Monday, April 28, 2014

The Weight of Nothing

I

everyone loves
the disappearing
coin. a bird pulled from
an empty hat. the comfort of
trusting a magician's hands.
when we know we'll get some-
thing from what
he takes away.

II

the student's assignment -
concentrate on nothing
for fifteen minutes a day.
she tries to empty her head
but can't figure out how.
after all, she doesn't know what
nothing sounds or looks like,
and the teacher won't give
the slightest clue. yet
she's got a good hunch
the exercise might quiet
all that shriek and clatter
trapped between her ears.
so like a good pupil,
she devotes an entire year
searching for nothing.
some days she's as still
as a stone, but can't
escape the distractions
of river and wind,
footsteps approaching,
birds calling in the trees
overhead. or closing
her eyes, she'll focus
on a cloudless blue sky.
pillows and planes and purple
sunsets keep interrupting.
she silently repeats words
like ocean or why,
chants sounds that dwell
low in her throat
like maah and uhmm.
at year's end her teacher
asks if she's found nothing.
she tells him she's found
everything but nothing.
he smiles, you're closer
than you think. now
try for twenty minutes.

III

we've all seen them -
looking at their empty
outstretched palms,
and we're fooled, thinking
about what isn't there.
sighing, they marvel
at all they've held in those hands,
their history revealed
in the thickened joints,
the full weight of their desire -
even now, incredible
hands still opening
and grasping
when there's nothing to keep.

IV

without my friend Nothing
on the page, I"d never have to write
another poem. but Nothing waits
here, waving me on, inviting me
to rap and rant, pray sing, testify
what is, was, could, and always will be.
I greet all that's coming,
contained as sheer breath
into word, born
to crave and engrave the emptiness
that Nothing can't stop giving.

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by Amy Uyematsu, 2005









Monday, April 21, 2014

Lindenbloom

Before midsummer density
opaques with shade the checker-
tables underneath, in daylight
unleafing lindens burn
green-gold a day or two,
no more, with intimations
of an essence I saw once,
in what had been the pleasure-
garden of the popes
at Avignon, dishevel

into half (or possibly three-
quarters of) a million
hanging, intricately
tactile, blond bell-pulls
of bloom, the in-mid-air
resort of honeybees'
hirsute cotillion
teasing by the milligram
out of those necklaced
nectaries, aromas

so intensely subtle,
strollers passing under
looked up confused,
as though they'd just
heard voices, or
inhaled the ghost
of derelict splendor
and/or of seraphs shaken
into pollen dust
no transubstantiating
pope or antipope could sift
or quite precisely ponder.

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by Amy Clampitt, 1981

Monday, April 14, 2014

Admission

The wind high along the headland,
mosquitoes keep low: it's
good to be out:
schools of occurring whitecaps
come into the bay,
leap, and dive:
gulls stroll
long strides down the shore wind:
every tree shudders utterance:
motions - sun, water, wind, light -
intersect, merge: here possibly
from the crest of the right moment
one might break away from the final room.

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by A.R. Ammons, 1970

Monday, April 7, 2014

from "Window Poems"


                     2

The foliage has dropped
below the window's grave edge,
baring the sky, the distant
hills, the branches,
the year's greenness
gone down from the high
light where it so fairly
defied falling.
The country opens to the sky,
the eye purified among hard facts:
the black grid of the window,
the wood of trees branching
outward and outward
to the nervousness of twigs,
buds asleep in the air.

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by Wendell Berry, 1968