daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
The Ghost Wife
Who, after years
with her husband,
years of rearing
their strapping boy,
is scorched by an eye.
She was gathering laundry.
The sun stuttered
from the clouds.
The rice bubbled
on the stove. Her hands
and face bubbled
too. She did not
cry out. She did not
speak. She was hurried
indoors. What to do?
The neighbors. The talk.
The thing to do was
lay her in a coffin
upstairs
and close the lid.
______________________
Esther Lin
Cold Thief Place
Alice James Books, 2025
Essay
I guess it’s too late to live on the farm I guess it’s too late to move to a farm I guess it’s too late to start farming I guess it’s too late to begin farming I guess we’ll never have a farm I guess we’re too old to do farming I guess we couldn’t afford to buy a farm anyway I guess we’re not suited to being farmers I guess we’ll never have a farm now I guess farming is not in the cards now I guess Lewis wouldn’t make a good farmer I guess I can’t expect we’ll ever have a farm now I guess I’ll have to give up all my dreams of being a farmer I guess I’ll never be a farmer now We couldn’t get a farm anyway though Allen Ginsberg got one late in life Maybe someday I’ll have a big garden I guess farming is really out Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops I guess farming is just too difficult We’ll never have a farm Too much work and still to be poets Who are the farmer poets Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient farm Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks And Wendell Berry has a farm Faulkner may have farmed a little And Robert Frost had farmland And someone told me Samuel Beckett farmed Very few poets are real farmers If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too, Why not a poet who was also a farmer Of course there was Brook Farm And Virgil raised bees Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of farmers I guess poets tend to live more momentarily Than life on a farm would allow You could never leave the farm to give a reading Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing Or on as little as one needs to survive Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly
____________________
Bernadette Mayer
The Golden Book of Words
New Directions 2025
originally published by Angel Hair Books, 1978
Selva Oscura
When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive darkness
the color of dawn; I sense it on your fingertips.
Forget the lie that helped you live.
Bare your feet, bare your eyes —
very few things remain when we've bared ourselves
but in the end we can see them exactly as they are.
When I close my eyes I always find myself on a path,
the yards ruined to the right and left and in the corner
the house with windowpanes beaten by the sun, empty
I thought of your fingertips beating against the panes.
I thought of your heart beating behind the panes
and the very few things that set a man apart from others
are never overcome.
You don't know anything because you looked at the sun.
Your blood dripped into the black leaves of the laurel bush.
I see the nightingale and the marbled moon of evenings past,
when I dragged your blood into the river, dyeing it red.
I ponder — when I ponder — I ponder
my veins and the mystery of your hands,
guiding carefully, descending step by step.
When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive garden.
May 1937
____________________________
George Seferis
Book of Exercises II
World Poetry 2024
Translated from the Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg
Spiral Staircase
In search of a bawdy shade
of blue, without the slightest wisp of cloud,
stair by stair ascend.
I've stumbled, by spiral's end,
out of this world and into heaven.
The Apple
One last apple among the leaves
of the highest branch, the sweetest.
The pickers must've missed it.
No matter — only I
can reach that high.
Watermelon
A man carves watermelons
beneath the green shade
of the vendor's stand.
Dozens of half-moons
make moonlight red.
Star Hunter
Forget about thrushes, quails,
woodcocks! I'm out hunting
stars with a butterfly net.
Undecided between Orion,
Vega, and Scorpio, I bet
on the Herdsman, Bootes.
At dawn I return empty-handed,
net burnt to a crisp.
I Built A Wall
It's my fault. Stone by stone
by stone I built a wall,
walled myself off from the world.
No way out now.
Even if I wanted to
feel your hand, one
step and I'd crack
my head on that wall.
Sunflower
Bright yellow in a field of green,
face to face with the sky,
holding its breath, calls it a day.
Not even the sun, for all its art,
can purge night from the sunflower's heart.
___________________________
Mario dell' Arco
Day Lasts Forever
World Poetry, 2024
translated from Romanesco by Marc Di Martino
Rage
It wasn't you they saw on the television screen, it wasn't you
as they filmed you coming out crumbled from the rubble,
who then was applauding and clamoring for death?
This is what war makes you: it takes your skin off and gives
you a tent, and like a crumpled piece of paper, it throws
your home out with the trash—it plucks your pink heart
and plants gunpowder stones, no wheat fields gleam in
your eyes from now on, no hills of olive groves dream
to be picked, no bunch of kids play on your shoulders,
no grass of remembrance sits with you in the sunset
of the house, nothing here or there except limitless
rage, boiling over to the end of time and distance,
it was not you; it was not a stream of water, it was
a wolf snarling underneath the rubble, wanting
to rip the flesh of these tanks with its teeth.
March 13, 2024
________________________________
Nasser Rabah
Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece
Translated from the Arabic by
Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, Khaled Al-Hilli
City Lights Books, 2025
St.Martin's Press
2024
LONGHOUSE
P.O. Box 2454
West Brattleboro
Vermont
05303
I will wait in the real sand,
the tangible form of rock,
in the conversion of fate by breath.
With words I feed the creation of time
— someone else can speak, someone else can write.
Liquid movements cycled by the marrow
of a false body.
The glass absorbs the sky.
I will wait in the sane, in the dust of the rock
—in the shadow of dryness I erase them.
Soothe me with passive thoughts.
Soothe me because I don't exist.
________________________
Liliana Ponce
Theory of the Voice and Dream
translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea
World Poetry 2025
