the transcendental modernist

I’m a responsibility too great
A lumbering burden
A caustic obligation according to your bitingly callous parting words
I’m a desert you ineptly try to hold in your clenched hand
Grains of me slip between your sodden uncouth fingers to gracelessly fall at your feet and implore to be held by you again
“But,” you say with a satisfactory grin as if you’ve accomplished some feat of wretched deceit that should be applauded for your iniquitous cold-hearted ingenuity
And you allude to your love of autonomy
I’m a saccharine spring you spoke into drought

- by Kat Laraine

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.   

- by Jane Hirshfield

There is no Frigate like a Book 
To take us Lands away, 
Nor any Coursers like a Page 
Of prancing Poetry –  
This Traverse may the poorest take        
Without oppress of Toll –  
How frugal is the Chariot 
That bears a Human soul.

- by Emily Dickinson

The poetry of earth is never dead:
   When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
   And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
   In summer luxury,—he has never done
   With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
   On a lone winter evening, when the frost
      Has wrought silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
   And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
      The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

- by John Keats

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

                 *

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

                  *

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

- by Archibald MacLeish