1. LYNDA HULL
What was the name of that bar beneath the El
in a neighborhood of matadors and jade-sequined fur?
Who dined with us in the district of thrashing eels
in bright blue buckets along cobblestones near a river
of sangria we could not for all our willingness drown
in or drink dry? Who taught the alchemical moon to ignite,
who spray-painted stars on the roof of the night?
Which room of the dream are you dying in now
that your hotel is filled with candy canes and broken glass?
Which horses, which alphabets, which strangers, which dawns?
Which triumph, which circle, which keyhole, which rhyme?
Avenues we swam through, a bride we traipsed past,
skeletons of syntax, a dagger, a mute swan.
Which room of the dream, Lynda, which room?
2. TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
Clouds on the horizon, liturgical scrivening,
their shadows like ink stains on the sea.
Half a glass of wine, pale irises
declining to parchment,
rust which erupts
through the white paint of the lawn chairs
like a map
to the labyrinth of regret: that time passes,
that the kingdom of each instant
arises and vanishes, this is the essential,
the abiding enigma
of our existence, but not the only one.
How tedious to be born
into a world
with just one mystery.
3. C. K. WILLIAMS
His poetry arrives like a message in a bottle
from the Age of Reason,
the meditations of an Enlightenment polymath
with a Freudian grasp
of the ego
and its discontents
found on a beach somewhere along the coast
of an insular, self-satisfied nation
proud to be ignorant
of what lies beyond its shores, godless
monsters, marvelous beasts,
and other such tomfoolery. If only there was a way
to remove those poems
a man might
find some use for a bottle like that.
4. FRANZ WRIGHT
The moment, at dusk, after
the mirror shatters,
there is another moment
when
it assembles
the falling darkness
into a puzzle of the falling darkness,
and then it falls.