Spencer Short

It Will But Shake & Totter

Many poems have been written about the turgid sea.
For instance: the one about the man & his lover on the cliffs above the turgid sea.
It is the English Channel
& he is Matthew Arnold in 1851.
Across from him: “ignorant armies,” “clashing by night.”

The armies are not French.
They may be stars if what we’ve always thought of as stars
turned out to be the fading chalk of a fading language,
turned out to be nothing but the small sparks of rocks
being struck by chains in the corners of sky.

Like a Russian novel the sea roils & cedes, roils & cedes.
Fish do their fish-like work among its atavistic depths.
Notice how the moonlight glistens like lacquer
between the crests & troughs, the smell of the brine,
the heavy, salt-stung air.

All night the moon rings & rings.
All night the wind searches the cliffs for a flag,
a kite, a woman’s hat.

Love, I say, let us be true. Let us be.
The world is but a darkling plain. A hill of beans.
We are the few & we are the far between.

Brenda Hillman

[two untitled fragments]
from Bright Existence


(—How long will you stay here.
Maybe longer. Sometimes,
the bee has so much pollen, it can’t fly!

and lands on the drunk camelia.
I watched you sleep,
delicious flesh, I watched you rise,

you made the dawn jealous,
you kept the future of the day inside,
not showing,—

And when you left, you were
so everywhere! torn spark. The night
had used you up, but you kept going—)

+ + +

(—Why did you tremble when you came in here.
I saw some doves fly the city;
this place, had no door.

You came in with your old sorrow,
with your other sexual loves in your mouth
your wrong previous your two laters

their little silver crosses in your eyes,
I wanted to be the boy,
I would have loved you against the wall
as hard as I could,

but there was no I right then,
desire is the good general,
the wall was nearly gone—)

C.D. Wright

Gift of the Book

lights go off
all over
rhode island
everyone falls
into bed
I stay awake
reading
re-reading
the long-awaited
prose
of your
body
stunned
by the hunger