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With Mercy for the Greedy By Anne Sexton
For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession
Concerning your letter in which you ask me to call a priest and in which you ask me to wear The Cross that you enclose; your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—
I pray to its shadow, that gray place where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep. I detest my sins and I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, its solid neck, its brown sleep.
True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.
All morning long I have worn your cross, hung with package string around my throat. It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might, tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born. Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.
My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue’s wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
Want By James Harms
I want nothing more than this:
to hear the blood in your hands when they touch my face; to listen at the edge of sleep to your breath grown steady; to fix the torn hem in your favorite dress before you return from a day of errands; to never seek your notice of the small ways, the slight repairs of love; to sear red peppers on a grill, the strips of steak, to pour the drinks and hear through the kitchen window the phone ring, your laughter; to love from a distance as you laugh; to fear truthfully, like a sparrow in the dark weeds, instead of hopelessly as I do when your image, for whole seconds, flickers loosely and vanishes, my mind a lit theatre, the film on fire; to smile quietly when your back is turned, because it isn't time yet to say it again; to ache a little less in your absence; to feel the hush that follows rain as silence and not a figure for loss; to find your fingerprints in the soil of a house plant, to fill them with water; to want for all things but not for you; to know my wanting is a way of holding; to hold without hurting; to leave the windows open, to find a room filled with pear blossoms, to leave them there for days, to find them in your hair.
America By Tony Hoagland
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is, He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain, or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night, It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—
Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,” And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past, When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand Which turns the volume higher?
Morning Song By Sylvia Plath
Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.
A Daughter of Eve By Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
A fool I was to sleep at noon, And wake when night is chilly Beneath the comfortless cold moon; A fool to pluck my rose too soon, A fool to snap my lily. My garden-plot I have not kept; Faded and all-forsaken, I weep as I have never wept: Oh it was summer when I slept, It's winter now I waken. Talk what you please of future spring And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:-- Stripp'd bare of hope and everything, No more to laugh, no more to sing, I sit alone with sorrow.
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