A Rhyme for Halloween

By Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Tonight I light the candles of my eyes in the lee

And swing down this branch full of red leaves.

Yellow moon, skull and spine of the hare,

Arrow me to town on the neck of the air.

I hear the undertaker make love in the heather;

The candy maker, poor fellow, is under the weather.

Skunk, moose, raccoon, they go to the doors in threes

With a torch in their hands or pleas: "O, please . . ."

Baruch Spinoza and the butcher are drunk:

One is the tail and one is the trunk

Of a beast who dances in circles for beer

And doesn't think twice to learn how to steer.

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.

Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.

No time for the martyr of our fair town

Who wasn't a witch because she could drown.

Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark

At the vision of her, bobbing up through the dark.

When she opens her mouth to gasp for air,

A moth flies out and lands in her hair.

The apples are thumping, winter is coming.

The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming.

By the caw of the crow on the first of the year,

Something will die, something appear.

Maurice Kilwein Guevara, "A Rhyme for Halloween" from Poems of the River Spirit. Copyright © 1996 by Maurice Kilwein Guevara.

Ars Poetica?

by Czeslaw Milosz

I have always aspired to a more spacious form 
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose 
and would let us understand each other without exposing 
the author or reader to sublime agonies. 

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, 
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 
and stood in the light, lashing his tail. 

That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion, 
though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel. 
It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from, 
when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. 

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, 
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, 
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, 
work at changing his destiny for their convenience? 

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, 
and so you may think that I am only joking 
or that I’ve devised just one more means 
of praising Art with the help of irony. 

There was a time when only wise books were read, 
helping us to bear our pain and misery. 
This, after all, is not quite the same 
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. 

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be 
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity, 
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors. 

The purpose of poetry is to remind us 
how difficult it is to remain just one person, 
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, 
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry, 
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, 
under unbearable duress and only with the hope 
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica?" from The Collected Poems: 1931-1987. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz.

Losses

by Andrew Motion

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops
in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‛The truth is you never do get
used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes,

and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’—
leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story
involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol,

tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball,
but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking,
all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be

reciting poetry. ‛My life’, said the interpreter, ‛is like a bag of flour
thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‛No, no’, he said,
correcting himself. ‛Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

Andrew Motion, “Losses” from Coming In To Land: Selected Poems 1975—2015. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Motion.

Enough Music

by Dorianne Laux

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive,
and we've talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it's what we don't say
that saves us.

Poem copyright ©1994 by Dorianne Laux, “Enough Music,” (What We Carry, BOA Editions, 1994).