from World Literature Today
TOI DERRICOTTE The Great Beauty
In the movie, flamingos migrate over Rome and rest
overnight on the terrace of Jep Gambardella, so that,
in the rose light of dawn, he walks out to find his saintly
old guest, Sister Maria, meditating amongst a flamboyance—
a hundred stand on pink stilt-like legs with roseate plumes
and beaks sturdy as lobster crackers. Some rest on one leg
or sit with legs tucked under them; some halfheartedly peck
at stone—as if they might find breadcrumbs from last night’s party.
But all are quiet. “I know all their Christian names,”
she brags under her breath to no one, or perhaps to God.
*
I never received such tidings from the universe, but Saturday
on my walk, checking my Fitbit again (3000 for an old lady is good) I heard wing beats
and cooing, and then, almost under my arm, one flew up
nearly brushing my hand—as if intentional—then twenty, thirty coming
from behind, as if they were pouring out of my back. I couldn’t tell how
many would arrive, a hundred resting on the branches of a tree, and some flying up to a
balustrade, sitting in a long row stolid as judges. Why can’t I
take evidence seriously? I (who half believe in God) spoke playfully—
not even remembering I had watched Sister Maria’s flamingos two nights
before—“What are YOU doing here?” as if they were old friends or a bunch
of my kids showing up out of nowhere. I watched for a while and when they
just sat there, turning their heads, I went on with my walk—another 1500
steps to go. By the time I was almost home, I had persuaded myself: they’re
only pigeons; perhaps hungry. But then they came back, from all around,
as if they were rising up out of the ground, as if they were being made
right before me, all the sounding wings, air whipping and breaking,
their grey and pink presences as if convincing me.
from The New Yorker
JAY DESHPANDE A Child’s Guide to Grasses
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic
—Walt Whitman
Although the smell of fresh-cut grass
is the same everywhere to me
it will always be Hanover:
rec soccer, someone’s tamed
plot of land neat and tractored
within a thicket, summer,
its black flies. I sat in grass
on bright secluded days and thought
nothing of the privileged fold
in which I grew. New England’s
strange descendants, academics
in the wilderness, proud, protected, civilizing
certain verdure into quads. College
towns are also settlements
of the mind: they trim the world
away. Already there was much
language rooted here I could not
understand. On sunny days I pulled
it up aggressively, a child-sign
for boredom. I am still
most at home on a campus,
which means field of course:
as if land naturally
conforms to strategies to turn
the pagan thing into some white
universal. These specific Americas,
selecting certain roots, opulent
with sudden green containment. Fescue
more precisely the species that
grew up around me, but
this word harkens to a rod or whip
in Latin, the rigidity we hold when
we hold the land in check. I was
a weak boy. I played alone, would not
proceed into the scrum or run
my kicks in for the ball. The action
seemed unsavory. I had my mud
enough. In school I knew better
how to contain myself. The mind,
too, can colonize its field
color green. I still can taste that full
scent fanned out against a morning,
mowed and mounded, dotting
lawns, spilling onto curbs
like roadkill. Fescue: in English
the word goes back to Wycliffe,
in his version of the Sermon
on the Mount, which warns to note
not the mote in the eye of your brother
before the beam that blinds your own.
from New England Review
NATALIE DIAZ lake-loop
, because there was yet no lake
into many nights we made the lake
a labor, and its necessary laborings
to find the basin not yet opened
in my body, yet my body—any body
wet or water from the start, to fill a clay
, start being what it ever means, a beginning—
the earth’s first hand on a vision-quest
wildering night’s skin fields, for touch
like a dark horse made of air
, turned downward in the dusk, opaquing
a hand resembles its ancestors—
the war, or the horse who war made
, what it means to be made
to be ruined before becoming—rift
glacial, ablation and breaking
lake-hip sloping, fluvial, then spilled—
I unzip the lake, walk into what I am—
the thermocline, and oxygen
, as is with kills, rivers, seas, the water
is of our own naming
I am wet we call it because it is
a happening, is happening now
imagined light is light’s imagination
a lake shape of it
, the obligatory body, its dark burning
reminding us back, memory as filter
desire as lagan, a hydrology—
The lake is alone, we say in Mojave
, every story happens because someone’s mouth,
a nature dependent—life, universe
Here at the lake, say
, she wanted what she said
to slip down into it
for which a good lake will rise—Lake
which once meant, sacrifice
which once meant, I am devoted
, Here I am, atmosphere
sensation, pressure
, the lake is beneath me, pleasure bounded
a slip space between touch and not
slip of paper, slip of hand
slip body turning toward slip trouble
, I am who slipped the moorings
I am so red with lack
to loop-knot
or leave the loop beyond the knot
we won’t say love because it is
a difference between vertex and vertices—
the number of surfaces we break
enough or many to make the lake
loosened from the rock
one body’s dearth is another body’s ache
lay it to the earth
, all great lakes are meant to take
sediment, leg, wrist, wrist, the ear
let down and wet with stars, dock lights
distant but wanted deep,
to be held in the well of the eye
woven like water, through itself, in
and inside, how to sate a depression
if not with darkness—if darkness is not
fingers brushing a body, shhhh
, she said, I don’t know what the world is
I slip for her, or anything
, like language, new each time
diffusion—remade and organized
and because nothing is enough, waves—
each an emotional museum of water
left light trembles a lake figure on loop
a night-loop
, every story is a story of water
before it is gold and alone
before it is black like a rat snake
I begin at the lake
, clean once, now drained
I am murk—I am not clean
everything has already happened
always the lake is just up ahead in the poem
, my mouth is the moon, I bring it down
lay it over the lake of her thighs
warm lamping ax
hewing water’s tender shell
slant slip, entering like light, surrounded
into another skin
where there was yet no lake
yet we made it, make it still
to drink and clean ourselves on
from Poem-a-Day
ALEX DIMITROV Love
I love you early in the morning and it’s difficult to love you.
I love the January sky and knowing it will change although unlike us.
I love watching people read.
I love photo booths.
I love midnight.
I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me.
I love snow and briefly.
I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold.
I love my twenties and want them back every day.
I love time.
I love people.
I love people and my time away from them the most.
I love the part of my desk that’s darkened by my elbows.
I love feeling nothing but relief during the chorus of a song.
I love space.
I love every planet.
I love the big unknowns but need to know who called or wrote, who’s coming—if they want the same things I do, if they want much less.
I love not loving Valentine’s Day.
I love how February is the shortest month.
I love that Barack Obama was president.
I love the quick, charged time between two people smoking a cigarette outside a bar.
I love everyone on Friday night.
I love New York City.
I love New York City a lot.
I love that day in childhood when I thought I was someone else.
I love wondering how animals perceive our daily failures.
I love the lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when Brick’s father says, “Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto.”
I love Brick.
I love that we can fail at love and continue to live.
I love writing this and not knowing what I’ll love next.
I love looking at paintings and being reminded I am alive.
I love Turner’s paintings and the sublime.
I love the coming of spring even in the most withholding March.
I love skipping anything casual—“hi, how are you, it’s been forever”—and getting straight to the center of pain. Or happiness.
I love opening a window in a room.
I love the feeling of possibility by the end of the first cup of coffee.
I love hearing anyone listen to Nina Simone.
I love Nina Simone.
I love how we can choose our own families.
I love when no one knows where I am but feel terrified to be forgotten.
I love Saturdays.
I love that despite our mistakes this will end.
I love how people get on planes to New York and California.
I love the hour after rain and the beginning of the cruelest month.
I love imagining Weldon Kees on a secret island.
I love the beach on a cloudy day.
I love never being disappointed by chocolate.
I love that morning when I was twenty and had just met someone very important (though I didn’t know it) and I walked down an almost empty State Street because it was still early and not at all late—and of course I could change everything (though I also didn’t know it)—I could find anyone, go anywhere, I wasn’t sorry for who I was.
I love the impulse to change.
I love seeing what we do with what we can’t change.
I love the moon’s independent indifference.
I love walking the same streets as Warhol.
I love what losing something does but I don’t love losing it.
I love how the past shifts when there’s more.
I love kissing.
I love hailing a cab and going home alone.
I love being surprised by May although it happens every year.
I love closing down anything—a bar, restaurant, party—and that time between late night and dawn when one lamp goes on wherever you are and you know. You know what you know even if it’s hard to know it.
I love being a poet.
I love all poets.
I love Jim Morrison for saying, “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.”
I love everything I haven’t done.
I love the quiet of the trees in a new city.
I love how the sky is connected to a part of us that understands something big and knows nothing about it too.
I love the minutes before you’re about to see someone you love.
I love any film that delays resolution.
I love being in a cemetery because judgment can’t live there.
I love being on a highway in June or anytime at all.
I love magic.
I love the zodiac.
I love all of my past lives.
I love that hour of the party when everyone’s settled into their discomfort and someone tells you something really important—in passing—because it’s too painful any other way.
I love the last moments before sleep.
I love the promise of summer.
I love going to the theater and seeing who we are.
I love glamour—shamelessly—and all glamour. Which is not needed to live but shows people love life. What else is it there for? Why not ask for more?
I love red shoes.
I love black leather.
I love the grotesque ways in which people eat ice cream—on sidewalks, alone—however they need it, whenever they feel free enough.
I love being in the middle of a novel.
I love how mostly everyone in Jane Austen is looking for love.
I love July and its slowness.
I love the idea of liberation and think about it all the time.
I love imagining a world without money.
I love imagining a life with enough money to write when I want.
I love standing in front of the ocean.
I love that sooner or later we forget even “the important things.”
I love how people write in the sand, on buildings, on paper. Their own bodies. Fogged mirrors. Texts they’ll draft but never send.
I love silence.
I love owning a velvet cape and not knowing how to cook.
I love that instant when an arc of light passes through a room and I’m reminded that everything really is moving.
I love August and its sadness.
I love Sunday for that too.
I love jumping in a pool and how somewhere on the way up your body relaxes and accepts the shock of the water.
I love Paris for being Paris.
I love Godard’s films.
I love any place that makes room for loneliness.
I love how the Universe is 95% dark matter and energy and somewhere in the rest of it there is us.
I love bookstores and the autonomy when I’m in one.
I love that despite my distrust in politics I am able to vote.
I love wherever my friends are.
I love voting though know art and n
ot power is what changes human character.
I love what seems to me the discerning nature of cats.
I love the often-uncomplicated joy of dogs.
I love Robert Lax for living alone.
I love the extra glass of wine happening somewhere, right now.
I love schools and teachers.
I love September and how we see it as a way to begin.
I love knowledge. Even the fatal kind. Even the one without “use value.”
I love getting dressed more than getting undressed.
I love mystery.
I love lighting candles.
I love religious spaces though I’m sometimes lost there.
I love the sun for worshipping no one.
I love the sun for showing up every day.
I love the felt order after a morning of errands.
I love walking toward nowhere in particular and the short-lived chance of finding something new.
I love people who smile only when moved to.
I love that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year.
I love Whitman for writing, “the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; / These come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are not the Me myself.”
I love October when the veil between worlds is thinnest.
I love how at any moment I could forgive someone from the past.
I love the wind and how we never see it.
I love the performed sincerity in pornography and wonder if its embarrassing transparency is worth adopting in other parts of life.
I love how magnified emotions are at airports.
I love dreams. Conscious and unconscious. Lived and not yet.
I love anyone who risks their life for their ideal one.
I love Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
I love how people make art even in times of impossible pain.
I love all animals.
I love ghosts.
I love that we continue to invent meaning.
I love the blue hours between three and five when Plath wrote Ariel.
I love that despite having one body there are many ways to live.
I love November because I was born there.
I love people who teach children that most holidays are a product of capitalism and have little to do with love—which would never celebrate massacre—which would never care about money or greed.
I love people who’ve quit their jobs to be artists.
I love you for reading this as opposed to anything else.
I love the nostalgia of the future.