Crustacean Island

There could be an island paradise
where crustaceans prevail.
Click, click, go the lobsters
with their china mitts and
articulated tails.
It would not be sad like whales
with their immense and patient sieving
and the sobering modesty
of their general way of living.
It would be an island blessed
with only cold-blooded residents
and no human angle.
It would echo with a thousand castanets
and no flamencos.

By Kay Ryan

Love Resigns

Excerpt from Blood Wedding
By Lorca

Beggar Woman:
that moon's going away, just when they's near. they won't get past here. the river's whisper and the whispering tree trunks will muffle the torn flight of their shrieks. It has to be here, and soon. I'm worn out. The coffins are ready, and white sheets wait on the floor of the bedroom for heavy bodies with torn throats. let not one bird awake,let the breeze, gathering their moans in her skirt, fly with them over black tree tops or bury them in soft mud.
Oh that moon! that moon!

Moon:
But let them be a long time a-dying. So the blood will slide its delicate hissing between my fingers. look how my ashen valleys already are waking in longing for this fountain of shuddering gushes!

Yerma:
I didn't come to these four walls to resign myself. When a cloth binds my head so my mouth wont drop open, and my hands are tied tight in my coffin-then, then I'll resign myself

For the Times I Spent, Trying to Fill Small Spaces

perhaps we will meet again
along an edge, or below a bottle cap.
but until then, an anagram poem,
because Love always has to be hidden for a time.
and sometimes Love must resign itself altogether.



[Her]

Yodel Sillies, sonny
only solely inside
Lonely, Noisy Slides

Kingdom of the Blind

Kingdom of the Blind
Hew Locke, 2008

EMBANKMENT

The Unilever Series: Rachel Whiteread: EMBANKMENT
11 October 2005 – 1 May 2006
Tate Modern
"Although the inspiration for EMBANKMENT came from the single box she found in her mother's house, Whiteread selected a number of differently-shaped old boxes to construct the installation for the Turbine Hall. She filled them with plaster, peeled away the exteriors and was left with perfect casts, each recording and preserving all the bumps and indentations on the inside. They are ghosts of interior spaces or, if you like, positive impressions of negative spaces. Yet Whiteread wanted to retain their quality as containers, so she had them re-fabricated in a translucent polyethylene which reveals a sense of an interior. And rather than make precious objects of them, she constructed thousands."

Animal Logic

Richard Barnes

Lenient, Yielding

Tilia Japonica

Under the lime tree
on the open field,
where we two had our bed,
you still can see
lovely both
broken flowers and grass.
On the edge of the woods in a vale,
tandaradei,
sweetly sang the nightingale.

Walther von der Vogelweide

But when the time comes for us both to die, I will turn into a Linden, and you an Oak, on a mountain, as far away as an arrow can shoot in one pull.

Systematic Landscapes

Maya Lin

Since We Last Loved

It was first, when you were a flower
You called out to me three times,
and three times I passed by looking only at the trees.
And then when you locked yourself to the bike rack,
waiting for me to be ready.
But two seasons passed, and you were a hungry heap.

I wish I knew what more to say.
But I think we have spent all of our candles now.

Marshall in the Days of Longing

I am honest that way.

Leaf Swords and Clover Flower Necklaces

BEAUTIFUL

The Thief of Baghdad

is for tonsil delirium.

Shouldn't Oughta Promise

Cause it's just Pretend

Shouldn't Oughta Try

To be that way

Should Have Known Better

To this very day