http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/opinion/31poetry.ready.html?th&emc=th
Closing Time NY Times: December 31, 2005 The Beautiful Quickness of a Street Boy Yusef Komunyakaa Sam Weber Where did he come from, this boy pressing his face against the window of the car on that January afternoon in Burdwan? One of the three coins slips from my outstretched fingers & falls somewhere in the small car, & I contort my body to retrieve this touch of alloyed copper. Then, I look up at the boy pointing to the roses on the dashboard. Afternoon light falls between us. I hand him a rose, & he walks away with his nose pushed into the bloom, smiling to himself. In no time, the boy is facing a young man waiting on the platform. They exchange a few words. The man shoves a hand into his pocket & gives the boy a coin, & he dances away, leaving the man holding the flower behind his back. Our car fills with awe & laughter, & someone says, There's a woman somewhere. That street boy, as if he sprung out of me, out of another time, is still pleading with everything he knows: his dusty clothes & eyes lit by Shiva, his half smile & black hair alive with lice, & his wounded song, as a bearded monkey paces the train station's roof-spine. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of "Taboo: Book One of the Wishbone Trilogy." A Little Moonlight Carl Phillips I. Given inconstancy, the resistless affair that has been my body (as if there were no place to go from anywhere except deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by tugging the flesh, where it is part-able, more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what legend says about violation - how it leads to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which is the future, fills the cave, which is desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck), I should perhaps regret more. But it's grown so late: see how dark, outside? II. Suspecting, even then, that the best way to avoid being broken by flaw would be to shape my life around it - flaw coming slowly to define the self, as shells make of the glass that holds them a little kingdom of sea - I followed him, and have only once looked back. Oh, I contain him as the lion's chest contains the arrow that death displaces, effect always mattering more than cause: pull the arrow free - brandish it. By now it must weigh almost nothing . . . III. I agree, to hope for a thing is to believe in it, or at least to want to. When does belief become expectation? Like committing a crime, confessing to it, and thinking confession might equal apology, mistaking apology for to wipe clean away, you turn your face to me. - What? Trees in a wind. Their mixed invitation of leaves flourishing as if unstoppable, as if foliage were the greater part of it, the part I could love best, or should learn to say I do more often. Tell me why, when what I loved from the start was how eventually each leaf must go. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Carl Phillips is the author of the forthcoming "Riding Westward." In a Loaning Seamus Heaney Spoken for in autumn, recovered speech Having its way again, I gave a cry: "Not beechen green, but these shin-deep coffers Of copper-fired leaves, these beech boles grey." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature, is the author of the forthcoming "District and Circle." Iskandariya Brigit Pegeen Kelly It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought I said not "some sort of fish," but a "scorpion fish," a request he would surely have granted, being a goodly God, but then he forgot the "fish" attached to the "scorpion" (because God, too, forgets, everything forgets); so instead of an edible fish, any small fish, sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish; instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part bell-ringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat, or even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly does it step, as if on ice, freezing again and again in mid-air like a listening ear, and then scuttling backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of Cleopatra's asp, but not, as I soon found out, despite the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men. In truth, it is shy, the scorpion, a creature with eight eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight, and is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot, and feeds on nothing much, and only throws out its poison barb when backed against a wall - a thing like me, but not the thing I asked for, a thing, by accident or design, I am now attached to. And so I draw the curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step softly, and so I do not speak, and only twice, in many years, have I been stung, both times because, unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal Book because of his strange organs of breath. His lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged like the pages of a book - imagine that! And when the holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood that circles through them touches the air, and by this bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the perishable manuscripts - a little mirror of the library at Alexandria, which burned. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brigit Pegeen Kelly is the author, most recently, of "Orchard." The Waterclock and the Hourglass Brad Leithauser An old pair of parents, it appears, In an old museum case . . . He unites Form and function, plainly; she's a thing Of fancy and flourish, and is - for all her years - Exceptionally pretty. He springs from Cathay, land of whispering Bamboo and gently rain-wrung skies; She's of Venice, a flowing city >From whose brisk ovens Glowing loaves of glass rise. A mixed marriage, then, but by all lights A happy one (differences reconciled - They've learned to take things day by day), Save that their only, problem child Keeps running away. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brad Leithauser is the author of "Darlington's Fall," a novel in verse. Matter Sarah Arvio I was what mattered in the end. Or if I didn't matter then nothing mattered, and if I mattered, well then all things did. O miracles and molecules, dust, rust. It was always a matter of matter. It might be meat or else it might be love (if I was meat, if I was fit to eat). What had never been matter would never matter: you might say this was a moot point. Clay and dust, ash and mud and mist and rust, blood-orange sunsets and turning maples, apples and cherries, sticks and trash and dust, rumpled papers blowing across a street (dead letters sent to him that lives away). There was life, there was loss, there was no such thing as loss - there was nothing that wasn't both life and loss. No, it had to be said, in questions of matter, nothing was lost. It might be a matter of carnal love. This was textual and material, and for once the facts-of-the-matter were both heartfelt and matter-of-fact. (Oh, matter of course was always the mother.) These were the facts of life, this was my life, and there I was, right at the heart of it, my own heart - at the heart-of-the-matter. And did I matter now or in the end? O mother, maintainer and measurer, mud and fruit of the heart, meat of the heart, the question might be asked, what was the end. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sarah Arvio is the author of the forthcoming "Sono." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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