Clarinet BY TERRANCE HAYES I am sometimes the clarinet your parents bought your first year in band, my whole body alive in your fingers, my one ear warmed by the music you breathe into it. I hear your shy laugh among the girls at practice. I am not your small wrist rising & falling as you turn the sheet music, but I want to be. Or pinky bone, clavicle. When you walk home from school, birds call to you in a language only clarinets decipher. The leaves whistle and gawk as you pass. Locked in my skinny box, I want to be at least one of the branches leaning above you. Terrance Hayes, “Clarinet” from Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (2004). Used with the permission of Verse Press.

Harlem by Langston Hughes What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Psalm BY GEORGE OPPEN

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there! Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there. Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out.

An old story BY BOB HICOK It’s hard being in love with fireflies. I have to do all the pots and pans. When asked to parties they always wear the same color dress. I work days, they punch in at dusk. With the radio and a beer I sit up doing bills, jealous of men who’ve fallen for the homebody stars. When things are bad they shake their asses all over town, when good my lips glow. "An Old Story" from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok, ©2004. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Tonight BY AGHA SHAHID ALI

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar —Laurence Hope

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight? Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight? Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—” “Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight? I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates— A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight. God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar— All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight. Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken; Only we can convert the infidel tonight. Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities multiply me at once under your spell tonight. He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven. He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight. In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed. No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight. God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day— I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight. Executioners near the woman at the window. Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight. The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight. My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all? This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight. And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee— God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight. “Tonight" from Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright 2003 by Agha Shahid Ali Literary Trust. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Deathwatch Beetle BY LINDA PASTAN 1. A cardinal hurls itself at my window all morning long, trying so hard to penetrate its own reflection I almost let it in myself, though once I saw another red bird, crazed by the walls of a room, spatter its feathers all over the house. 2. My whole childhood is coming apart, the last stitches about to be ripped out with your death, and I will be left—ridiculous, to write condolence letters to myself. 3. The deathwatch beetle earned its name not from its ugliness or our terror of insects but simply because of the sound it makes, ticking. 4. When your spirit perfects itself, will it escape out of a nostril, or through the spiral passage of an ear? Or is it even now battering against your thin skull, wild to get through, blood brother to this crimson bird?

kitchenette building BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.” But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms Even if we were willing to let it in, Had time to warm it, keep it very clean, Anticipate a message, let it begin? We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “kitchenette building” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Red Wheelbarrow BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens William Carlos Williams, “So much depends” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

“What Do Women Want?” BY KIM ADDONIZIO I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what’s underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment from its hanger like I’m choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, it’ll be the goddamned dress they bury me in.

The Afterbirth, 1931 BY NIKKY FINNEY We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk Who threw soil not salt Over our shoulders Who tendered close the bible Who grew and passed around the almanac at night So we would know What to plant at first light Black soil and sweet brown sorghum From the every morning biscuits Mama Susan fixed Dripping and mixing Up under our fingernails A secret salve Just like any other Living simple And keeping to our proud selves Quite aware of night riders Quite aware of men with Politicious smiles Cologned with kerosene and match Aware of just whose feet Walked across our tin roofs at night We were such light sleepers Such long distance believers We were a family pregnant Whose water had broke And for once there was ham money ’Bacca money So we thought to do better by ourselves To begin our next row We would go and get him Because he was medically degreed in baby bringing Because he was young and white and handsome And because of that Had been neighbor to more knowledge Than us way back behind The country’s proud but inferior lines And because he came with his papers in his pocket So convincing so soon After his ivy graduation Asking us hadn’t we heard Telling us times had changed And the midwife wasn’t safe anymore Even though we had all been caught By tried and true Black Grannies

Who lay ax blade sharp side up And water pan underneath the bed To cut the pain To cool the fever We were a Pregnant Clan of Kinfolk Caught with water running down our legs Old family say they remember Going to fetch him Telling him that it was time That he should come now But he didn’t show right away Not right away But came when he wanted The next day After his breakfast But what more Could we colored country folk ever want Even if we had to watch the road all night for him Even if we had to not let her push too hard When he finally came He had his papers on him Something with one of those pretty shiny seals Old family say they can remember Somethin’ just wasn’t right But we opened the screen for him anyway Trusting And tendering close what the Good Book Had told us all our lives to do Then we made him a path Where he put his hand up then inside My grandmother’s womb Her precious private pleasing place Somewhere he probably didn’t want to touch Then he pulled my daddy through Somebody he probably didn’t care to reach for And from the first he pulled him wrong And wrong Shattered his collarbone And snapped his soft baby foot in half And smashed the cartilage in his infant hand Wringing Their own sun baked arms Old timey family Remember him well Say they knew somethin’ wasn’t right As he came through the door A day later His breakfast digested now Somethin’ just wasn’t right

How he had two waters on him One sweet one sour-mash One trying to throw snow quilt over the other As he un-carefully As drunkenly He with his papers on him still Stood there turning a brown baby into blue Un-magically And right before our eyes Hope and Pray Hope and Pray Then he packed his bag and left With all of his official training And gathered up gold stars left The Virginia land of Cumberland County He left and forgot He left and didn’t remember The afterbirth inside Carlene Godwin Finney To clabber Gangrene Close down Her place Her precious private pleasing place To fill the house to the rafters Up past the dimpled tin roof With a rotting smell That stayed for nine days That mortgaged a room In our memories And did not die with her We were a Brown and Pregnant Family And he would’ve remembered his schoolin’ And left his bottle Recollected his manners And brought his right mind Had another klan called him to their bedside He would’ve come right away He would’ve never had liquor on his breath If the color of my daddy’s broken limbs Had matched the color of his own but We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk We should’ve met him at the door Should’ve told him lean first into the rusty screen Made him open up his mouth and blow Breathe out right there Into all of our brown and lined up faces In wait of his worthiness

Then just for good measure Should’ve made him blow once again Into Papa Josh’s truth telling jar Just to be sure Should’ve let Mama Sally Then Aunt Nanny Then lastly Aunt Mary Give him the final once over And hold his sterile hands Down to the firelight to check Just like she checked our own every night Before supper Before we were allowed to sit At her very particular table We could’ve let Aunt Ira clutch him by his chin Enter and leave through her eyes Just like how she came and went through us Everyday at her leisure She would’ve took care to notice As she traveled all up and through him Any shaking any sweating And caught his incapable belligerent incompetence In time Oh Jesus We should’ve let Grandpop Robert Have him from the first Should’ve let him pick him up By the back of his pants And swirl him around Just like he picked us up And swirled us around Anytime he caught us lying or lazy Or being less than what we were We should’ve let Grandpop Loose on him from the start And he would’ve held him up High eye to the sun And looked straight through him Just like he held us up And then we would have known first Like he always knew first And brought to us The very map of his heart Then we would have known Just what his intentions were With our Carlene Before we knew his name

Or cared about his many degrees Before he dared reach up then inside Our family’s brown globe While we stood there Some of us throwing good black soil With one hand Some of us tending close The Good Book with the other Believing and trusting We were doing better By this one Standing there Waterfalls running Screaming whitewater rapids Down our pants legs Down our pantaloons To our many selves All the while Praying hard That maybe we were wrong (please make us wrong) One hundred proof Smelled the same as Isopropyl Nikky Finney, "The AfterBirth, 1931" from Rice. Copyright © 1995 by Nikky Finney. Used by permission of the author.

Not Waving but Drowning BY STEVIE SMITH Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning” from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Facing It BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

After working sixty hours again for what reason BY BOB HICOK The best job I had was moving a stone from one side of the road to the other. This required a permit which required a bribe. The bribe took all my salary. Yet because I hadn’t finished the job I had no salary, and to pay the bribe I took a job moving the stone the other way. Because the official wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit for the second job. When I pointed out that the work would be best completed if I did nothing, he complimented my brain and wrote a letter to my employer suggesting promotion on stationery bearing the wings of a raptor spread in flight over a mountain smaller than the bird. My boss, fearing my intelligence, paid me to sleep on the sofa and take lunch with the official who required a bribe to keep anything from being done. When I told my parents, they wrote my brother to come home from university to be slapped on the back of the head. Dutifully, he arrived and bowed to receive his instruction, at which point sense entered his body and he asked what I could do by way of a job. I pointed out there were stones everywhere trying not to move, all it took was a little gumption to be the man who didn’t move them. It was harder to explain the intricacies of not obtaining a permit to not do this. Just yesterday he got up at dawn and shaved, as if the lack of hair on his face has anything to do with the appearance of food on an empty table. "After working sixty hours again for what reason" from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok, ©2004. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Selene’s Horse BY _____

–for my Grandfather James I asked James, can you feel you’re dying? Can you feel the water pouring from the hose turn to nothing in the grass? James loved his big rigs. I love the sweet metallic reek filling my own gas tank. All day the train shuttles heaps of carpet scraps through the wild blue phlox of Georgia where James’ oil truck exploded. When Aristotle said there must be something immoveable in the animal for the animal to move, he must of meant James, two years in a hospital bed. Like the woman smoking on the billboard— for one whole week only half her mouth opened in the rain. I think of Selene’s horse, its marble head hacked from the Parthenon and shipped to England in “manageable pieces.” To see it, is to see pain bulging in a single vein. James can’t smile or blink. Selene’s horse— exiled, perched on a plinth in the cold light of a museum. That’s one thing. Then there’s James, wide-eyed, nostrils flaring.

What the Living Do by Marie Howe Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you. From What the Living Do, copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton. All rights reserved.

How to Uproot a Tree

By Jennifer Sweeney Stupidity helps. Naiveté that your hands will undo what does perfectly without you. My husband and I made the decision not to stop until the task was done, the small anemic tree made room for something prettier. We’d pulled before, pale hand over wide hand, a marriage of pulling toward us what we wanted, pushing away what we did not. We had a shovel which was mostly for show. It was mostly our fingers tunneling the dirt toward a tangle of false beginnings. The roots were branched and bearded, some had spurs and one of them was wholly reptilian. They had been where we had not and held a knit gravity that was not in their will to let go. We bent the trunk to the ground and sat on it, twisted from all angles. How like ropes it was, the sickly thing asserting its will only now at the end, blind but beyond the idea of leaving the earth. 2010, Perugia Press

BIRD IN SPACE BY____

after Brancusi

Child, what efficient breath you imitate drawing a bird without feet or wings, your chalk breaking the sidewalk. All morning, trees in the city open to speed. Winter has come in the hurry birds live in. Your mother sits in a metal bathtub inside Walter Reed’s Warrior Transition Brigade. Two blasts and just that like, her legs burned off. Child, you don’t understand what should be visible. What science drawing a bird the artist knows. The field marks, the essential red drops on the wing flashing from the dead stubs, the burned-over cattails. Warriors sleep on the street, on the blue kickers of garbage trucks— crack whores, skanks, cum-dumpsters. Ignore their scarred hands, their spans of liver spots, Child. Draw with your chalk, carve the cold walk into a highly-tuned nervous system, the stick-bird, the abstract fledgling round with hunger. The simple glyph speaks by shifting half her head in the sand

where the bent grass blows down a song. Child, see how the face surrenders to hollow resolve in the white trunk of rain. Child, hurry, gently scrub behind the wet ears of your bird in her stone tub. The wounds soften, the hands, the feet dissolve.

The Nineteenth Century as a Song

BY ROBERT HASS B. 1941 “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” John Gray’s translation of Verlaine & Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861 shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe. He thought himself a clever man and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands, gazed briefly at what Tennyson called “the sweet blue sky.” It was a warm day. What clouds there were were made of sugar tinged with blood. They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages new settings of the songs Moravian virgins sang on wedding days. The poet is a monarch of the clouds & Swinburne on his northern coast “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” composed that lovely elegy and then found out Baudelaire was still alive whom he had lodged dreamily in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.” Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century while Marx in the library gloom studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit and that gentle man Bakunin, home after fingerfucking the countess, applies his numb hands to the making of bombs. Robert Hass, “The Nineteenth Century as a Song” from Field Guide. Copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press, http://www.yale.edu/yup/.

Source: Field Guide (1973)

Song of Myself

(an excerpt from 35 pages)

BY WALT WHITMAN 1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. 2 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. 3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead? 4 Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,

The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. 5 I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.