Thread by Dan Chiasson

Thread

 

I lack the rigor of a lightning bolt,

the weight of an anchor. I am

frayed where it would be highly useful—

and this I feel perpetually—to make a point.  

 

I think if I can concentrate I might turn sharp.

Only, I don't know how to concentrate—

I know only the look of someone concentrating,

indistinguishable from nearsightedness. 

 

It is hard for you to be near me,

my silly intensity shuffling

all the insignia of interiority.

Knowing me never made anyone a needle.

Come Closer and Listen by Charles Simić

Come Closer and Listen

 

I was born—don’t know the hour—

Slapped on the ass

And handed over crying

To someone many years dead

In a country no longer on the map,

 

Where like a leaf on a tree,

The fair weather gone,

I twirled around and fell to the ground

With barely a sound

For the wind to carry me away

 

Blessed or cursed—who is to say?

I no longer fret about it,

Since I’ve heard people talk

Of a blind lady called Justice

Eager to hear everyone’s troubles,

But don’t know where to find her

 

And ask her the reason

The world treats me some days well,

Some days ill. Still, I’d never

Be the first to blame her,

Blind as she is, poor thing,

She does the best she can.

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

 

You whom I could not save,

Listen to me. 

 

Can we agree Kevlar

backpacks shouldn’t be needed

 

for children walking to school? 

Those same children

 

also shouldn’t require a suit

of armor when standing

 

on their front lawns, or snipers

to watch their backs

 

as they eat at McDonalds.

They shouldn’t have to stop

 

to consider the speed

of a bullet or how it might

 

reshape their bodies. But

one winter, back in Detroit,

 

I had one student

who opened a door and died. 

 

It was the front

door to his house, but

 

it could have been any door,

and the bullet could have written

 

any name. The shooter

was thirteen years old

 

and was aiming

at someone else. But

 

a bullet doesn’t care

about “aim,” it doesn't

 

distinguish between

the innocent and the innocent,

 

and how was the bullet

supposed to know this

 

child would open the door

at the exact wrong moment

 

because his friend

was outside and screaming

 

for help. Did I say

I had “one” student who

 

opened a door and died? 

That’s wrong.

 

There were many. 

The classroom of grief

 

had far more seats

than the classroom for math

 

though every student

in the classroom for math

 

could count the names

of the dead. 

 

A kid opens a door. The bullet

couldn’t possibly know,

 

nor could the gun, because

“guns don't kill people,” they don't

 

have minds to decide

such things, they don’t choose

 

or have a conscience,

and when a man doesn’t

 

have a conscience, we call him

a psychopath. This is how

 

we know what type of assault rifle

a man can be,

 

and how we discover

the hell that thrums inside

 

each of them. Today,

there’s another

 

shooting with dead

kids everywhere. It was a school,

 

a movie theater, a parking lot.

The world

 

is full of doors.

And you, whom I cannot save,

 

you may open a door

 

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.

And if the latter, you will be

 

mourned, then buried

in rhetoric. 

 

There will be

monuments of legislation,

 

little flowers made

from red tape. 

What should we do? we’ll ask

again. The earth will close

 

like a door above you. 

What should we do?

 

And that click you hear?

That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse

sliding into place.

Steering Wheel by Jorie Graham

Steering Wheel

 

In the rear-view mirror I saw the veil of leaves

suctioned up by a change in current

and how they stayed up, for the allotted time,

in absolute fidelity to the force behind,

magenta, hovering, a thing that happens,

slowly upswirling above the driveway

I was preparing to back clear out of—

and three young pine trees at the end of that view

as if aghast with bristling stillness—

and the soft red updraft without hesitation

aswirl in the prickly enclosing midst—

and on the ratio I bent to press on,

a section with rising strings plugging in,

crisp with distinctions, of the earlier order.

Oh but I haven’t gotten it right.

You couldn’t say that it was matter.

I couldn’t say that it was sadness.

Then a hat from someone down the block

blown off, rolling—tossing—across the empty macadam,

an open mouth, with no face round it,

O and O and O and O—

“we have to regain the moral pleasure

of experiencing the distance between subject and object,”

—me now slowly backing up

the dusty driveway into the law

composed of updraft, downdraft, weight of these dried

                                                                    midwinter leaves,

light figured-in too, I’m sure, the weight of light,

and angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude,

and the part of the law which is the world’s waiting,

and the part of the law which is my waiting,

and then the part which is my impatience—now; now?—

 

though there are, there really are,

things in the world, you must believe me.

The Poet Goes About Her Business by Linda Gregg

The Poet Goes About Her Business

 

Michele has become another dead little girl. An easy poem.

Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five year old photograph

of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows

I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it.

Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias.

Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses

so dark the mind comes to them without color.

Dark on the Greek hillside. Dark, volcanic, dry and stone.

Where the oldest women of the world are standing dressed in black

up in the branches of fig trees in the gorge

knocking with as much quickness as their weakness will allow.

Weakness which my heart must not confuse with tenderness.

And on the other side of the island a woman

walks up the path with a burden of leaves on her head,

guiding the goats with sounds she makes up,

and then makes up again. The other darkness is easy:

the men in the dreams who come in together to me with knives.

There are so many traps, and many look courageous.

The body goes into such raptures of obedience.

But the huge stones on the desert resemble

nobody’s mother. I remember the snake.

After its skin had been cut away, and it was dropped

it started to move across the clearing.

Making its beautiful waving motion.

It was all meat and bone. Pretty soon it was covered with dust.

It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go.

Toward any dark trees.