Monday, May 27, 2013

Route Six

The city squats on my back.
I am heart-sore, stiff-necked,
exasperated. That's why
I slammed the door,
that's why I tell you now,
in every house of marriage
there's room for an interpreter.
Let's jump in the car, honey,
and head straight for the Cape,
where the cock on our housetop crows
that the weather's fair,
and my garden waits for me
to coax it into bloom.
As for those passions left
that flare past understanding,
like bundles of dead letters
out of our previous lives
that amaze us with their fevers,
we can stow them in the rear
along with ziggurats of luggage
and Celia, our transcendental cat,
past-mistress of all languages,
including Hottentot and silence.
We'll drive non-stop till dawn,
and if I grow sleepy at the wheel,
you'll keep me awake by singing
in your bravura Chicago style
Ruth Etting's smoky song,
"Love Me or Leave Me,"
belting out choices.

Light glazes the eastern sky
over Buzzards Bay.
Celia gyrates upward
like a performing seal,
her glistening nostrils aquiver
to sniff the brine-spiked air.
The last stretch toward home!
Twenty summers roll by.

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by Stanley Kunitz, 1978

Monday, May 20, 2013

Buyers and Sellers

What is a man worth?
What can he do?
What is his value?
On the one hand those who buy labor,
On the other hand those who have nothing
      to sell but their labor.
And when the buyers of labor tell the
      sellers, "Nothing doing today, not a
      chance!" --then what?

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by Carl Sandburg, 1963

Monday, May 13, 2013

On the Longing of Early Explorers

I would prefer one hour of conversation with a native of terra australis incognita to one with the most learned man in Europe. - Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, 1740


Before satellites eyed the earth's whole surface
through the peephole of orbit, before
we all were tracked by numbers trailing from us
like a comet's tail - O if only,
they'd say in quaint accents and obscure
sentence structures - if only the unsullied
could be discovered, if only, once found,
it could speak its own nobility and let us
empathize. Poignant, the despair that itched
beneath their powdered wigs, their longing to touch
the unspoiled, their sense that the world was already ruined.

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by Elizabeth Bradfield, 2010

Monday, May 6, 2013

Aye

(from The Loaning)

Big voices in the womanless kitchen.
They never lit a lamp in the summertime
but took the twilight as it came
like solemn trees. They sat in the dark
with their pipes red in the their mouths, the talk come down
to Aye and Aye again and, when the dog shifted,
a curt There boy!
                            I closed my eyes
to make the light motes stream behind them
and my head went airy, my chair rode
high and low among branches and the wind
stirred up a rookery in the next long Aye.

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by Seamus Heaney, 1984