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).

In The Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year

by W.S. Merwin

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older
It is there at hand I could take it
Except for the things I think I would do differently
They keep coming between they are what I am
They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably
It is how I have come to it
Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

There is nothing the matter with speech
Just because it lent itself
To my uses

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

W. S. Merwin, "In the Winter of my Thirty-Eighth Year" Copyright © 1993 by W.S. Merwin.

Bilingual/Bilingüe

by Rhina P. Espaillat

My father liked them separate, one there,
one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart
(el corazón) and lock the alien part

to what he was—his memory, his name
(su nombre)—with a key he could not claim.

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”
he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from
any child? I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,
I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run
where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

I like to think he knew that, even when,
proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen,

he stood outside mis versos, half in fear
of words he loved but wanted not to hear.

Rhina P. Espaillat, “Bilingual/Bilingüe” from Where Horizons Go (Kirksville, MO: New Odyssey Books, 1998). 

A Dog Has Died

by Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.