SEPTEMBER

I miss the tilt and racket of your face,
the collapsing factories of your anger,
the shoreline wearing your boas of foam—
the steel mirror of your silence,
your glass contingencies, in the night’s hold.
I miss the morning’s coverlet of cloud,
one gull flying east over the moving distances
while closer in
the same boulder is kissed again and again.
As the blacksmith plunges the bruised steel into the tub,
erasing the heat of his industry,
I have cooled my brow
with the ice of your disdain—
I have held your cold hand in the rain.

  — Jim Armstrong. Blue Lash (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Jim Armstrong. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org.

these quiet nights

after the storm
there is a hush.

a held breath
in moist silences.

after the storm,
these quiet nights
are all that remain.

we work hard all our lives
battling forces
we cannot defeat,

our voices mingling
with the roar of passing time.

but after the storm
there are
chances to wipe the water
from our eyes and
see with
uncertain clarity,
to rest our ragged throats,
to hope.

these quiet nights
refuel us

as
            dark clouds
gather

in
threatening
skies.

  — christopher cunningham.

From the GPP Reader: Selections from the poets of the Guerilla Poetics Project.

CC will have a new chapbook published by Kendra Steiner Editions within the next few weeks, as well as a limited edition broadside from 10pt Press. Both are bound to be outstanding.

THE WEAKERTHANS - WATERMARK

I count to three and grin.
You smile and let me in.
We sit and watch the wall you painted purple.

Speech will spill on space.
Our little cups of grace.
But pauses rattle on about the way that you cut the snow-fence,
braved the blood,
the metal of those hearts that you always end up pressing your tongue to.
How your body still remembers things you told it to forget.
How those furious affections followed you.

I’ve got this store-bought way of saying I’m okay,
and you learned how to cry in total silence.

We’re talented and bright.
We’re lonely and uptight.
We’ve found some lovely ways to disappoint,
but the airport’s always almost empty this time of the year,
so let’s go play on a baggage carousel.
Set our watches forward like we’re just arriving here
from a past we left in a place we knew too well.

Knew too well.
Knew too well.

Hold on to the corners of today,
and we’ll fold them up to save until it’s needed.
Stand still.
Let me scrub that brackish line that you got
when something rose and then receded.
Hold on.

MAY  

Let me look at those eyes.
I want to know how you are.
—Rainer W. Fassbinder

Look. May has come in.
It’s strewn those blue eyes all over the harbor.
Come, I haven’t had word of you in ages.
You’re constantly terrified,
Like the kittens we drowned when we were little.
Come and we’ll talk over all of the old same things,
The value of being pleasant,
The need to adjust to the doubts,
How to fill the holes we’ve got inside us.
Come, feel the morning reaching your face,
Whenever we’re saddened everything looks dark,
When we’re heartened, again, the world crumbles.
Every one of us keeps forever someone else’s hidden side,
If it’s a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture.
Come and we’ll flay the winners,
Laughing at our self leapt off the bridgeway.
We’ll watch the cranes at work in the port in silence,
The gift for being together in silence being
The principal proof of friendship.
Come with me, I want to change nations,
Change towns. Leave this body aside
And go into a shell with you,
With our smallness, like sea snails.
Come, I’m waiting for you,
We’ll continue the story that ended a year ago,
As if inside the white birches next to the river
Not a single additional ring had grown.

Copyright © 2007 by Kirmen Uribe, English translation copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Macklin. Reprinted from Meanwhile Take My Hand without the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.,

JOY DIVISION - ATMOSPHERE

Walk in silence,
Don’t walk away, in silence.
See the danger,
Always danger,
Endless talking,
Life rebuilding,
Don’t walk away.

Walk in silence,
Don’t turn away, in silence.
Your confusion,
My illusion,
Worn like a mask of self-hate,
Confronts and then dies.
Don’t walk away.

People like you find it easy,
Naked to see,
Walking on air.
Hunting by the rivers,
Through the streets,
Every corner abandoned too soon,
Set down with due care.
Don’t walk away in silence,
Don’t walk away.

I got nothing to say …

SILENCE

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free.
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyæna, calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,—
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

  — Thomas Hood (1799 - 1845), British poet.