brooklynstatehospital

[brooklynstatehospital]

Jonathan Galassi . Once

Once the train has left the station you can't take it. Once the promise has been broke you can't unbreak it. If the letter has been sent you can't rewrite it. If the cigarette's been smoked you can't not light it. Now the candle's snuffed you can't see by it. Once the seat's been sold no one can buy it. The phone is disconnected: don't talk to it. The window's painted black; you won't see through it. The scotch tape end is lost, you can't unwind it. The earring's in the lake; you'll never find it. And now the money's squandered— you can't give it back. And time is short; you have to live it.

#Jonathan Galassi #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Mark Doty . A Green Crab’s Shell

Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like—

though evidence suggests eight complexly folded

scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace and power. A gull's gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber —size of a demitasse— open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue. Though it smells of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case comes with such lavish lining! Imagine breathing

surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament.

What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened into this— if the smallest chambers

of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky.

#Mark Doty #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Norman MacCaig . So Many Summers

Beside one loch, a hind's neat skeleton, Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry: Two neat geometries drawn in the weather: Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand, Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray, And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one– Now you'd look very close before you knew If it's the boat that ran, the hind went sailing. So many summers, and I have lived them too.

#Norman MacCaig #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Anne Stevenson . The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument

The spirit is too blunt an instrument to have made this baby. Nothing so unskilful as human passions could have managed the intricate exacting particulars: the tiny blind bones with their manipulating tendons, the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae, the chain of the difficult spine. Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear, with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain. Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No, no desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body's ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and their pain.

#Anne Stevenson #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Raymond Carver . Grief

Woke up early this morning and from my bed looked far across the Strait to see a small boat moving through the choppy water, a single running light on. Remembered my friend who used to shout his dead wife’s name from hilltops around Perugia. Who set a plate for her at his simple table long after she was gone. And opened the windows so she could have fresh air. Such display I found embarrassing. So did his other friends. I couldn’t see it. Not until this morning.

#Raymond Carver #advent #poetry

[brooklynstatehospital]

Kay Ryan . All Your Horses

Say when rain cannot make you more wet or a certain thought can’t deepen and yet you think it again: you have lost count. A larger amount is no longer a larger amount. There has been a collapse; perhaps in the night. Like a rupture in water (which can’t rupture of course). All your horses broken out with all your horses.

#Kay Ryan #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

John Ashbery . Some Trees

These are amazing: each Joining a neighbor, as though speech Were a still performance. Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented Such comeliness, we are surrounded: A silence already filled with noises, A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, Our days put on such reticence These accents seem their own defense.

#John Ashbery #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Terrance Hayes . What it Look Like

Dear Ol' Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw, I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is Never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party. Trill stands for what is truly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse. Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is Never mistake what it looks like for what it is else you end up like that Negro Othello. (Was Othello a Negro?) Don't you lie about who you are sometimes and then realize the lie is true? You are blind to your power, Brother Bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king. And that's okay. No one will tell you you are the king. No one really wants a king anyway.

#Terrance Hayes #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Wendell Berry . Like Snow

Suppose we did our work like the snow, quietly, quietly. leaving nothing out.

#Wendell Berry #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Derek Mahon . Afterlives

(for James Simmons)

1

I wake in a dark flat To the soft roar of the world. Pigeons neck on the white Roofs as I draw the curtains And look out over London Rain-fresh in the morning light. This is our element, the bright Reason on which we rely For the long-term solutions. The orators yap, and guns Go off in a back street; But the faith doesn't die That in our time these things Will amaze the literate children In their non-sectarian schools And the dark places be Ablaze with love and poetry When the power of good prevails. What middle-class shits we are To imagine for one second That our privileged ideals Are divine wisdom, and the dim Forms that kneel at noon In the city not ourselves. 2 I am going home by sea For the first time in years. Somebody thumbs a guitar On the dark deck, while a gull Dreams at the masthead, The moon-splashed waves exult. At dawn the ship trembles, turns In a wide arc to back Shuddering up the grey lough Past lightship and buoy, Slipway and dry dock Where a naked bulb burns; And I step ashore in a fine rain To a city so changed By five years of war I scarcely recognize The places I grew up in, The faces that try to explain. But the hills are still the same Grey-blue above Belfast. Perhaps if I'd stayed behind And lived it bomb by bomb I might have grown up at last And learnt what is meant by home.

#Derek Mahon #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Anne Michaels . Phantom Limbs

“The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart."      —Charles Baudelaire So much of the city is our bodies. Places in us old light still slants through to. Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling, like phantom limbs. Even the city carries ruins in its heart. Longs to be touched in places only it remembers. Through the yellow hooves of the ginkgo, parchment light; in that apartment where I first touched your shoulders under your sweater, that October afternoon you left keys in the fridge, milk on the table. The yard - our moonlight motel - where we slept summer's hottest nights, on grass so cold it felt wet. Behind us, freight trains crossed the city, a steel banner, a noisy wall. Now the hollow diad ! floats behind glass in office towers also haunted by our voices. Few buildings, few lives are built so well even their ruins are beautiful. But we loved the abandoned distillery: stone floors cracking under empty vats, wooden floors half rotted into dirt; stairs leading nowhere; high rooms run through with swords of dusty light. A place the rain still loved, its silver paint on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us. Closed rooms open only to weather, pungent with soot and molasses, scent-stung. A place where everything too big to take apart had been left behind.

#anne michaels #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Raymond Antrobus . Echo

                                      1

My ear amps whistle like they are singing to Echo, goddess of noise, the raveled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs of dull doorbells, sounds swamped in my misty hearing aid tubes. Gaudí believed in holy sound and built a cathedral to contain it, pulling hearing men from their knees as though atheism is a kind of deafness. Who would turn down God? Even though I have not heard the golden decibels of angels, I have been living in a noiseless palace where the doorbell is pulsating light and I am able to answer.

                                     2

What?

a word that keeps looking in mirrors like it is in love with its own volume.

What?

I am a one-word question, a one-man patience test.

What?

What language would we speak without ears?

What?

Is paradise a world where I hear everything?

What?

How will my brain know what to hold if it has too many arms?

                                     3

The day I clear out my dead father’s flat,

I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey,

Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl.

I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf,

smudged green label Raymond Speaking.

I play the tape in his vintage cassette player

and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob

and dad’s laughter crackling in the background

not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus”

and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids.

Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — 

Antrob Antrob Antrob

                                     4

And no one knew what I was missing

until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos

and said to put a brick on the table

every time I heard a sound.

After the test I still held enough bricks

in my hand to build a house

and call it my sanctuary,

call it the reason I sat in saintly silence

during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached

the good news, I only heard

as Babylon’s babbling echoes.

                                     5

         And if you don’t catch nothing          then something wrong with your ears —          they been tuned to de wrong frequency                          — Kei Miller

So maybe I belong to the universe underwater, where all songs are smeared wailings for Salacia, goddess of saltwater, healer of infected ears, which is what the doctor thought I had, since deafness did not run in the family but came from nowhere, so they syringed in olive oil and saltwater, and we all waited to see what would come out.

#Raymond Antrobus #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Charles Wright . Clear Night

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. Moon-fingers lay down their same routine On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed. I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says “What?” to me. And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me. And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark. And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

#charles wright #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Mary Oliver . The Journey

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice– though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world determined to do the only thing you could do– determined to save the only life you could save.

#Mary Oliver #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Louise Glück . Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

#Louise Glück #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Jane Hirshfield . Sheep

It is the work of feeling to undo expectation.

A black-faced sheep looks back at you as you pass and your heart is startled as if by the shadow of someone once loved.

Neither comforted by this nor made lonely.

Only remembering that a self in exile is still a self, as a bell unstruck for years is still a bell.

#Jane Hirshfield #poetry #advent

[brooklynstatehospital]

Carol Rumens . Quotations

What I like about quotations Is their loneliness

What I like about loneliness Is seven and a half vodkas-and-blackcurrant

What I like about blackcurrants Are the sharp little stones inside their burst cushions

What I like about cushions Is their lack of backbone

What I like about the backbone Is its perfection

What I like about perfection Is academic

What I like about academics Is the way they curl two fingers when citing quotations

     (Etc.)

#Carol Rumens #poetry #advent