hunting king 
and end his line 

For you 
I will be a Broadway Jew 
and cry in theatres 
for my mother 
and sell bargain goods 
beneath the counter 

For you 
I will be a doctor Jew 
and search 
in all the garbage cans for foreskins 
to sew back again 

For you 
I will be a Dachau Jew 
and lie down in lime 
with twisted limbs 
and bloated pain 
no mind can understand 

“A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had

watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and

he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was

like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly

when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One

night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she

turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like

that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and

when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance

that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--

withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said,

"I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin

through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the

porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found

when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the

bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was

full of dead bees.

Recommended: "Soul Kitchen" by Jim Morrison

Well, the clock says it's time to close now 
I guess I'd better go now 
I'd really like to stay here all night 
The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes 
Street lights share their hollow glow 
Your brain seems bruised with numb surprise 
Still one place to go 
Still one place to go 

Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen 
Warm my mind near your gentle stove 
Turn me out and I'll wander baby 
Stumblin' in the neon groves 

Well, your fingers weave quick minarets 
Speak in secret alphabets 
I light another cigarette 
Learn to forget, learn to forget 
Learn to forget, learn to forget 

Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen 
Warm my mind near your gentle stove 
Turn me out and I'll wander baby 
Stumblin' in the neon groves 

Well the clock says it's time to close now 
I know I have to go now 
I really want to stay here 
All night, all night, all night

Recommended by Patrick Stein.
"Mainly I like the line 'your fingers weave quick minarets'. It sounds nice."

He was inspired to begin writing his own poem:

Baby
Your fingers weave quick minarets



 

“Fairy-tale Logic” by A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks

And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,

Or learn the phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe

That you have something impossible up your sleeve,

The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,

An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,

The will to do whatever must be done:

Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

“Mock Orange” by Louise Glück

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers

lighting the yard.

I hate them.

I hate them as I hate sex,

the man’s mouth

sealing my mouth, the man’s

paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,

the low, humiliating

premise of union—

In my mind tonight

I hear the question and pursuing answer

fused in one sound

that mounts and mounts and then

is split into the old selves,

the tired antagonisms. Do you see?

We were made fools of.

And the scent of mock orange

drifts through the window.

How can I rest?

How can I be content

when there is still

that odor in the world?

"The Singing" by C.K. Williams

I was walking home down a hill near our house

on a balmy afternoon

under the blossoms

Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here

every spring with

their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing

no it was more of

a cadenced shouting

Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because

the young man was

black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell he was making his

song up which pleased

me he was nice-looking

Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously

full of himself

hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed

me there almost

beside him and "Big"

He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll

to have my height

incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing

he looked

in fact pointedly away

And his song changed "I'm not a nice person"

he chanted "I'm not

I'm not a nice person"

No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat

but he did want

to be certain I knew

That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord

between us I should forget it

That's all nothing else happened his song became

indecipherable to

me again he arrived

Where he was going a house where a girl in braids

waited for him on

the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and

unanswered questions

were left where they were

It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice

person either" but I

couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he have believed

it both of us

knew just where we were

In the duet we composed the equation we made

the conventions to

which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that

someone something

is watching and listening

Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though

no one saw nor

heard no one was there   

"Breath" by Mark Strand

When you see them

tell them I am still here,

that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams,

that this is the only way,

that the lies I tell them are different

from the lies I tell myself,

that by being both here and beyond

I am becoming a horizon,

that as the sun rises and sets I know my place,

that breath is what saves me,

that even the forced syllables of decline are breath,

that if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath,

that breath is a mirror clouded by words,

that breath is all that survives the cry for help

as it enters the stranger's ear

and stays long after the world is gone,

that breath is the beginning again, that from it

all resistance falls away, as meaning falls

away from life, or darkness fall from light,

that breath is what I give them when I send my love        

“Madame la Fleurie” by Wallace Stevens

Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of

    the end.

Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought

    he lived in it.

Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting

    parent.

His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the

    moon.

It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he

    could be told.

It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.

It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

The black fugatos are strumming the blackness of black...

The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.

He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.

His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and

    what he saw,

In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead

    light.