So glad this found you!

I GIVE IN TO AN OLD DESIRE I lost so much of the world's beauty, as if I were watching every shining gift on its branch with one eye. Because I was hungry. Because I was waiting to eat, a self crawling about the world in search of small things. I remember a small thing, my mother's hat, a tea hat or cocktail hat that sat on top of her perfect face-petals, perhaps peonies, flaming out, like the pink feathers of some exotic bird. Her mother had been a cook in the South. She grew up in the home of wealthy white people. Hesitant toward her own beauty, unable to protect mine, there were things she never talked about. She said silence was a balm. It sat on top of her head, something of exaltation and wonder exploding from the inside like a woman in orgasm. One artificial flower I have desired to write about for years. -Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte

One of his last recordings.

Necropsy of Love If it came about you died it might be said I loved you: love is an absolute as death is, and neither bears false witness to the other-- But you remain alive. No, I do not love you hate the word, that private tyranny inside a public sound, your freedom's yours and not my own: but hold my separate madness like a sword, and plunge it in your body all night long. If death shall strip our bones of all but bones, then here's the flesh and flesh that's drunken-sweet as wine cups in deceptive lunar light: reach up your hand and turn the moonlight off, and maybe it was never there at all, so never promise anything to me: but reach across the darkness with your hand, reach across the distance of tonight, and touch the moving moment once again before you fall asleep--

So moved by Leonard Cohen's plaintive reading of this iconic Al Purdy poem in Al Purdy was Here (2015).

So glad this found you, Jessica. Perhaps it'll inspire you to write your own PF poem. Did you know they only performed this song live on two occasions? One of my favourite tracks from the Syd Barrett era.

Binoy, thank you! Really appreciate that you took the time to read and comment.

REMEMBER A DAY PHILLIP CRYMBLE It's human to be open to the wholly unexpected — little accidents of strangeness and disquiet ― the agency of something once familiar in a foreign place. With friends today who've driven up to visit us from Boston, we're poking through the furnishings and retro-modern house wares at the York Street home and garden — whiling time away. The girl behind the counter wraps a package, snips the excess string ― her plain, untailored radiance made lovelier by sunlight, spring humidity, and space rock streaming randomly from speakers in the ceiling tiles. Syd Barrett's slides and looping fades give way to a piano line so fragile, sharp and crystalline I'm gob smacked — carried briefly back to far-flung adolescence ― those long elastic summers stretched like open shutter photographs of star trails in an arctic sky. Someone sneezes, and from miles away I'm home. Bewildered, self-effaced, and lost, I hear the last notes fade ― a pilgrim like in by-gone days, well-travelled, here with news of distant places, and the rubbing from a grave.

From the Summer 2025 Cornerstone issue of Qwerty

NIGHT SHIFT When I am touched, brushed, and measured, I think of myself As a painting. The artist works no matter the lack of sleep. I am made Beautiful. I never eat. I once bothered with a man who called me Snack, Midnight Snack to be exact. I'd oblige because he hurt me With a violence I mistook for desire. I'd get left hanging In one room of his dim house while he swept or folded laundry. When you've been worked on for so long, you never know You're done. Paint dries. Midnight is many colors. Black and blue Are only two. The man who tinted me best kept me looking a little Like a chore. How do you say prepared In French? How do you draw a man on the night shift? Security At the museum for the blind, he eats to stay Awake. He's so full, he never has to eat again. And the moon goes. -Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown, for the late crowd

Achilles Ach! Ill ease, All ails his sake, All hail his clash. Ask his likes: He lacks his lass, Alas, his law, his Clause is cause-he Slashes, slays, sacks, Classes his kills As skills: He slices clay, he Seals his lease. I call His kisses alkali, His sex, silk ashes. He's classical, his ilk: I see his case, his heel, Sick as lilies. He chases a shale sill, Hell's chilly hall— Shaky isles hazy As Hellas—keels, cauls. Ice slakes his cells. As lilacs cease, His ache heals all.

A. E. Stallings

We've all lead raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.

Charles Wright, from Littlefoot (2007)

preach

Pastan's a terrific poet. If you're unfamiliar with her work, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 is great gateway.

The Maypole --after Wallace Stevens One must have a mind of spring to regard the cherry tree burdened with blossom; and have been warm for days to behold the boughs of the redbud prickly with color in the glint of the April sun; and not to think of any cruelty in the difficult birthing of so many leaves, to feel only pure elation at the sound of the undulant breeze which is the sound of every garden with a breeze blowing among its flowers, the sound the listener hears, watching the buds which were not quite here a week ago pushing up from oblivion now.

Linda Pastan

The Tulip Garden And we divorced in spring the tulip garden A field of tulips and a field of wheat / A field of wheat a field of wheat the road / From Silverton to Salem and the road From Salem to Mount Angel and the road From Silverton to Mount Angel were not / The same road and the tulips changed and did / Not change the changing colors everywhere in The same place everywhere and each color in its own world / And separate from the other col- / ors a red wave a purple wave / The tulips changed and going to and return- / ing from And that was how we loved we glanced at things we loved each other at the end

Shane McCrae

Here's a passage I lean on in my dissertation involving Robert Duncan and Edith Sitwell that demonstrates just how vicious Randall Jarrell could be, especially when provoked. Duncan was an admirer of Sitwell's, which Jarrell knew full well.

I was fortunate enough to attend one of his readings myself. This one was at Purdue in 2002. A brilliant poet, indeed. So glad this found you.

HUMAN CHAIN FOR TERENCE BROWN Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers Firing over the mob, I was braced again With a grip on two sack corners, Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs To give me purchase, ready for the heave— The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback, A letting go which will not come again. Or it will, once. And for all.

Seamus Heaney, born on this day in 1939

Couldn't agree more. The poem I have in the new issue of The Walrus borrows its title from a phrase in "Poem in October."

Nice. Met my wife in the last year of high school because of a shared love of Thomas's poems. We read "Poem in October" to each other every year on our anniversary

For many of us, the gateway to Thomas's poetry.

Trollope What a sad day, full of black, blue, red, and yellow umbrellas. Everyone in the world, whatever their disposition, seemed to be crying at once, while I hit upon reading Trollope, and so remained a week among the grouse. That was my disposition. Sometimes I would get up and move about-- tea, Kleenex, cigarette, a phone call--but always I returned to my life among the grouse. Can you forgive me? I was about to ask, but like some rose that never opened. Because I wish I were a quiet voiceless plant too full of love and joy to move about and utter words. Besides, there are tears which happen in a day that it would take a lifetime to explain.

Mary Ruefle

Rain and Stars A person can be removed. All evidence points to it. And in the space left behind-- It rained all night. A heavy, even rain that added to the pond. Now there are tiny fish scissoring in the blackness. New alphabets, not encased in anything— these ripples of emergence, silver darts in a withdrawing sky.

Jenny George

Thanks, Sarah. A little on the sentimental side, but I'm pleased with it just the same.

"Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajewski, and Derek Walcott photographed by Jill Krementz in Brodsky’s garden, January 12, 1986" (bookandfilmglobe).

nice

🙏

BOOGIE-WOOGIE You shout from the other room You ask me how to spell boogie-woogie And instantly I think what luck no war has been declared no fire has consumed our city's monuments our bodies our dwellings The river didn't flood no friends have been arrested It's only boogie-woogie I sigh relieved and say it's spelled just like it sounds boogie-woogie --Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) (Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.)

Can't stop thinking about this Adam Zagajewski poem

Garden Something is growing. Plath said growing hurts at first, but when does the hurting stop?

Victoria Chang

Bravo!