Elegy

by Leonard Cohen

Do not look for him In brittle mountain streams: They are too cold for any god; And do not examine the angry rivers For shreds of his soft body Or turn the shore stones for his blood; But in the warm salt ocean He is descending through cliffs Of slow green water And the hovering coloured fish Kiss his snow-bruised body And build their secret nests In his fluttering winding-sheet.

Something I've Not Done

by W.S. Merwin

Something I've not done is following me I haven't done it again and again so it has many footsteps like a drumstick that's grown old and never been used

In late afternoon I hear it come closer at times it climbs out of a sea onto my shoulders and I shrug it off losing one more chance

Every morning it's drunk up part of my breath for the day and knows which way I'm going and already it's not done there

But once more I say I'll lay hands on it tomorrow and add its footsteps to my heart and its story to my regrets and its silence to my compass

Driving Through Sawmill Towns

by Les Murray

I.

In the high cool country, having come from the clouds, down a tilting road into a distant valley, you drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest, swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance crouches in clearings … then you come across them, the sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards with perhaps a store, perhaps a bridge beyond and a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles.

II.

The mills are roofed with iron, have no walls: you look straight in as you pass, see lithe men working,

the swerve of a winch, dim dazzling blades advancing through a trolley-borne trunk till it sags apart in a manifold sprawl of weatherboards and battens.

The men watch you pass: when you stop your car and ask them for directions, tall youths look away – it is the older men who come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you.

Beside each mill, smoke trickles out of mounds of ash and sawdust.

III.

You glide on through town, your mudguards damp with cloud. The houses there wear verandahs out of shyness, all day in calendared kitchens, women listen for cars on the road, lost children in the bush, a cry from the mill, a footstep – nothing happens.

The half-heard radio sings its song of sidewalks.

Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step, or a plain young wife at a tankstand fetching water in a metal bucket will turn round and gaze at the mountains in wonderment, looking for a city.

IV.

Evenings are very quiet. All around the forest is there. As night comes down, the houses watch each other: a light going out in a window here has meaning.

You speed away through the upland, glare through towns and are gone in the forest, glowing on far hills.

On summer nights ground-crickets sing and pause. In the dark of winter, tin roofs sough with rain, downpipes chafe in the wind, agog with water. Men sit after tea by the stove while their wives talk, rolling a dead match between their fingers, thinking of the future.

Untitled

by Vera Pavlova tr. Steven Seymour

A beast in winter, a plant in spring, an insect in summer, a bird in autumn. The rest of the time I am a woman.

The Hat

by Matthew Sweeney

A green hat is blowing through Harvard Square and no one is trying to catch it. Whoever has lost it has given up -- perhaps, because his wife was cheating, he took it off and threw it like a frisbee, trying to decapitate a statue of a woman in her middle years who doesn’t look anything like his wife. This wind wouldn’t lift the hat alone, and any man would be glad to keep it. I can imagine -- as it tumbles along, gusting past cars, people, lampposts -- it sitting above a dark green suit. The face between them would be bearded and not unhealthy, yet. The eyes would be green, too -- an all green man thinking of his wife in another bed, these thoughts all through the green hat, like garlic in the pores, and no one, no one pouncing on the hat to put it on.

can’t focus on work. can only think of that one lesbian poem about chivalry

oh god. oh fuck

hold on a second man…

@insect-p0sitivity tags peer approved

wild pear tree by Kaveh Akbar

Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf

by Jorge Luis Borges tr. Alastair Reid

At various times, I have asked myself what reasons moved me to study, while my night came down, without particular hope of satisfaction, the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.

Used up by the years, my memory loses its grip on words that I have vainly repeated and repeated. My life in the same way weaves and unweaves its weary history.

Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul has some secret, sufficient way of knowing that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing circle can take in all, can accomplish all.

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

Okay, this made me pause and literally write out every letter that 'fell' in order (‘oomngouuhhrsrtutpntnue’), then make sure they were all contained in 'turntomushuponthergroun'.

They are, and it's very satisfying.

oomngouuhhrsrtutpntnued

→

turntomushupontheground

Ozymandias

by Percy Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert… . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

who’s up thinking about after the threesome they both take you home by sue hyon bae i’m thinking about after the threesome they both take you home by sue hyon bae

normal time. im having it

Magnolias are so ancient plants that almost every other plant and insect who came to being around the same time as them has gone extinct by now. They are the loneliest plants in this world. Does anybody understand how much grief it gives me that the symbolic flower of Kuras is magnolia.

may i please direct your attention to the poem dinosaurs smelled magnolias by dalton day!!!!!