Poem from "Without"- Donald Hall

Katy: I first heard Donald Hall read a poem from "Without" on the radio, while sitting at my desk at work one day.  I went out that afternoon and bought the book, then rode the El home that night, weeping.  "Without" sits on my shelf as one of those books I can't read, because if I don't, maybe it's not real.  Maybe grief doesn't exist, maybe pain isn't our lot, maybe those we've lost are just standing outside a door somewhere, waiting to come back in.  If anyone can capture beauty in such terrible pain, it's Donald Hall, and the poem below is a wonderful example of that.


    Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
    of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
    at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
    against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
    of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
    She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
    They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

Asperges Me - Timothy Murphy

Cleanse me of my iniquity
and wash away my sins.
Laugh, Lord, at my obliquity.
In you laughter begins.

Regard this little steeple.
You gave to the High Plains
a flock of sheep, the people
who drink deep when it rains.

I shall number all the stones
Assyria had laid low.
I shall number all my bones
as David did long ago.

Oh, what a troubled route man took,
descending from the trees:
cave paintings and the printed book
made on his bended knee.

Lord, the broken spirit,
the sorrows in my heart
are much, much to inherit
and hard, hard to impart.

You Who Never Arrived - Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...


Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Apples and Oranges - Megan H.

Like Apples and Oranges
love their trees,
we'll mean to leave gently
but gravity, gravity.

Love their trees,
like a mother and child,
But gravity, gravity,
we say it can't be helped.

Like a mother and child
slowly grow old and apart,
We say it can't be helped,
like apples and oranges.

Sorrows - Lucille Clifton

who would believe them winged who would believe they could be beautiful who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin sometimes we hear them in our dreams rattling their skulls clicking their bony fingers they have heard me beseeching as i whispered into my own cupped hands enough not me again but who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire