Ariana Writes Mary Oliver

That cottonwood grove full of fawns, some curled in the high
grass, tawny circles with white spots in a funnel
of sleep and vulnerability, some giving the lie
to pathos in their efforts to crawl for shelter; that tunnel
under my dreams where fear always waits to turn
the mundane to the terrible--these form my constant sense
of departure. Even in the first person vortex, the churn
where memories keep reinventing themselves, I tense
at the sound of my own lies. Thus I fly
the grove in hopes the doe will return. I wake
to the hurt world and feign indifference. Why,
in all the green sadness religion would take
for granted, would the carnivores remain at bay
when these spots turn to blood in light of day?


Ed Writes Dylan Thomas

When the river turns opaque
and its mirror dies too,
how many clouds will lose
their charm for the boys of spring
who lost their fear in the greening thunder?
When the girls turn fair
and their songs improve,
how many birds will sound the alarm
for the boys of spring who lost
their hearts in the whirling rain?
When the air turns chill
and its scent turns blue,
how many stars will it cost the night
for the boys of spring who lost their youth
in the failing light?
When the sun turns moon
and the mood turns too,
how many deaths will spell the truth
for the boys of spring who lost their minds
to their lewd intentions?
When the river turns opaque, how many,
oh, how many mirrors will it take?

Jimmy Writes Jim Harrison

You approach on the highway,
the crows fly up. You look in the rearview,
the crows fly back. Road kill works that way
and it probably should. What would you expect?
Our sleek machines load their larders
with sluggish bunnies. Urban to rural,
we move between our appointments
with an ease attainable only in this
most perfect of worlds.
You think I’m being ironic?
Why would I tease you about this?
There’s a huge sadness
behind it all that makes no allowances
for the play between good and evil.
What the crows find interesting
is painfully simple.
Say what you will, they’ll still
fly up when you pass, then
in lieu of the wreckage you’ve left,
they’ll settle again.

Melanie Writes Ann Sexton

New snow piled on old snow
turns to old snow under more new snow.
Thus the winter goes.
Leave the house and track some bold
new tracks out into more of the same.
Enter the commerce of the coffee shop,
and mark in every face you meet
the color of the day.
Converse if you’ve a mind for it.
“Stark enough for you?” or
“Thinking of moving away?”
But more likely you’ll sit by yourself
and observe the dogs tied
to a bike rack outside. No bikes,
just dogs. Big dogs with lots of fur.
They look back as if they haven’t seen
the likes of you before. One stands up
for a better view then sits back down
when he sees that you’re nothing new.


Jamie Writes Billy Collins

Much of the world has put
a cell phone to its head.
Walking in the woods,
standing in line at the super market,
alone in a restaurant, these damaged goods
chat like there's no tomorrow,
and maybe there isn't.
Maybe this is the new Russian roulette
with nothing but empty chambers.
The insistence in the voices
is too strong to let them go
from the past to the future.
They stand on street corners,
muttering like true schizophrenics,
pausing to punch their hands
occasionally and stare into a blue glow
while they wait for the voices
in their heads to die down
into the silence they dread.


Casey Writes Shel Silverstein

When the big bad world
comes blowing down
the door, some little girl
might call it by
another name: say mine
or kitty or clown.
When all the world
she’d ever want might lie
just beyond the length of her arm,
she’d reach until her arm was longer
and Mr. Happy Candy Pig
rolled a giant peach
into her hand. She’d say,
“Let’s make it snappy,”
to the clouds that block the sun. She’d say,
“Why, thank you” to the sun itself,
“You’re welcome” to the moon,
and when the stars came out to play
she’d drift away with them down the plum-
colored sky. And in her dreams the girl
would call the wild world home.
“Good world! Good world.”

Mercury

Mercury

Hush-a-bye

These fish that surround me like icons
on the blue battlements,
they are a risk I have never been willing to take.
Gorgeous feathers all look alike to the Jamaican girl there,
carrying a list from her auntie
into a northern climate.

don’t you cry.

One orchid
one jar of Katydids
one broken mirror
two limes
one skull
six periods
two large spiders (male and female).

Go to sleep you little baby.

As a child, I carried fillings of mercury around inside of my head.
Mother would call and call, but I could only hear the train in my ears,
moving down its tunnel of blood toward the dark heart
my father gave me in his pain.

When you wake

I’ll never get used to my orbital lenses where only the center is clear
and everything else falls away.
In the dream my girl was eating chocolates—
no, she was eating the cooked hearts of chickens
one after another.

you will see

The musak beside this escalator is playing a tune the Irish learned from whales
before the great slaughter.
Are these your lamps, O poets, fueled by blubber and blood?

After the priest had finished with her, she went into the garden behind the rectory
and filled her mouth with red clay.

All the pretty little ponies.

A Separate Life

You're not here,
not in the sky
nor ground nor water,
not even the fire.
So what do I do?
I hold the cat instead of you.
I hold this black ball of a cat,
which, at the moment, doesn't
particularly want to be held.
There's something in this cat
that reminds me of you--
not in its heat nor gaze nor touch,
soft as that might be,
but more its manner
of living a separate life
next to the one that I have
here.

You're not here
though the river is
and the tree
and the fly that drinks
across my wrist
and the stone that shapes the water
that shapes the stone.
And the ashes that relinquish their DNA
have spoken in their small, small voices
that you're not here.

The shadow is a significant other
as is the frozen breath
as is the wind
beneath the door to our bedroom
because, even as weak clues
to the spirit, they are here
and you're not.

A Target

Don’t call me that other name,
that time-warp you folded me into
with your Movie-Tone death.

The stress lines in black and white, the crackle of speakers:
These brave lads aren’t coming home.

Near its source in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates appears to run uphill
where a bloody Kurdish child tries to eat the orange
I have given her in the rubble of her home.

When I awake above the Atlantic, my wife is gone, so I walk the isle
whispering her name above the hiss of engines until the door to the cockpit
opens and I see her there under the arm of the pilot.

Dear Mother,

He talks in his sleep and prays to your god he never believed in.
Last night he told a man he called Lucas to step down from the tractor and fight.
This morning after we made love he corrected my grammar again.

She got the rug with royal blue crosses framed in tan
that they bought at the covered market in Ankara.
He got the samovar
that they found in the shops of Erzurum
with an airman from the American missal base.
How much is that in real money?

The camera pans back from a fogged, green mountaintop,
and the music builds as he holds her there dying on eight wide-screen TVs
up against the wall
of a Target.

Across the aisle, more screens with talking heads:

Those who seek their other in pornography
may find their lives as viable as the tumor
behind the ear to which they hold their cell.

Sight Unseen

Beneath the swing set she fed
her little brother a toadstool.
Not to be saved by the reflection in her patent
leather shoes,
not to be caught up by the angels
flapping on a neighbor's clothesline,
not to be recollected through the green lense
of a Kool-Aid pitcher,
carried by a mother long dead,
she denied her innocence then and there.
O child,
O bloody cut healed then picked then healed then picked,
O storms who drive their winds harder in the night,
take her sight unseen,
orphan that she is,
into the witch's cottage.

And so the brother
sits alone on a log
in the park
knowing that something is coming
through the gastropod of his inner ear:
the spring on a screen door
slammed in the last century,
the crunch of a tadpole (still alive)
fed through the claws of a crawfish,
the whine of a child's pet ferret
crushed on a road in a D.C. suburb.

You there in the toll booth,
a fly is on the tube to your oxygen tank.
You there on the seat of that toilet
six miles above the earth,
hurry up, a child is at the door.
You there in the corner of that elevator
where a fight has broken out,
is that a tooth beneath your foot?

You there.
You.
There.

Before the Gander

I didn't wake up with a large pod by my bed.
On that road to Damascus, I didn't spot a UFO,
but a somehow pleasant hum fills me, as though
life weren't all that bad after all, as though dead
birds hadn't accumulated under my windows. Or
am I just imagining this interlude from these, of late,
patriotic mites scribbling on the blank slate
of my sleep, conducting their erotic wars
in my dried up snot and tears. Big and happy,
I’m a vegetable cultivated by a commander
of intergalactic tramps who records my snappy
come-backs for posterity. Before the gander
came this program shaped like a golden egg,
and monogrammed along its helix: GREG.

Wildlife Management

Bees and clover winter in the sad facts
that pepper sleeping children with doubt. Never
walk under a blossoming tree unless the act’s
reflected somewhere—a pool, the eyes of your
dog, a compact mirror. You’ve probably seen
the way geese lose formation as soon as you hear
their distant voices. Do you think they mean
to hint at suicide? Have you considered a career
in Wildlife Management? As long as you’re
down here on your knees, you might as well take
a good look at the grass. Is that a tear
or is it dew? Does it really make
any difference where the water came
from when the reflections are the same?

Those Were the Days

We found the Nordic wallets more challenging,
the way their flippers shook
when we opened them.
The blood wasn't as bad as with those
we abducted from the Argentine Mission
while all of the mothers were praying inside.

They were small but we cleaned them anyway
in the tidal pools along the coast of the Tierra Del Fuego
while enormous jackrabbits watched
through the cataracts of their sun-damaged eyes.

I remember Bertrand singing sea chanties
he had learned from slavers on the Ivory Coast.
Viscera flew from his hands
as he accompanied the lyrics
with lewd gestures.

They don't make money like that any more.

Pissed Is Nothing
after "What's Going On" by Pamela Gemin

It’s spring, it’s 1970
and we’re on our way
to Janis Joplin. Careful with
that water pipe or you’ll
burn a hole in the buckets
before this yellow bug gets
to Oklahoma City where Janis will
be drunk and yell pig
so the security cops drag her
off before she really gets started.
With a bridesmaid and a best man
in tow, this marriage is as new
and destined to fail
as I-35, cheap concrete already
buckling under them from shady deals
and kickbacks. The bridesmaid
passes the Ripple back and says
pull over I’ve gotta puke while
a grasshopper the size of a clothespin
guts itself on the windshield
and thunderbellies turn purple
then green to the west, churning
up their spring tornados. The new bride
holding down the smoke squeaks Dad’s
pissed we’re moving to Dallas.
The best man says pissed is nothing.
Mine won’t let me in the house
after he found that hit of windowpane
in the glovebox. We all know Janis will
make it o.k. with “A Piece of My Heart,”
so the groom guns it down the off ramp
and the world tilts just so for the
seconds it takes for someone to
turn the war off the radio,
turn up the Jimmi Hendrix
and keep the heat off our tail.

Wordsworth Parody

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


Big Yellow Flowers

O.k., so I was wandering, I was lonely,
and I felt like a cloud I was so wasted when I saw
these big yellow flowers. I mean not only
were they big, there was a bazillion all
along the banks. The wind made 'em look like they
were dancing. I mean it was so awesome it
was hard to take it all in on the spot. No way
was I gonna remember such a buzz. But shit
man, later that night when I crashed, I thought about
'em again, and I mean like it was even better.
And I wasn't even wasted. It was fuckin' far out.
It's not like I remembered the whole thing to the letter,
but more like lying right there on the bed
with a wide-screen TV inside my head.

Carolyn Forche Writes Billy Collins

The cabin attendant has noticed
that I can't open my miniature
bottle of vodka. The surface
of her smile says that she

would like to help, but
I have seen much the same
smile on other Chilean women
in the service of men.

It is a smile born of mud
and tin but worn like
Victoria's Secret.
She now sees the lid

come free in my fingers
and she turns to her
other duties: a mother
who needs a pillow for

her child, a business man
who needs a refill for
his coffee, a young couple
who both want another

packet of peanuts. Below us
pass the juntas, the bloody rivers
of her country that no smile
could conceal from my own.

Jim Harrison Writes Billy Collins

Peeling an onion in my kitchen,
I'm taken by the way the birds
just beyond this window

blur into each other's names
and become gods of time and place--
the finch in the bush behind

that Italian model in Paris,
the swallow I found still alive
on the concrete of the L.A. River

and that hurt girl who wanted
to take it home with her.
Now that I'm finished

with the onion, I see
more clearly that each
bird has its own god

because here in New York,
even in a garden illuminated
by April, this is a necessity.

Dr. Suess Writes Billy Collins

Suess Writes Collins

I surveyed what dogs were traversing my lawn
From the old wooden deck chair that I sat on.
Some dogs were fuzzy.
Some dogs were not.
Some dogs had noticed the biscuit I'd brought,
So I thought and I thought and I thought and I thought
Whether to offer that biscuit I'd brought
To the fuzzy dogs first
And then to the not
So fuzzy ones who had all started to trot
Toward me, their noses all sleek in the air.
They snuffled and huffed,
They puffed and they ruffled
Like readers for meanings
Or pigs after truffles--
As if they all knew what I had in my duffle.
More biscuits, you think as you guess the next line,
But no it's not biscuits,
Nor tiskets nor taskets,
And now that you ask, it's
just poems.

Mary Oliver Writes Billy Collins

Mary Oliver Writes Billy Collins

Perhaps you've noticed how dark
this pool has become, how it
makes these cattails look

like silly flags the frogs
ran up to surrender
their evening voices?

I'm asking you this question
in my notebook, though
I don't even know

who you are
or how you came upon
this pool with

its darkness,
its frogs, its flags
of surrender.