The Thing Itself

by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.

My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn't sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.

by Elizabeth Willis

Something drives out
from the fate I was hungry for.
A body that fulfills its face
carries into day
what fades behind it.
In Natural History
Sophocles loved
Asphodel, but Asphodel
loved William Carlos
Williams as hyacinth
loved France, and honey
loves a toothache.
Is that a crime
or just a form of currency
like big tobacco, moving on
with shady radar
over our greenery?

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

by Paul Farley

Forget all of that end-of-the pier

palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town

in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells

and raise the lid of the world to change the light,

then go as far as you want: the ornament

of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,

the weak grip of a crane in the arcades

you’ve built, ballrooms to come alive at night,

then a million-starling roost, an opulent

crumbling like cake icing…

Now, bring it down

in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings,

that knows the spectral blues; that always starts

in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling

in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings

marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume

of black smoke high enough to stain the halls

of clouds. Now look around your tiny room

And tell me that you haven’t got the power.

by John Ashbery

Is it possible that spring could be

once more approaching? We forget each time

what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,

adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump

of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,

and the whole point of its being spring collapse

like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,

you have to say that for it.

And should further seasons coagulate

into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,

who’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed

looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,

catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night

in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.

But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen

daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.

When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I've
been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what's never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.