planning the revolution

Happiness Severity Index
by Rebekah Remington

Though in the lower standard deviation, I fall, the statistician says,
within the normal range of happiness. Therefore, no drugs today.

What about tomorrow? What if doodling stars isn’t enough?
Will I be asked to color the rainbow one more time?

Name three wishes that might come true?
List everything I’ve been given within a minute?

Though within the normal range of happiness, I score poor
on bird appreciation, poor on oboe joy. My responses, in fact,

seem to indicate an overall confusion concerning joy itself.
What did I mean that during parties I choose the sofa

like a sick cat? That when tattoos are dispensed I’m first
in line? That books full of other people’s misery

make the beach infinitely more pleasant? Stargazing is another weakness.
Too much I examine the patch of dirt where nothing grows

where buried curiosa aren’t deep enough, though in Short Answer
I’m all for dancing alone in a silken robe. Friends call.

Mostly the machine answers. Mozart makes me cry.
I kill spiders without guilt. To make up for this

I take the kids to the golden arches play area.
A positive indicator. Also, interest in the existential

is minimal. I approve of make-up and ice cream.
When I wake early, I get out of bed. When I wallow

in planetary counterpoint, it never lasts. And here’s what really saves me:
if I were a ghost I’d be Casper. If I were a tradition

I’d be a dreidel. I like the rain. When the boat drifts off
I wave. When the dog runs off I follow.

--

I'm looking for a text version of Marty McConnell's Five of Swords. If not, I'll just have to post the youtube video, which is angry delicious, but dictates a reading more than the written word is wont.

The first time I read Jack Gilbert's The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart I stopped at A people / in northern India is dying out because their ancient / tongue has no words for endearment, shook myself, went back to the beginning and read very, very slowly, eating up each and every word. I normally read poetry quite quickly, like maybe it's a race to the finishing line, like maybe something is waiting for me there, and it's because I like to know if I'm going to like what I read. I always read poems at least twice. Something about a poem has to strike me if I post it here. But with the poems that do strike me hard, I have to go back and read them word for word for word, until every single one has weight.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, / as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.

--

Your first poem is probably from a nursery book. Your second is probably in school. But your first poem could be anywhere. Again, school; the ads on the London Underground; in a newspaper; as an addendum to someone's emo post on eljay. Your first poem will delight you unexpectedly. It will wake you. You may never find it. You may find it and never remember it. You may stumble over it and hate it, rip it apart word form for word form for an essay, loathe it, never want to see it again until it unceremoniously pops up again years later, and you realise that it is more than the sum of its parts.

I don't remember my first poem. I don't. I know that something switched in me during my A-levels. I think it was probably Plath, probably Daddy or Lady Lazarus. I know 'Ariel' was the first book of poetry I read cover to cover and back again. I know that it will stay with me.

Sue Hubbard's Eurydice is a tone that stays with me, an idea, where I remember no actual phrases but I remember the sensation. Paul Guest's Austria is all words, all desire. Richard Jackson's Antigone Today I have read so, so, so many times, and still I am lost in it. You have to stand clear of the briars of anger. / You have to wash revenge from your eyes.

There are others, better ones probably. Show them to me. I am experiencing a drought.

Twin Tree
by Carol Muske-Dukes

A tree divided. It grew like that—
Its slender trunk suddenly forking,

Lifting up from the crux in two Shiva arms—
As if it had come to a crossroads and split

The way twins unpeel from one another
In the womb. Two from one, it reached up

And flourished this way—it topped thirty feet
As its thick dark glossy leaves, half-folded like

Paper boats, kept the nubs of coming pears
Hidden then dangling. Avocado, avocado.

I held you in my hand as a big wrinkled pit,
Propped you (as I'd been taught once by a lover

Who was trouble) with four toothpicks over a glass
Filled with water—till the tiny white filament inside

Your worried seed slowly let itself down into the
Clear transparency, while sprouting above into a

Green feasible stem. I transplanted those floating roots,
The top-heavy shoot after weeks—then waited till it

Reached out at last—growing fast in both directions,
Down into dirt, up into the sky over the backyard. When

It twinned, climbing upward, I stopped my husband,
Standing hard by with shears, from pruning it back

Into one: The only way it would survive he said. But
It doubled skyward into the single tree at the top—

A hermaphrodite—as it had to be to make fruit. So
Many alligator pears, summer after L.A. summer! We

Filled baskets with the abundance of the you
And you: the fruit of two separate flowerings

From one quick hesitation. Till days after David died,
When clumsy workmen, digging a trench, severed your

Taproot. I saw the white exposed arteries they'd chopped clean
With their spades. I stood beside you weeping, trying to hold

Your heart together with my hands at the fork where you'd
Leaned apart, then towered. You were my love, conflict tree,—

Tough-skinned, the rich light-green flesh beneath. Avocado,
They killed you. When we sold the house, you were a cut stump.

--

There is a small temple - a shrine, really - in Gujarat that I visited when I was ten. It was a shrine to Shiva. I remember it being an eerie hollow, and that the shrine was dark. All around the clearing were these enormous trees which sprouted from one another, growing up and then down, and then back up again. I have never seen anything like it before or since.

Dust
by Dorianne Laux

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor-
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn't elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That's how it is sometimes-
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you're just too tired to open it.

Insomniac
by Sylvia Plath

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Orpheus at the Second Gate of Hades
by Yusef Komunyakaa

My lyre has fallen & broken,
but I have my little tom-toms.
Look, do you see those crows
perched on the guardhouse?
I don’t wish to speak of omens
but sometimes it’s hard to guess.
Life has been good the past few years.
I know all seven songs of the sparrow
& I feel lucky to be alive. I woke up at 2:59
this morning, reprieved because I fought
dream-catchers & won. I’ll place a stone
in my mouth & go down there again,
& if I meet myself mounting the stairs
it won’t be the same man descending.
Doubt has walked me to the river’s edge
before. I may be ashamed but I can’t forget
how to mourn & praise on the marimba.
I shall play till the day’s golden machinery
stops between the known & the unknown.
The place was a funeral pyre for the young
who died before knowing the thirst of man
or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair
wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine
in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture
poised over Tityus’ liver. I could see
Ixion strapped to a gyrating wheel
& Sisyphus sat on his rounded stone.
I shall stand again before Proserpine
& King Pluto. When it comes to defending love,
I can make a lyre drag down the moon & stars
but it’s still hard to talk of earthly things—
ordinary men killing ordinary men,
women & children. I don’t remember
exactly what I said at the ticket office
my first visit here, but I do know it grew
ugly. The classical allusions didn’t
make it any easier. I played a tune
that worked its way into my muscles
& I knew I had to speak of what I’d seen
before the serpent drew back its head.
I saw a stall filled with human things, an endless
list of names, a hill of shoes, a room of suitcases
tagged to nowhere, eyeglasses, toothbrushes,
baby shoes, dentures, ads for holiday spas,
& a wide roll of thick cloth woven of living hair.
If I never possessed these reed flutes
& drums, if my shadow stops kissing me
because of what I have witnessed,
I shall holler to you through my bones,
I promise you.

Melancholia
by Paul Guest

Almost I rushed from home to tell you this:
that melancholia, the word, when broken
down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars,
means black hole. How perfect. How yes,
I've been reading the dictionary again.
How ready I am to adopt this codified cosmos,
where at the center of things we see
and helplessly grow to love, oxygen and water,
the night around us rumbling with trains—
how there is in the heart of them this word.

Lorded over by the seraphim in shabby pajamas
who refuse to shave, whose wings
are matted, who endlessly sigh,
we are filled by God with ridiculous longing
in this universe of anxious matter: lost
marbles and empty tubes of lipstick
the color of cranberries; the dank fug
of old books never to be read and the wind
ever to disturb; the newborn squirrel
at your feet, dazed and dying in its nest
of cement. Undone by the stars
like buttons on a blouse, I’ve tried to escape.
I ended up here. I would tell you
Why my nails grow faster than yours,
Never snag on the hem
of anything, or why in an audience
of coughers I am safe from sickness.
I would tell you how it would be
to fly like Flash Gordon on a gold rocket sled
through a black hole’s heart,
through melancholia, where time soon stops.
But I would be wrong. In error
there’s freedom, though, and since no one knows,
it is safe to say on the other side
you’d find a world of sentient blue beanbags
who love the poetry of Petrarch,
and while you rested from your journey,
they would be happy to hold you
and hum softly in the dim dark your favorite song.
It’s true. I have seen it, though
I find myself here without good reason
and no comfortable place to sit.

I’m riddled with errors, machine-gunned
by wrong, leaking half-truth like rain
on a sun-rinsed day, like this day
which leaves no room for melancholia, for black bile,
the true meaning of the word
which I misread and gave myself to
happily, my heart skipping rope like a girl,
and to think I almost rushed here to tell you.

it is at moments after i have dreamed
by e.e. cummings

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

-turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

Antique
by Robert Pinsky

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

Phantom Limbs
by Anne Michaels

"The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart."
—Charles Baudelaire

So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.

Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard - our moonlight motel -
where we slept summer's hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad !
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.

Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt;
stairs leading nowhere; high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.