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Finding a Box of Family Letters by Dana Gioiat
The dead say little in their lettersthey haven’t said before.We find no secrets, and yethow different every sentence soundsheard across the years. My father breaks my heartsimply by being so young and handsome.He’s half my age, with jet-black hair.Look at him in his navy uniformgrinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout.He says he misses all of us(though I haven’t yet been born).He writes from places I never knew he saw,and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photographcurled like a diploma–a banquet sixty years ago.My parents sit uncomfortablyamong tables of dark-suited strangers.The mildewed paper reeks of regret. I wonder what song the…
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Their lonely betters
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shadeTo all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that wordsShould be withheld from vegetables and birds. A robin with no Christian name ran throughThe Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third party waitedTo say which pairs, if any, should get mated. Not one of them was capable of lying, There was not one which knew that it was dyingOr could have with a rhythm or a rhymeAssumed responsibility for time. Let them leave language to their lonely bettersWho count some days and long for certain letters; We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: Words…
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The More Loving One W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total darkness sublime, Though this might take me…
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WHY DO YOU STAY UP SO LATE? By Don Paterson
I’ll tell you, if you really want to know: remember that day you lost two years ago at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore? Most of them went dark and nothing more, but sometimes one would blink the secret color it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep. This is how you knew the ones to keep. So I collect the dull things of the day in which I see some possibility but which are dead and which have the surprise I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell– so I look at them…
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You Are There by Erica Jong
You are there. You have always been there. Even when you thought you were climbing you had already arrived. Even when you were breathing hard, you were at rest. Even then it was clear you were there. Not in our nature to know what is journey and what arrival. Even if we knew we would not admit. Even if we lived we would think we were just germinating. To live is to be uncertain. Certainty comes at the end.
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From Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems”
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and there are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are…
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Eleven Addresses to the Lord BY JOHN BERRYMAN
3 Forsake me not when my wild hours come; grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams; achieve in me patience till the thing be done, a careful view of my achievement come. Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder. When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey. Empty my heart toward Thee. Let me pace without fear the common path of death. Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter: fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord. Unite my various soul, sole watchman of the wide & single stars. 9 A Prayer for the Self Who am I worthless that You spent such…
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Waking at 3 a.m.
Even in the cave of the night when you wake and are free and lonely, neglected by others, discarded, loved only by what doesn’t matter–even in that big room no one can see, you push with your eyes till forever comes in its twisted figure eight and lies down in your head. You think water in the river; you think slower than the tide in the grain of the wood; you become a secret storehouse that saves the country, so open and foolish and empty. You look over all that the darkness ripples across. More than has ever been found comforts you. You open your eyes in a vault that…