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LJW Jun 2014
blossoms like cad fish lingering
beneath salten seas lost
yellowing days
desperate for remembrance.

creeping thyme crevicing
through sandstone
jumping gardens of
mist spray.

broken teeth alongside
coffee and news
old printed cities
chilled by traffic noise.
LJW Jun 2014
I.

This is a poet of the river lands,
a lowdown man of the deepest
depth of the valley, where gravity gathers
the waters, the poisons, the trash,
where light comes late and leaves early.

From the window of his small room
the lowdown poet looks out. He watches
the river for ripples, flashes, signs
of beings rising in the undersurface dark,
or lightly swimming upon the flow,
or, for a minnow, descending the deeps
of the air to enter and shatter
forever their momentary reflections,
for the river is a place passing
through a passing place.

The poet, his window, and his poems
are creatures of the shore that the river
gnaws, dissolves, and carries away.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted
in the dark, aspiring to the light,
dependent on both. His poems
are leavings, sheddings, gathered
from the light, as it has come,
and offered to the dark, which he believes
must shine with sight,
with light, dark only to him.


II.

Times will come as they must,
by necessity or his wish, when he leaves
his enclosure and his window,
his homescape of house and garden,
barn and pasture, the incarnate life
of his desire, thought, and daily work.
His grazing animals look up
to watch in silence as he departs.
He sets out at times without even
a path or any guidance other than knowledge
of the place and himself as they were
in time already past. He goes among trees,
climbing again the one hill of his life.
With his hand full of words he goes
into the wordless, wording it barely
in time as he passes. One by one he places
words, balancing on each
as on a small stone in the swift flow
in his anxious patience until
the next arrives, until he has come
at last again into presentiment
of the Real, the wholly real in its grand
composure, for which as before
he knows no word. And here again
he must stop. Here by luck or grace he may
find rest, which he has been seeking
all along. Sometimes by the time’s flaws
and his own, he fails. And then
by luck or grace he will be given
another day to try again, to go maybe
yet farther before again he must stop.
He is a gatherer of fragments, a cobbler
of pieces. Piece by piece he tells
a story without end, for in the time
of this world no end can come.
It is the story of eternity’s shining,
much shadowed, much put off,
in time. And time, however long, falls short.







Wendell Berry's most recent books include It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays, New Collected Poems, and A Place in Time, the newest volume in his Port William series.
LJW Jun 2014
The patterns
of rainfall and afforestation,
the veins of village streams—
I colored them in
as I saw fit.

My beloved spiders
wove a second pattern
on top,
which I approved
before leaving.





Günter Eich (1907–1972) was a noted German poet and radio dramatist who won the Georg Büchner Preis in 1959. His translator, Michael Hofmann, is a poet and German translator; his versions of Eich will be out soon in book form in Angina Days: Selected Poems of Günter Eich (Princeton).
LJW Jun 2014
vaguen
(Samuel Beckett, notation on MS of Happy Days)


I
Fire comes bouncing in from the
desert a threat to houses Here’s
what we do says the King to
Rudyard Kipling who is visiting
Stuff wet rags in the eaves throw
the silverware in the swimming
pool And my letters Rudyard
Kipling is thinking will you be
pressing my letters to your
breast as we skid towards
the car Truly diverse people
the King and Kipling one or
the other was always getting
his feelings hurt Above them
a strip of once blue sky now
dark adust


II
Nowadays there are technicians
of despair you can work at it
Going to the Buddhist study
group I pass a thin crumpled
man at a wall his face on the
bricks Behind him another big
black city legs wide apart roaring
Say you aren’t stupid then why
aren’t you happy


III
New guy at the Buddhist study
group Eyes cut to bits I want
he keeps saying So I don’t get
so he keeps saying A bunch
of sage grass has blown onto
his head and grown down into
his mind He shakes hands with
everyone over and over again
at the door


IV
I had previously been to
the Old South Thirty minutes
into the faculty dinner a man
to my left drops his eyes and
his voice says he murdered his
brother with a shotgun when
he was twelve The other diners
appear to have heard this
before On the plane home I
sit across from a vet with a
falcon on his lap It observes
the other passengers severely
Drinks apple juice from a
cup with very small silver
lips


V
At twenty-eight thousand feet
above the uncarved block of
NY state a cricket jumps onto
my coat Vaguen it says






Anne Carson currently teaches at NYU and will publish a handmade book called NOX in 2010. She is the author of Autobiography of Red, Plainwater, and other books of poetry, non-fiction, and mixed genre.
LJW Jun 2014
holding a tragedy lie between
nervous hands glancing as
my eastern sun bombards
this sierra western *****
plummeting veins solar
caging my fragile wrap
boiling my lungs while I
cradle a tragedy lie.
LJW Jun 2014
ten years ago I was thin.
I remember the lover I
met ten years before then.
ten years later was nowhere
to be seen. Five years later
had yet to happen. I can
remember the freezing winter
of 1996.  It was just like yester
day.  I miss the creamy cotton
futon tucked quietly in my private
curtained alcove entryway, all sheets
calmly milky, my studio littered
by inspiration found outside along
Warwick Street. Life was easy,
I'd only loved one man for real. He'd
loved me just enough to leave
me in tact. Ten years later from
ten years from that, I've been left
twice, and left with one who stays.
All the while wanting the man
meant for God and an angel.
LJW Jun 2014
shadows of people I've known before
I see you all again
here upon this blanken sheet
carving upon words
with tipp-ed hats
I've seen you before
I'll see you again
it is SO good to see you!

I'm glad we've met in this version here
you are that much nicer now!
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