I Go Back to May 1937, by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

take them up like the male and female

paper dolls and bang them together

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

After Reading the Inferno

Second Circle

We cannot condemn the lovers,

but rather relate to their longing.

Together, but never again able

to experience earthly touch.

Doubled over with passion,

where Dante can only faint from the sight

Of the two imprisoned

by their overwhelming love.

She recalls romantic memories of the two

making love with their eyes open,

the light sweat glazing the crease

where pelvis meets thigh.

The coming ecstasy, the tired touch.

To live in punishment from loving too much,

and caring too little about

anything but the lover.

To love someone more than the self,

more than God.

Alexandra Ustach

Bellini's Castadiva

Performed by Maria Callas

I hear it for the first time, in the bedroom,

over the buzz of the ceiling fan,

and it is so graceful it's as if she were

a falcon flying or salmon swimming.

It is that instinctive.

And I only know some Italian

but it doesn't matter.

I don't even want to see the translation.

The way it sounds, her voice, is so much

more than words could ever speak.

I lay there, small amongst the giant notes

that billow in the evening air.

I picture bursting waves over rocks at sea,

Both tension and release,

but mostly release.

Alexandra Ustach

Saying Goodbye

They said she could hear me

as she laid there violently still.

Her soft Irish skin spread like putty

to the mattress,

her speechless mouth hung open,

and her eyes,

like fish eyes- glossy, unfocused, bulging.

How I prayed to hear words

from her, there, living lips

as if to pull out some meaning.

I remember the day

she told me this might happen.

How naive I was about her bruised

and wheezing body.

And when asked a month before,

if the chance of her dying might come,

Any questions? Anything to say?

I just stared at the evening

stroking tall buildings outside.

How much I'd change that,

the closed mouth, the young mind.

What I might ask of her now-

all the things I'd love to know.

Alexandra Ustach

How to Deal with Rivers

How do we come to understand water

in each of its motions,

as it changes form without changing its nature.

In all of its goings and comings--

the inevitable progression,

and the accidental risings of water.

And then to read a book of the earth,

to learn of it uncovered by rivers,

eroded.

And the water under a luminous body,

with an original illusion of strength,

dries up as the rays of the sun

fall upon it.

As if after long and anxious explorations

making love to the edges of the earth,

it fulfills its functions, falls off

and dies.

a collage poem.

by, Alexandra Ustach

Ask Me, By William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

Before the Diagnosis

Mom set the pool up in the backyard
on top of the crunchy grass
grown dry under the summer sun,
our young chubby bodies
drifting in the light breeze.

We wore sunglasses in the shape of stars
and floated in inner tubes
to feel the cool water
touching our bums,
our pink painted toes gliding across the surface.

In the big backyard of my childhood,
where the worst that could happen was a bee sting.
My mother lifted me from that little pool
into her warm toweled embrace.

Alexandra Ustach

Lindsay's Shoot with Yu Tsai

"The short film's models relive the reckless, drug and sex fueled relationship of Johnny Depp and Kate Moss in the 1990s."

Poem Written on a Napkin

Finally some time to sit and

think again,

time to contemplate the way of things.

I notice again, finally,

the gesture of a hand,

light's quiet glow,

the authority of words.

Months of held breath,

sick with decisions,

but thoughts, stunted--

the bird with clipped wings,

water surrounded by the concrete

walls of a pool.

And though there is now a certain loneliness,

I have more time

to grasp some things I missed.

As if all the thoughts now

are driftwood carved in to a dining room chair.

Alexandra Ustach

Rough Draft 12/15/09

O My Pa-Pa, by Bob Hicok

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.

They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs

and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,

whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,

or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,

or those with middles which, if you think

of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch

of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights

in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed

that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex

and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello

from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs

is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like

“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste

for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”

They’re not trying to make the poems better

so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook

or electrocution, as a group

they overcome their individual senilities,

their complete distaste for language, how cloying

it is, how like tears it can be, and remember

every mention of their long hours at the office

or how tired they were when they came home,

when they were dragged through the door

by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard

to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,

not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball

of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man

with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence

was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,

the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,

that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,

who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know

that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.

A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,

and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling

on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared

as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted

the rocket cars, as if running away from them

to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers

wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did

start to say something, to form the words hey

or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,

into the burning leave, and were gone

before it came to them that it was all right

to shout, that they should have knocked us down

with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified

by the distance men need in their love.