One Luminous Poison

from The Favors of the Moon
By Charles Baudelaire

The moon, who is caprice itself, looked through the window while you were sleeping in your cradle, and said to herself: "I like this child."

And softly she decended her staircase of clouds and, noiselessly, passed through the window-panes. Then she stretched herself out over you with the supple tenderness of a mother, and laid down her colors on your face. Ever since, the pupils of your eyes have remained green and your cheeks unusually pale. It was while contemplating this vistor that your eyes became so strangely enlarged; and she clasped your neck so tenderly that you have retained for ever the desire to weep.

However, in the expansion of her joy, the Moon filled the whole room with phosphorescent vapour, like a luminous poison; and all the living light thought and said: "You shall suffer forever the influence of my kiss. You shall be beautiful in my fashion. You shall love that which I love and that which loves me: water, clouds, silence and the night; the immense green sea...."

...And that, my dear, cursed, spoiled child, is why I am now lying at your feet, seeking in all your person the reflection of the formidable divinity, of the foreknowing godmother, the poisoning wet-nurse of all the lunatics.

One Stone Sword

Modern Love I
By George Meredith

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

One Suppurating Power

from Power
By Adrienne Rich

...Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

One Good Sale

I go to the house of my one true lover, the Lifter of Mountains.
When I see his beauty, I only crave him more.
At dusk I go to him, at dawn I return.
Whatever his pleasure, day and night I am his.
The clothes he gives me, I wear. The food he offers, I eat.
Where he wants me to be, I stay. If he wants to sell me, I want to be sold.

--Mirabai, translated by Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield

One Persevering Seducer

You call an artist a seducer and are not aware that you are paying him the highest of compliments. The whole attitude of the artist towards the Universe is that of a seducer. For what does seduction mean but the ability to make, with infinite trouble, patience, and perseverance, the object upon which you concentrate your mind give forth, voluntarily and enraptured, its very core and essence?

--Isak Dinesen

One Righteous Murderess

from Clytemnestra Triumphant
By Aeschylus

So he goes down, and the life is bursting out of him--
great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower
wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel
like the Earth when the spring rains come down
the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear
splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!


...I glory.
And if I'd pour upon his body the libation
it deserves, what wine could match my words?
It is right and more than right.

--Translated by Robert Fagles

One Undeceased Wanda

from Wanda Why Aren't You Dead
By Wanda Coleman

wanda when are you gonna wear your hair down
wanda. that's a whore's name
wanda why ain't you rich
wanda you know no man in his right mind want a
ready-made family
why don't you lose weight
wanda why are you so angry
.....

wanda i think you need this
wanda you have no humor in you you too serious
wanda i didn't know i was hurting you
that was an accident
wanda i know what you're thinking

wanda i don't think they'll take that off of you

wanda why are you so angry

i'm sorry i didn't remember that that that
that that that was so important to you

wanda you're ALWAYS on the attack

wanda wanda wanda i wonder

why ain't you dead

One Green Blade

from Unrecounted
By W.G. Sebald

They say
that Napoleon
was colorblind

and blood for him
as green as grass

Translated by Michael Hamburger ~ Book

One Blank Snow

from Desert Places
By Robert Frost

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

One Pitiless Tuning

from Fruit-Gathering
By Rabindranath Tagore

the pain was great
when the strings were being tuned,
my Master

begin your music...
let me feel in beauty
what you had in your mind
through those pitiless days.

One Thoughtful Alien

from A Sick Child
By Randall Jarrell

...If I can think of it, it isn't what I want.
I want...I want a ship from some near star
To land in the yard, and beings to come out
And think to me: "So this is where you are!

Come." Except that they won't do,
I thought of them... And yet somewhere there must be
Something that's different from everything.
All that I've never thought of--think of me!

One Sunny Smile

A Poison Tree
By William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunnéd it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.

One Heartbreaking Cuckoo

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

--Basho, translated by Jane Hirshfield

One Good Bipolar

Here Lies a Lady
By John Crowe Ransom

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, her aunt, an infant of three,
And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

For either she burned, and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads –
What was she making? Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds.

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline
Till she lay discouraged and cold, like a thin stalk white and blown,
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;
The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,
But was she not lucky? In flowers and lace and mourning,
In love and great honor we bade God rest her soul
After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

One Good Leukocyte

from Pathologic Vistas
By Stephen Vadenhoff

... a part of another world where cells have grown
Mutinous or failed in their duty.

But here's a white blood cell, patrolling the blood
Like some Roman centurion watching
The mist-shrouded, far bank of the Rhine
With civilization at his back
And the savagery of the unknown forest before him.

Book

One Hovering Sunset

The Dark Hills
By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade—as if the last of days
Were fading and all wars were done.

One Capital Crime

...an artist to his fingertips, regarding the failure of completeness as a crime...

--Henry James

One Granulated Soul

Crush Syndrome
By Miroslav Holub

Once when, in winter dark,
I was cleaning the concrete-mixer,
its cogwheels, like the teeth
of a bored rat of Ibadan,
snapped up the glove
with the hand inside. The finger bones
said a few things you don't hear very often
and then it grew quiet, because
even the rat had panicked.

In that moment
I realized I had a soul.
It was soft, with red stripes,
and it wanted to be wrapped in gauze.

I put it beside me on the seat
and steered with the healthy hand. At the clinic,
during the injections of local anesthetic
and the stitching,
the soul held firmly with its mandibles
to the stainless-steel knob of the adjustable table.
It was now whitish crystal
and had a grasshopper's head.

The fingers healed.
The soul turned, at first,
to granulation tissue,
and later a scar, scarcely visible.

--Translated by David Young and Dana Habova ~ Book

One Fake Passport

And Then Who Shows Up (Hymn to Aphrodite)
By Jean Gallagher

How did I not know you but you fool me
every time. The alias, the fake passport, the clever
excuse for why you talk like me. Then you fell
like something fancy and on fire in my lap
and there's no going home for me. For you,
there's the long track of shine in which no one,
you included, can ever say your name.

More

One Nice Chair

Oh No
By Robert Creeley

If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit

for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places.

Book