another one i like, courtesy of my dad

Old Globe

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born -- ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

Her eye fell at random. "Formosa," she read.
"Now that's pretty. Is it there today?"
A pause. "It is," my brother said,"

though now it's called Taiwan."
She looked apolgetic. 'I sometimes forget . . ."
"Like Sri Lanka," I added. "Which was Ceylon."

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay . . .

She was in a middle place --
her fifties -- when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men -- in their black noon --
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overhead a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today --
the globe she'd so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

Finally, there's cake; nine candles in a ring.
. . . Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, "Now make a wish before
you blow them out." She says, "I don't see --"

stops. Then mildly protests: "But they look so nice."
We laugh at her -- and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well -- what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

- Brad Leithauser

from The Unassailable

IV

Space is full of mental rooms where we can go
Like a hunter unleashing his dogs, I freed my spirit into them
High blaze of hieratic grasses
Simple or resounding victory
Although it wasn’t an especially simple day
All day long the sun suffused some leaves
Nearby harvesters bent in the vineyards
Mindful of patient provisions in the grapes’ blood
To each one his wine-press and his wine
As for me, I unleashed my dogs
First of all death deciphered itself in the gold
Its obols waited at the foot of every tree
Weightless coins of the glad munificence
Which replaces summer
Glory piercing loss through to its afterlife
To each his crystal and to each his blood
To each his drunkenness
And his journey just a bit beyond himself
I too was heavy
I too, clumsy in the evening’s affluence
My wealth was too great for me
A beautiful sunset thickening my lips
Like a hunter heading home
I whistled for my spirit

- Gabrielle Althen, translated by Marilyn Hacker

sunklight of bloody afterglow

From Adrienne Rich, Inscriptions

Six: edgelit
Living under fire in the raincolored opal of your love
I could have forgotten other women I desired
so much I wanted to love them but
here are some reasons love would not let me:

One had a trick of dropping her lashes along her cheekbone
in an amazing screen so she saw nothing.
Another would stand in summer arms rounded and warm
catching wild apricots that fell
either side of a broken fence but she caught them on one side
only.
One, ambitious, flushed
to the collarbone, a shapely coward.
One keen as mica, glittering,
full at the lips, absent at the core.
One who flirted with danger
had her escape route planned when others had none
and disappeared.
One sleepwalking on the trestle
of privilege dreaming of innocence
tossing her cigarette into the dry gulley
--an innocent gesture.

Medbh's postcard from Belfast:
one's poetry seems aimless
covered in the blood and lies
oozing corrupt & artificial
but of course one will continue...
This week I've dredged my pages
for anything usable
head, heart, perforated
by raw disgust and fear
If I dredge up anything it's suffused
by what it works in, "like the dyer's hand"
I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy
and I go on
In my sixty-fifth year I know something about language:
it can eat or be eaten by experience
Medbh, poetry means refusing
the choice to kill or die
but this life of continuing is for the sane mad
and the bravest monsters

The bright planet that plies her crescent shape
in the western air that through the screen door gazes
with her curved eye now speaks: The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see. Through the screen door
she told me this and half-awake I scrawled
her words on a piece of paper.
She is called Venus but I call her You
You who sees me You who calls me to see
You who has other errands far away in space and time
You in your fiery skin acetylene
scorching the claims of the false mystics
You who like the moon arrives in crescent
changeable changer speaking truth from darkness

Edgelit: firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds
blue-green agave grown huge in flower
cries of birds streaming over
The night of the eclipse the full
moon
swims clear between flying clouds until
the hour of the occlusion It's not of aging
anymore and its desire
which is of course unending
it's of dying young or old
in full desire
Remember me....O, O, O, O, remember me
these vivid stricken cells
precarious living marrow
this my labyrinthine filmic brain
this my dreaded blood
this my irreplaceable
footprint vanishing from the air
dying in full desire
thirsting for the coldest water
hungering for hottest food
gazing into the wildest light
edgelight from the high desert
where shadows drip from tiniest stones
sunklight of bloody afterglow
torque of the joshua tree
flinging itself forth in winter
factoring freeze into its liquid consciousness
These are the extremes I stoke
into the updraft of this life
still roaring
into thinnest air