One Unsheathed Cortex

from Via Insomnia
By Adrienne Rich

...Is this how it is to be newly dead? unbelieving
the personal soul, electricity unsheathing
from the cortex, light-waves fleeing
into the black universe
to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering
Where, when will I sleep

One Pestered Angel

from my old Guardian Angel
By Tadeusz Rozewicz

the avalanche of angels
brought about
by inspired poets
artists priests
and American
movie directors
is infinitely more foolish
than the one brought about
by Romantic poets

the products
of the dream factory
--the "holy wood"--
are sugary white
like the cotton candy
young children
adore

my Guardian Angel who
is 83 years old
and remembers all
my misdeeds
flew to me in consternation
and told me he was
being pestered
by salesmen
pedophiles sodomites
from commercial public
and religious TV
to endorse "angel's milk" custard
dance hip-hop with seniors
and sell
sanitary napkins
with wings
and without...

Translated by Bill Johnston ~ Book

One Spilled Bucket

from Moon Eclipse Exorcism

come out come out come out
the moon has been killed

who kills the moon? crow
who often kills the moon? eagle
who usually kills the moon? chicken hawk
who also kills the moon? owl
in their numbers they assemble
for moonkilling

come out, throw sticks at your houses
come out, turn your buckets over
spill out all the water don't let it turn
bloody yellow
from the wounding and death
of the moon

o what will become of the world, the moon
never dies without cause
only when a rich man is about to be killed
is the moon murdered...

--Alsea, translated by Armand Schwerner and Leo J. Trachtenberg

One Late Laurel

Several Voices Out of a Cloud
By Louise Bogan

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit;
to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.
It is deathless
And it isn't for you.

One Vertical Glare

Grief
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death--
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

One Cold Algebraist

[The poet] is no longer the disheveled, delirious man, someone who writes an entire poem in a night of fever; now he's a cool savant, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer.

--Paul Valery

One Appropriated Harvest

A Black Man Talks of Reaping
By Arna Bontemps

I have sown beside all waters in my day.
I planted deep within my heart the fear
that wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land
in rows from Canada to Mexico,
but for my reaping only what the hand
can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root.
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

One Insulting Sun

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

--Herman Melville

One Blue-Smoking Torch

Bavarian Gentians
By D. H. Lawrence

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

One Dusty Cell

from Women
By Louise Bogan

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

One Sealed Note

written in pencil in the sealed railway car
By Dan Pagis

here in this carload
I am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him i


Translated by Stephen Mitchell

One Skeptical Tic

Inshallah
By Ben Downing

-- which is to say "God willing," more or less:
a phrase that rose routinely to her lips
whenever plans were hatched or hopes expressed,
the way we knock on wood, yet fervently,
as if to wax too confident might be
to kill the very thing she wanted most.

It used to pique and trouble me somehow,
this precautionary tic of hers, but now
I understand why she was skeptical
of what Allah in His caprice allots,
because that she should live He did not will
or, more terribly, He did that she should not.

in memoriam Mirel Sayinsoy 1967-1999

One Aching Instep

from After Apple-Picking
By Robert Frost

...I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall...

One Grumley Guest

The Gray Selchie

In the north away there lives a maid:
"Bye loo, my baby," she begins;
"Little know I my child's father
Or if land or sea he's living in."

Then there arose at her bed feet
An grumley guest, I'm sure it was he,
Saying, "Here am I, thy child's father,
Although that I am not comely."

"I am a man upon the land,
I am a selchie in the sea.
And when I am in my own country,
My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie."

And he has taken a purse of gold,
And he has put it upon her knee,
Saying, "Give to me my little wee son,
And take thee up thy nurse's fee."

"And it shall come to pass on a summer's day
When the sun shines hot on every stone,
That I shall take my little wee son
And teach him for to swim in the foam.

"And you will marry a hunter good
And a proud good hunter I'm sure he will be,
But he'll go out on a May morning,
And kill my little wee son and me."

And lo, she did marry a hunter good.
And a proud good hunter, I'm sure it was he,
And the very first shot that ere he did shoot
He killed the son and the gray selchie.

In the north away there lives a maid:
"Bye loo, my baby," she begins;
"Little know I my child's father,
Or if land or sea he's living in."

--Old English Ballad

One Worrying Job

I always think that poetry is more terrible than painting, though painting is a dirtier and a much more worrying job.

--Vincent van Gogh

One Green-Haired Army

I Hear an Army Charging Upon the Land
By James Joyce

I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

One Tenacious Clock

The Clock on the Wall
By Samih al-Qasim

My city collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
Our neighborhood collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The street collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The square collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
My house collapsed
The clock was still on the wall
The wall collapsed
The clock
Ticked on

One Self-Replicating City

The City
By Constantine Cavafy

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
I will find another city, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is -- like a corpse -- buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years,
and ruined and wasted."

There are no new lands, no other seas to find.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land -- do not hope --
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

One Great Ge

Not another lament for the makers
By Aileen Kelly

What can you do with the pissed-off major poets?
Five marvellous books, translated to diverse tongues yet
toaded by work all day, half-drunk at night,
their trousers bagged by stones of unhappiness, even
on Margate sands among sunny kids and sundried oldsters
they groan with humanity’s torment and angle deathwards
so ignited, so solipsistic or red or straight,
mourning lost lovers, icons and apposite breakdowns.

Great Ge of death and birth, can’t you recycle them
into multiple minor poets who’d suckle for years
each on the juice of their one great poem and ever
party with whoopee streamers and rockets towards you
down to a last careless and satisfied breath?

One Stalking Foot

They Flee from Me
By Sir Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber:
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with continual change.

Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once especial,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, 'Dear heart, how like you this?'

It was no dream; I lay broad awaking:
But all is turn'd now through my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness;
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served
How like you this, what hath she now deserved?