I exchange my life for words.

Weak, uncertain currency.

*     *     *

Saint Augustine calls the kingdom of the saved “Jerusalem,” and the kingdom of the damned “Babylon.” Maybe that’s what Norwid has in mind when he says “I write from Babylon to Jerusalem—and the letters get through.”

*     *     *

As a spring makes its way to the light, to air. Its toil, its drudgery, its dark transit, like despair.

That’s how the poet works for words. Through muscles, movements. That’s how J.* wrote poems. He paced, he muttered, he waved his arms as though gathering and grasping words.

*     *     *

I wasn’t looking for God at all.

I sought my Dead One.

I’ll never cease repeating this, amazed.

-Anna Kamienska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook“

David Yezzi, from Flatirons

into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,

or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to

love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead

opaquely clean as a bottle’s bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was

leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,

so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat’s call at dawn or the face

reflected on a coffee machine’s chrome side,
the pencil’s curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor’s square

of afternoon light another page I couldn’t know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover’s wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn’t so much light
I think about, but the back’s skin cracking
to let each wing’s nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.”

-Rick Barot, from How a Poem Happens

each time your traces come past the shadows
and visit under my looking-glass fingers
that lift and block out the sun.

Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn,
and you can trace your last homecoming
into the snow or the sun.

-Annie Finch

-Joanne Kryger, “When I used to focus on the worries, everybody“

On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves
a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens

Out of jasmine the night’s blood streams white. Your perfume,
my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair
is a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speech
to the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves

I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place—anew

-Mahmoud Darwish

translated by Fady Joudah

Please think of us as we are, tiny, with skins that burn easily.
Please notice how we have watered the shrubs around our houses
and transplanted the peppers into neat tin cans.
Forgive any anger we feel toward the earth,
when the rains do not come, or they come too much,
and swallow our corn.
It is not easy to be this small and live in your shadow.

Often while we are eating our evening meal
you cross our rooms like a thief,
touching first the radio and then the loom.
Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges,
they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

How can we live like this?
We need to wake and find our shelves intact,
our children slumbering in their quilts.
We need dreams the shape of lakes,
with mornings in them thick as fish.
Shade us while we cast and hook—
but nothing else, nothing else.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

-e e cummings

Notes from a Time Traveler

1.

My dear,
I’ve landed back in Paris.
The year is 1865, our own.
I thought you were to meet me here.
It rained all day. I watched the hats
of merchants float like barges up
and down a rain-drenched street. I’m waiting
in rooms I’ve taken in the house
kept by the owl-faced matron. Come. Come soon.
Until you do, I will remain
your sorrowing,
Pascal

Read the rest here