Terri Ford is an amazing poet love.

Valentine by Terri Ford

Hovering insectile love. Fretful love, every
two mile check-up love, nerve pill rope-end indecisive highly
diagnostic love. Bracing love. Speedy

love. Medieval leeching what ho troubadour head-
lopping dulcimer lost
ark love. Manifesto
love. Give up the throne
love. Love as truce. Tectonic plate
rearrangement love. Ultimatum bad

dog love. Ziplock
suffocation love. Bottom
feeder plankton love. Trophy preener
improvement love. Pink pluming
hope burning diary teen
reversion love. Blurt
out love. Perpendicular
gridlock love, hall
monitor love, detention love. Bad
press love. Half-Nelson Gladiator
headlock uncle you say it blood-

spitting hard-breathing down
for count head
injury love. Log-rolling jolly
motion river gusto wet and
galvanized love. Sympathetic

Red Cross love. Sinatra, Iglesias, Don Ho, Yo-
Yo, Dvorák, Monk Chant, Yanni love. Not entirely
believable love. Wild
love, burned at the stake love, iron
lung love, bone marrow pacemaker
toupee love. Love in remission,
amputee love, Federal Witness
Protection love, in hiding subtext
Morse Code spy love. Revisionist

love. Open book test
love. Boundless applause in the front
row love. AFrican trumpeting large
flap love. Stealth Bomber
love. Slow me down
love. Keyhole light
love. Pebbled
bird's egg love. Name it to
your face love, woke

up love, count on it
stouthearted no-leak no-fault
high octane 911 in the daylight unashamed
lon haul fearful but right here intergalactic
Hovercraft love.

Claudia Cortese

SARAH’S MOTHER MAKES HER LONG DRESSES OF LACE

to hide the wooden brace, slight limp.
Darker than inside a locket, more pungent—
what wood wouldn’t love to live there,

thinks Frankie, the neighbor boy
who’s never said a word to her. He watches
Sarah flick her foot through sand, write tangerine

and starblade and dead girls glow prettiest.
She braids and unbraids her hair, sticks a stick
through a caterpillar—throws one green half

in the grass. Puts the other in her mouth.
Gimp-girl, they say, Limp-a-rella—the ugly Cinderella.
Because she smells of cinder & matchsticks,

wears homemade hand-me-downs—
a patchwork sweater, fox stole, ostrich
feathers in her hair. He sees her at her window,

thinks she studies raindrops on glass, how sad
and brief each life—dissolving
on the sill seconds after they bloom.

From March 1979 by Tomas Tranströmer

Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words.

Spoiler:

I found this poem here. It's a beautiful place.

A Ghost by Cole Swensen

erodes the line between being and place becomes the place
of being time and so
the house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the
architecture of a storm
The architect tore down room after room until the sound
stopped. A ghost is one
among the ages at the edge of a cliff empty sails on the bay
even when a ship
or the house moves off in fog asks you out loud to let the
stranger in

Beautiful poem, beautiful handwriting (from a blog somewhere).

L'Art
Ezra Pound

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
...................Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

Long Distance by Tony Harrison


I

Your bed's got two wrong sides. You life's all grouse.
I let your phone-call take its dismal course:

Ah can't stand it no more, this empty house!

Carrots choke us wi'out your mam's white sauce!

Them sweets you brought me, you can have 'em back.
Ah'm diabetic now. Got all the facts.
(The diabetes comes hard on the track
of two coronaries and cataracts.)

Ah've allus liked things sweet! But now ah push
food down mi throat! Ah'd sooner do wi'out.
And t'only reason now for beer 's to flush
(so t'dietician said) mi kidneys out.

When I come round, they'll be laid out, the sweets,
Lifesavers, my father's New World treats,
still in the big brown bag, and only bought
rushing through JFK as a last thought.

II

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

You Can Have It
by Philip Levine

Spoiler:

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then

to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.

Carl Phillips - Luncheon On The Grass
(Manet Dejeuner sur l'herbe)

Spoiler:

They're a curious lot, Manet's scandalous
lunch partners. The two men, lost
in cant and full dress, their legs sprawled
subway-style, as men's legs invariably are, seem
remarkably unruffled, all but oblivious to their nude
female companion. Her nudity is puzzling and
correct; clothes for her are surely only needed
to shrug a shoulder out of. She herself appears
baldly there-for-the-ride; her eyes, moving out
toward the viewer, are wide with the most banal,
detached surprise, as if to say, "where's
the real party?"

Now, in a comparable state of outdoor
undress, I'm beginning to have a fair idea
of what's going on in that scene. Watching
you, in clothes, remove one boot to work your
finger toward an itch in your athletic sock,
I look for any similarities between art
and our afternoon here on abandoned
property. The bather in the painting's
background, presumably there for a certain
balance of composition, is for us an ungainly,
rusted green dumpster, rising from overgrown
weeds that provide a contrast only remotely
pastoral. We are two to Manet's main group
of three, but the hum of the odd car or truck
on the highway below us offers a transient third.
Like the nude. I don't seem especially hungry,
partly because it's difficult eating naked when
everyone else is clothed, partly because
you didn't remember I hate chicken salad.
The beer you opened for me sits untouched,
going flat in the sun. I stroke the wet bottle
fitfully, to remind myself just how far
we've come or more probably have always been
from the shape of romance. My dear,
this is not art, we're not anywhere close
to Arcadia.

One of my all time favourites.

As I Walked Out One Evening
W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme
by Gerard Manley Hopkins


As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.