Albert Goldbarth's "After Yitzl" from Many Circles

"In this story-in-my-story they say, 'I love you,' and now I say it in the external story, too: I stroke you slightly rougher as I say it, as if underlining the words, or reaffirming you're here, and I'm here, since the gray in the air is darker, and sight insufficient. You murmur it back. We say it like anyone else-- in part because our death is bonded into us meiotically, from before there was marrow or myelin, and we know it, even as infants our scream is more than the teat. We understand the wood smoke in a tree is aching to rise from the tree in its shape, its green and nutritive damps are readying always for joining the ether around it-- any affirming clench of the roots in soil, physical and deeper, is preventive for its partial inch of a while.

So: genealogy. The family tree. Its roots. Its urgent suckings among the cemetarial layers" (2).

"Which is what we did with love, you and I: invented it. We needed it, it wasn't here, and out of nothing in common we hammered a tree house into the vee of a family tree, from zero, bogus planks, the bright but invisible nailheads of pure will. Some nights a passerby might spy us, while I was lazily flicking your nipple awake with my tongue, or you were fondling me into alertness, pleased in what we call bed, by the hue of an apricot moon, in what we called our life, by TV's dry-blue arctic light, two black silhouettes communing: and we were suspended in air" (3).

"I've seen each friend I have, at one time or another, shake at thinking how susceptible and brief a person is: and whatever touching we do, whatever small narrative starring ourselves can bridge that unit of emptiness, is a triumph" (3).

"We grew fat on pickled herring in cream, and love. I suppose we looked jolly. Although you could see in the eyes, up close, there was a sadness: where our families died in the camps, where I was never able to find time for the poetry-- those things" (13).

"But nothing is ever over-- or, if it is, then the impulse is wanting to make it over: 'over' not as in 'done,' but 'again'" (15).

Execution, by Edward Hirsch

The last time I saw my high school football coach

He had cancer stenciled into his face

Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate

Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's

That he copied down in a neat numerical hand

Before practice in the morning. By day's end

The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,

Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players

Shining under his favorite word, Execution,

Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.

He believed in football like a new religion

And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals

Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare

Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates

Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet

Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling

The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,

Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,

The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.

And so he drove us through punishing drills

On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,

And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,

And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea-

Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat.

Almost always they worked. He despised losing

And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even

More than himself. But the last time I saw him

He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,

And I remembered the game in my senior year

When we met a downstate team who loved hitting

More than we did, who battered us all afternoon

With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing

And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,

Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

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."