Cooking for someone can be loaded with danger.
He’ll get here at six and I’m filled with a small fear
of conversation at the table.
I always toy with the edge across my throat,
between the cabbage, the duck and coffee we stare into.

There are many ways to scream.
I’ve chosen the silent one
because I”m afraid of being discovered as I am, not
who he remembers 20 years ago.

I want to say thing have changed since then.
I’ve smoked my lungs black and eaten my heart out.
Lost each leaf of hair and seen friends to their graves.

So the real talk is never said.
After a polite time he leaves a bit early.
I want to re-run dinner again
with simpler food, the apartment a little messy.
I’d like to walk right over the edge and say,
‘Who we were then is fable.’
But that takes believing we’re someone right now.

Instead I sit down to a second meal.
I’m famished from things left unsaid,
go to bed too early, and wake totally
at the national anthem, before the TV hisses
into blue snow.

I get up. I eat again.

John Burnside

After Lucretius
Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante,
Lucretius

(In English: “For whatever from its own confines passes changed, this is at once the death of that which before it was.” -Lucretius)

I

It happens from time to time,
on days like this

– in winter, when the air is cold
and still,

the boats at the harbour
perched on their wooden stocks,

the gaps between the houses
filled with light –

it happens that I think of all
the vanishings I learned about in childhood:

that ship they found at sea,
unanchored, blind,

the table set for lunch, the galley
filling with steam;

the blank if the lamp-room
at Flannan, where they found

no sign of the men
who were waiting to be relieved;

the boy from a northern village, going out
at daybreak, to get kindling for a fire,

a line of footprints
stopping in the woods

and gradually erased
by morning snow.

When they speak about angels in books
I think what they mean is this sudden

arrival at somewhere else
through a rift in the fabric,

this glimpse of the absence that forms
between two lives

– and it comes as no surprise, on days like this,
alone in the house, or walking on the shore

at evening, that I’ll stop dead and recall
the disappearances my childhood self

never quite engineered,
or how it is a legend in these parts

that one bright afternoon,
in wintertime,

something will come from nowhere
and touch a man

for no good reason; ice-cold on his skin
or sharp as a needle,

it finds him and moves away
and leaves no mark.

It’s not what he expected, neither death
nor absolution, but a slow and painless

fall between the collarbone and wrist
that lasts for days

and when he disappears,
amidst the thaw,

there is nothing to show he is missing,
not even
an absence.

In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

by Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

-Margaret Atwood

when the crows fly away 
with their compassion 
and I remain to eat 
whatever is left of my heart 

I think of my love 
with the odor of salt 
of my love who holds me in her eyes 
as if I were whole and beautiful 

and I think of those 
who walk the streets all night 
frantic with desire and bruised 
by the terrible small lips of rain 

I touch you 
as a blind man touches the dice 
and finds he has won

-Richard Shelton

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Reports from the Palace
by Ian McBryde

The abandoned hospital
was a godsend. We are
exhausted, and short on hope.

-

Dusty coverlets on carefully
made beds stretching
down the many wards.

-

Those of us with
training in medicine
have been taken aside
and whispered to.

-

October. No word from you.
The old cities glowing
sickly, remotely, to the east.

-

Armed guards
around the morphine.

-

Seasons slowing down.
Two of the scouts
have still not returned.

-

As yet there have
been no relays from
the south tower.

-

In the emergency bay
someone has erected
a sculpture fashioned
from used syringes.

-

The ravaged, upper sections
sealed off. No one allowed
above the third level.

-

Nightly, a rage of flame
on the horizon. The smell
of temples on fire.

-

Linen missing. Frost
on a heap of wheelchairs
stacked in the back field.

-

Another scout gone.
The meeting reset
for tomorrow.

-

Just before dawn.
All my transmissions
to you coming back
to me, unanswered.

-

Someone has been
on the roof again.
Footprints. Palmprints.
Evidence of signaling.

(via iampoetry)

I could not feel her longing. She said “love” as though it were an easy thing, cotton candy melting sweet on the tongue. I did not know of love. What I knew was harshness— my waves crashing mercilessly at the shores of places I did not care to know the names of.

She did not know my depths, the crushing silence of abyssal plains scattered with the vestiges of so much wasted life. In my darker moments, I have kept my secrets close to me, the way a mother holds a child. Close to my breast, I hold hellish creatures, feeding from fire and brimstone and darkness. Light only goes so far. In its absence, we find other things to sustain us.

What I have to offer has always been conditional, the current just so, the seamount just emerged, the chemical compositions just right. Life flourishes here, but only for the ordinary instant. There is no room for love, that unconditional hope brandished by poets and dreamers, in a place where everything depends on the ordinary instant.