To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like a Death by Lloyd Schwartz

In today’s paper, a story about our high school drama
teacher evicted from his Carnegie Hall rooftop apartment 

made me ache to call you—the only person I know 
who’d still remember his talent, his good looks, his self-

absorption. We’d laugh (at what haven’t we laughed?), then 
not laugh, wondering what became of him. But I can’t call, 

because I don’t know what became of you.

—After sixty years, with no explanation, you’re suddenly
not there. Gone. Phone disconnected. I was afraid

you might be dead. But you’re not dead. 

You’ve left, your landlord says. He has your new unlisted 
number but insists on “respecting your privacy.” I located 

your oldest son, who refuses to tell me anything except that 
you’re alive and not ill. Your ex-wife ignores my letters.

What’s happened? Are you in trouble? Something 
you’ve done? Something I’ve done? 

We used to tell each other everything: our automatic 
reference points to childhood pranks, secret codes, 

and sexual experiments. How many decades since we started 
singing each other “Happy Birthday” every birthday? 

(Your last uninhibited rendition is still on my voice mail.)

How often have we exchanged our mutual gratitude—the easy
unthinking kindnesses of long friendship. 

This mysterious silence isn’t kind. It keeps me 
up at night, bewildered, at some “stage “of grief. 

Would your actual death be easier to bear? 

I crave your laugh, your quirky takes, your latest
comedy of errors. “When one’s friends hate each other,”

Pound wrote near the end of his life, “how can there be
peace in the world?” We loved each other. Why why why 

am I dead to you? 

Our birthdays are looming. The older I get, the less and less 
I understand this world, 

and the people in it.

Sonnet 50 by William Shakespeare

How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel's end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
'Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!'
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov'd not speed being made from thee.
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind,
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.

Mozart by Caroline Knox

Can you imagine
what is true, that
smack in the middle
of making The Magic FluteFlute he interrupted
himself to make
“Ave Verum Corpus,”world’s most truth-telling
motet (Who made its
text? Maybe a pope),
then got himself on
track, back to TMF(all the while dealing
with money worry and
sickness of wife). When
you get to the esto nobiscadence in “AVC,” you
scale the spine of the
European Enlightenment;
when you get to the
idiotic “Three Faithful
Youths” chorus in TMF: “Three faithful youths we now will lend you
Upon your journey they’ll attend you;
Though young in years, these youths so fair
Heed the words of wisdom rare!”
you’re dealing with
Bertie Wooster’s
three best friends.
Because he was Mozart,
not a problem.

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad BY JOHN KEATS

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

       And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

       With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

       Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

       And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

       And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,

       And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

       A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

       And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

       ‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

       And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

       With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

       On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

       Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

       With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

       On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

       Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

Why is Quiet "Kept"? by Paul Hoover

They are crying out in restaurants,
so delighted to be speaking,
they appear to be insane.

But we are the silent types, 
who hold speech within 
like the rustle of gold foil.

We eat our words and swallow hard.
There’s nothing much to say.
The knot’s in its nest, breathing.
A hand thinks it’s a bird.

The world “nows”; it doesn’t know.
The world “wows.” Then it snows.

A word arrives, silent and upright.
It stands in profile against a white wall.
It’s here for safekeeping only.

Keep quiet, mice.
A cat’s patrolling the area, 
with drones and more drones.

The keys we carry unlock us every day
and lock us up again.  Hushed is the ward.
Now conjugate, please, to werd and to werld.

One of us has just conceived 
the sum for infinity:  plus one, plus one, plus one.
In the cosmological phone booth,
there’s always one more.

The fishing report’s too thick to read, 
but its cadence is that of a god.
Waves and ships are passing.
We can barely discern the semaphores
flashing through the fog.

And here are the ones who walk the walk and talk the talk,  
blackening the day with news, with news.

SONNET 45 by William Shakespeare.

The other two, slight air and purging fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppress'd with melancholy;Until life's composition be recured
By those swift messengers return'd from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:
This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,
I send them back again and straight grow sad.

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

 
The fountains mingle with the river   
And the rivers with the ocean,   
The winds of heaven mix for ever   
With a sweet emotion;   
Nothing in the world is single, 
All things by a law divine   
In one another's being mingle—   
Why not I with thine?   
   
See the mountains kiss high heaven,   
And the waves clasp one another; 
No sister-flower would be forgiven   
If it disdain'd its brother;   
And the sunlight clasps the earth,   
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—   
What is all this sweet work worth 
If thou kiss not me? 

On the Statue by John Mateer

When in the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela I will be invited
to hug, for good luck, the marble torso of the Saint,
I won't. Not for moral reasons.

Embracing someone from behind like that
reminds me too much of how, in the Apartheid army,
we were taught to approach the enemy,

to slit the throat.

On the Painting by John Mateer

Neither that album page, nor its pristine miniature painting
of a fabled Persian garden where plants bloom with human features,
nor that monochromatic landscape in Coetzee's Age of Iron
under which, as under a bloodied Oriental carpet,
there were the dead faces none of us could avoid stepping on,

this panel of the Altar of the Virgin of the Navigators in the Real Alcazar,
in the chamber from which Queen Isobel despatched the Conquistadors,
she who like the Eternal Mother harboured all behind her chador,
this statement on the Expulsion of the Moors –

Santiago on a white horse, sword raised and poised, ready to swoop;
the heads of the disembodied, their faces stony and sprouting from the ground.

Alicante by John Mateer

Nobody believes me when I say this city
looks like Waikiki, the beaches curving away
under their wall of new hotels and
on the lone bare mountain, where a cryptic
Diamond Head should be, the Moorish hallucination
of a Roman castle. They should: not far
away Wild West towns await a cinematic eye
and south, across the azure Mediterranean,
my doppelgänger stands in a striped galabia,
feet planted on the earth of Djemaa el-Fna,
and, with fado in his heart, he recites
into the ear of an old Goytisolo,
a poem on the lost Caliphate
and on the World-to-Come.

Mall of the Emirates by John Mateer

We don't use the word "exile" anymore,
despite meeting in the Mall of the Emirates,
that hyperbolic cave, ordering what is expensive
peasant food, while contemplating our prospects
on two or, maybe, three continents,
confessing that we no longer return to our natal countries.
We're unlike our taxi drivers, with our perpetually
renewable visas and self-conscious amnesia,
even if we, too, could forever cruise down Dubai's freeways,
reminiscing on the stupas of Anuradapurna,
how in the sunlight they glint like rice bowls overturned.
In consolation we have what used to be Literature,
its metamorphosis, those phantoms, our other lives.
Or isn't it the other way round? Haven't we been expelled
from the Garden of Nothingness to wander, decade-long,
lost in thought, imagining Al Muteena Street as an avenue in Tunis,
grey palm trees attempting shadow against gilded exhaust haze?
Ali, remember that dream you told me of: Hafiz
appearing to an Australian scholar, nominating him
his Interpreter? That's probably how we ended up here
in this extravaganza of shops, this oasis,
as a poem born on the tip of another's tongue,
as perfectly translatable synonyms for that word: "exile."

"Words"by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other –
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Our love is here to stay By Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Clouds gather under a blue moon,

like trouble brewing as strange fruit

continues to swing – keeping time –

while Columbia turntables refuse to spin

the song; is vinyl too black, too flash to be

sleeved in white prisons? The answer lies

like white gardenia petals on a bruise

too subtle to separate from wind; like

a trumpet caught in the ill wind of a jet’s

prejudice in the company of clouds – a

rumble in a jungle of noise, the forgotten b-

side that holds its breath. Trouble brewing.

There’s nothing random about rain;

It clears the sky’s throat for the sun’s shrill

voice; the white hanky is for black sweat.

They’ll all laugh when I say it, whisper

as though I’m making whoopee with Communist

ideals. They’ll laugh like they laughed

when Louis appeared coal-sketched on screen,

years before he lifted the smoke and called

Eisenhower a spade, said let’s call the whole

Soviet thing off, as sweetly as he sang that song

with Ella –– and there’s silence where the applause

should be; because it’s OK when the needle hits

the dark flesh of wax and causes blue screams,

but when the tip hits the dark flesh of a woman

and she wails for justice; shooting off ideas

as she reloads stimulants, suddenly music is

treble trouble. And everybody knows

that the calm comes before the clouds . . .

There’s nothing random about rain; so blow

Louis, blow from cheek to cheek, blow

under a blanket of blue until you get a kick

from a laughing Ella and switch the tone

so swift   //              so hot      //              so dark

that the only bright thing will be the spotlight

of struggle illuminating a girl in Baltimore,

learning as time goes by that life isn’t a fine

romance, love, but your soul won’t desert you;

like the note can’t leave the music, like

the shadows can’t leave the darkness.

The secret is to listen; to the slow creeping

embrace of the trumpet’s protest, the percussive

defiance of the piano’s syncopation, the indrawn

breaths when the song learns the body that sings it.

My Childhood Home I See Again by Abraham Lincoln

My childhood home I see again, 
    And sadden with the view; 
And still, as memory crowds my brain, 
    There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world 
    'Twixt earth and paradise, 
Where things decayed and loved ones lost 
    In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that's earthly vile, 
    Seem hallowed, pure, and bright, 
Like scenes in some enchanted isle 
    All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye 
    When twilight chases day; 
As bugle-notes that, passing by, 
    In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall, 
    We, lingering, list its roar— 
So memory will hallow all 
    We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away 
    Since here I bid farewell 
To woods and fields, and scenes of play, 
    And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain 
    Of old familiar things; 
But seeing them, to mind again 
    The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day, 
    How changed, as time has sped! 
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray, 
    And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell 
    How nought from death could save, 
Till every sound appears a knell, 
    And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread, 
    And pace the hollow rooms, 
And feel (companion of the dead) 
    I'm living in the tombs.

The Road Not Taken BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

SONNET 43 by William Shakespeare.

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, 
For all the day they view things unrespected; 
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, 
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed;
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Tears, Idle Tears by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

A Late Walk By Robert Frost

When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

Ode on Melancholy by John Keats

NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist 
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; 
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist 
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Astrophel and Stella 78 by Sir Philip Sidney

O how the pleasant aires of true loue be
Infected by those vapours, which arise
From out that noysome gulfe, which gaping lies
Betweene the jawes of hellish Iealousie.
A monster, others harme, selfe-miserie,
Beauties plague, Vertues scourge, succour of lies:
Who his owne joy to his owne hurt applies,
And only cherish doth with injurie.
Who since he hath, by Natures speciall grace,
So piercing pawes, as spoyle when they embrace,
So nimble feet as stirre still, though on thornes:
So manie eyes ay seeking their owne woe,
So ample eares as neuer good newes know:
It is not euill that such a Deuill wants hornes?

The Clod and the Pebble by William Blake

Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet;
But a Pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet.

Love seeketh only Self to please,

To bind another to Its delight:
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.

SONNET 42 by William Shakespeare

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
But here's the joy; my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

I know that He exists. (365) BY EMILY DICKINSON

I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play –
’Tis a fond Ambush –
Just to make Bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play
Prove piercing earnest –
Should the glee – glaze –
In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun
Look too expensive!
Would not the jest –
Have crawled too far!

A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow-You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?