10 poems // August 10
if you can't be free, be a mystery
1 //
don’t call it a dream // by Crispin Best
i let summer take over the house
for however long it needs
and what is it
about the clawed opening of dawn
that makes me want to call it that
if you can’t do the crime
don’t do the crime
and don’t thank me for the birthday wishes
please
just let me grow my beans
2//
from Heat // by Denis Johnson
August,
you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?
3//
Sorrow is Not My Name // by Ross Gay
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
—for Walter Aikens
4//
Provision // by WS Merwin
All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound
Of rain
From memory
And in the wall
The dead increase their invisible honey
It is August
The flocks are beginning to form
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands
What you do not have you find everywhere
5//
Canary // by Rita Dove
for Michael S. Harper
Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.
(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)
Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.
If you can’t be free, be a mystery.
6//
from acknowledgments // by Danez Smith
i would love you even if you killed god
•
you made coming out feel like coming in from the storm
•
you are the country i bloody the hills for
•
you love me despite the history of my hands, their mangled confession
•
at the end of the world, let there be you, my world
•
god bless you who screens all my nudes, drafts my break-up text
•
you are the drug that knocks the birds from my heart
•
ain’t no mountain, no valley, no river i wouldn’t give the hands for comin’ to you sideways
•
o the horrid friends who were just ships harboring me to you
•
& how many times have you loved me without my asking?
how often have i loved a thing because you loved it?
including me
7//
Overjoyed // by Ada Limón
What’s the drunk waxwing supposed to do
when all day’s been an orgy of red buds
on the winery’s archway off Gehricke Road
and it’s too far to make it home, too long
to fly, even as the sober crow goes. What’s
the point of passion when the pyracantha
berries keep the blood turned toward
obsess, obsess. Don’t you know those birds
are going to toss themselves to the streets
for some minor song of happiness? And
who can blame them? This life is hard.
And let me be the first to admit, when I
come across some jewel of pleasure, I too want
to squeeze that thing until even its seedy heart
evaporates like ethanol, want to throw my
bird-bones into the brush-fire until,
half-blind, all I can hear is the sound
of wings in the relentlessly delighted air.
8//
from You Can’t Have It All // by Barbara Ras
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so.
9//
from Sweet Heart // by Eileen Myles
A bee
wants
to sting
me and
in that
moment
I would
notice
everything. Why
do you
think I’m
sweet. Why
must I
die.
10//
from A Ubiquity of Sparrows // by Craig Arnold
Sparrow do you imagine more than a little warm
rambunctious life between two corridors of nothing
the one forever before the one forever after