Stone - What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems

What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...28

Note to the Reader Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. Thank you.

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible. For some we loved, the loveliest and the best That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest, Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest. The Rubiyt of Omar KhayymDedicated to Don CrollAugust 19, 1939January 11, 2008Beloved father of my grandchildren Nora Swan, Jesse Ehsan,
and Sahara Najat; world traveler, lover of the Persian language,
guage,
and my dear friend for over fifty years.

Contents

Tendrils

While leaves are popping bullets of air, they are saying something a flux of otherness, a pulse of organic sex.

But the wind sucks up the slightest moth or spider that leaps throwing its web in the shadows a continuous tongue of foreign talk. It is a matriarchy, perhaps a grandmother, vast and all knowing, this caster of violent, untranslatable language.

The Alien

Like myself, the body gets in bed. Unlike myself, it reads blank words, blank books. I know Im not, but I suspect Im dead. Some message on a wall erased by rain.

Some house, some street, some other place; behind me salt dissolving salt; and where I step I cannot step again. Now the body rises to be fed. It knows its own. It does not need my codes or maps. It does not care whats hanging in my head.

The Old Story

Although he didnt love me, I loved him.

Most wives know this story; the patience of midnight. It was the same with my mother and father. My father, yes, he gambled, he gave jewelry to other women. After he died, my mother bought a wristwatch for herself and a small diamond engagement ring which she wore to church or when she shopped for groceries; for those were her outings. Perhaps she took them off when she worked in the garden. Her hands were slender, she wore gloves when she dressed up.

After my father died she bought a mohair couch and an Oriental rug for the living room. And even then she wept for him.

Imprint of the Stereoscopic Cards

If you make a connection between this table and that table, then you will remember your grandmothers loaves of bread and from there you arrive outside the gates of Jerusalem. Your jealous and unkind aunt Virginia, who is six years older than you, has made it a rule that you must look at each card, even that one of the lepers. Your grandmother knows nothing of this. Rotting in rags, their voices crying, Unclean, unclean.

The lepers lips are eaten away. They hold out their stumps. Bones come through their soiled wrappings. And yet they are odorless on the stereoscopic cards. Bread is made twice a week on the scrubbed kitchen table. You are seven, waiting for the boxed tour of Jerusalem.

The trick of two eyes and two photographs. Then your whole body enters into that place. You take in your mouth the warm buttered bread from your grandmothers white flowered hands. You sit with the viewer; waiting to slide into focus the lettered and numbered cards and to hold for the rest of your life these cast-out bodies of lepers.

Setting Type

From a long way, the semicolon begins to wave. Hello! Hes on the telephone.

We were just passing en route, the period and I. They are so cute. Theres a half gallon of hearty burgundy, I say. Are they having an affair? Well, the periods rather tired. I forget how shy they are. Were so glad to see one another that we skip the long paragraphs between, the deep pages of doubt, but after a review, the material grows thin.

Im in another book now, I say. We ink each other thoughtfully. You sure youll be comfortable in these old journals? Yes, yes. The fried vocabulary was good. The next day they are off. Good punctuation, I say.

A nice pair. I think they ought to get edited and settle down.

The Real Travelers

It was supposed to snow, but it rained the last two weeks in March; or is it a week and three days? Whatever. No matter what groceries you lay in, you are not hungry. But you feel the rush of the body through the thickening air although the folks next door park their cars and turn on their TV, and mysterious as mice, something occurs between them. And although they are short and dense and curiously look like aliens; they are professional cleaners in other peoples houses and their tiny dog is not allowed to bark at the window.

I ask, where are those birds? On the other side of town, my left brain answers. I am so blind I can no longer see the lines in my hands. Now who will interpret me? But it does not matter. We lope along the galaxy, along one thickening arm, winking at Eta Carinae. Blast away sister, we sigh, as something ignites her furious hair.

Work

The voice of the laundry says, hang me; hang me, or I will mold.

Work

The voice of the laundry says, hang me; hang me, or I will mold.

The voice of the clothesline says, tighter or I will sag. The voice of the front porch says, sit here. Tell me, what is the meaning of this? While the subliminal shrews are ferociously eating, always eating, in order to waste away.

From Where We Are

Embedded in the navel of the belly of our goddess, we are deeper in and closer to her viscera. That is why, in the gurgles of her vast digestion, we are shaken with thought waves in her fiery pores, in the gluons that flicker in her infinite intestines, pouring out of her the eternal roar.

What It Comes To

Sometimes I cry for that young man I loved fifty years ago.

What It Comes To

Sometimes I cry for that young man I loved fifty years ago.

My, my, he has been dead for almost half a century. His voice trembled when he spoke to me. What did I know of men and their cupidity? And do I cry for myself, that lonely, ignorant woman? Not half, I think. Even in my sleep I laugh, a common sentiment. The average cheap romance; the familys dull drama. But you bone and skin that you are you didnt even want to come to the desert without shoes.

Scorpions, snakes, thorns. But there were the stars and the breath of something, stamens, the centers of the thinnest tissues; the momentary and almost tangible universe.

Memory

Can it be that memory is useless, like a torn web hanging in the wind? Sometimes it billows out, a full high gauze like a canopy. But the air passes through the rents and it falls again and flaps shapeless like the ghost rag that it is hanging at the window of an empty room.

Next page

1234567...28

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems»

Look at similar books to What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Mary Vasquez

Love Poems from God: My Poems and Practical Exercises

Valente José Angel

Landscape with yellow birds: selected poems

Tucker

Bonsai love: poems

Stone Will

Surrender to night: collected poems of Georg Trakl

McKendrick

Selected Poems

Zenith Richard

Education by Stone: Selected Poems

Espada

Alabanza: new and selected poems, 1982-2002

Ammons

Selected Longer Poems

Donald Hall

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall

Collins

Aimless love : new and selected poems

Hall

White apples and the taste of stone

Herman Melville

Selected Poems of Herman Melville

Discussion, reviews of the book What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.