To Don Quixote

H. J. Massingham

You saw the world a golden age,

     A country wench a Queen,

What is dull, wonted, formal, stale

     Magnificent Has Been;

Against you, zany of world’s stage,

     The man of safety wins;

But heaven shall be your own tilt-yard,

     Its palaces your inns.

LETTER VII: Remember to Breathe

Margaret Rhee

To hear poetry and to read poetry are different acts.

Reading poetry makes me feel calm.

And you, dear reader, I wonder if

you also feel this way.

Consider this articulation.

Reading poetry: You must gaze upon, pay attention to words, and

consider pacing,

an attentiveness not usually asked

in our contemporary world.

I gaze into your eyes, we remember to breathe.

Turn the page.

Reading poetry is the opposite of eating with

your phone

Without thought to the

opening and closing of one’s mouth

The taste and texture of the food on the edges and tips of

one’s tongue

Warmth of the food, and how it envelops you.

A different kind of information than the Scroll.

Luddites

Lord George Gordon Byron

1.

As the Liberty lads o’er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,

          So we, boys, we

     Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

2.

When the web that we weave is complete,

And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,

         We will fling the winding sheet

    O’er the despot at our feet,

And dye it deep in the gore he has poured.

3.

Though black as his heart its hue,

Since his veins are corrupted to mud,

         Yet this is the dew

     Which the tree shall renew

Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

Lake Michigan II

S. Brook Corfman

For ten days I slept only four or six hours, subject
              to a small blonde bulldog. But deeply, her
a burr to me. I’d never had a pet; I did not expect
              to let her into the bed. But I soften and warm.
Like my old love I loved her despite, which made it
              no less true. It seemed the lake was leaving me
the longer I strayed east. My choice was not choice but a wish,
              only mine, the way his naps in late afternoon were his.
When we watched the flat world we weren’t
              flat anymore, especially me, my small breasts, but we couldn’t
parse it. The night is still there behind the day.
              A new feeling told me how beautiful I was
and how silly was it that I agreed. This was a true account
of how it will have happened, and then it was simply true.

How To Take a Life

Janel Pineda

Keep a son from his mother until her last breath.

         When she goes, all she’ll know of him is desert

heat, folded letters, a phantom of his sixteen-year-old self outside

         her nursing home window, unable to come inside. Venite,

Chepito, venite. If he could, he’d leave the gang, leave the gun,

         come home. Venite. If he could, he’d disappear the war,

his father’s strike, his father’s stroke. If he could, he’d

         pick a different place, a different time, free his hands

of any crime, of any charge. When he goes, all he’ll know

         of her is the faint fatigue of her voice, her full name tattooed

beneath his throat. When he goes, all he’ll know of life is

         every inch of a cell, the way the decades flew by, and how he was made

to rot, alone.

The Abduction

Stanley Kunitz

1905 –2006

Some things I do not profess 

to understand, perhaps

not wanting to, including

whatever it was they did

with you or you with them

that timeless summer day

when you stumbled out of the wood,

distracted, with your white blouse torn

and a bloodstain on your skirt.

"Do you believe?" you asked.

Between us, through the years,

we pieced enough together

to make the story real:

how you encountered on the path

a pack of sleek, grey hounds,

trailed by a dumbshow retinue

in leather shrouds; and how

you were led, through leafy ways,

into the presence of a royal stag,

flaming in his chestnut coat,

who kneeled on a swale of moss

before you; and how you were borne

aloft in triumph through the green,

stretched on his rack of budding horn,

till suddenly you found yourself alone

in a trampled clearing.

That was a long time ago,

almost another age, but even now, 

when I hold you in my arms, 

I wonder where you are.

Sometimes I wake to hear

the engines of the night thrumming

outside the east bay window

on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

You lie beside me in elegant repose,

a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

indifferent to the harsh green flares

that swivel through the room,

searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

Out there is a childhood country,

bleached faces peering in

with coals for eyes.

Our lives are spinning out

from world to world;

the shapes of things

are shifting in the wind.

What do we know

beyond the rapture and the dread?

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

1935 –2019

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Honestly

John Ashbery

1927 –2017

we could send you out there

to join the cackle squad,

but hey, that highly accomplished,

thinly regarded equestrian—well there was no way

he was going to join the others’ field trip.

Wouldn’t put his head on the table.

But here’s the thing:

They had owned great dread,

knew of a way to get away from here

through ice and smoke

always clutching her fingers, like it says

to do.

Once we were passionate about the police,

yawned in the teeth of pixels,

but a far rumor blanked us out.

We bathed in moonshine.

Now, experts disagree.

Were we unhappy or sublime?

We’ll have to wait until the next time

an angel comes rapping at the door

to rejoice docently.

(I know there’s a way to do this.)