her back

HOW SIMILE WORKS

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I'm telling her a childhood remini- scence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.

Albert Goldbarth

from To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth.
Copyright © 2009 by Albert Goldbarth.
All rights reserved.

naked

AUGUST METEOR SHOWER

While they're here I hold them
like my breath.
They deepen the sky
like blood in my body,
I'm glad to offer







my body like this -- a small craft
over fields of water, where light can fall, be lost, be caught,
be held.
I'm naked in my chair,
facing the window.





If I were outside I'd want to look up
and see someone naked in every window.

I think we need
the difficult river, we need the absence of tenderness
so love can come like shooting stars
if it comes.

Ruth L. Schwartz







from Dear Good Naked Morning C 2005 Ruth L. Schwartz

birds

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens

From Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens.
Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

(see also)