#12

as you try to stand on your toes
your head barely touches my chin
I could lend you my commas
to use as stilts or just lift you up.
Bending low might be easier
.
But I prefer to wait till you get tired
and fall
into my arms

Maybe

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e e cummins

#11

a little girl twirls clockwise
and the pink-crystal-studded-knee-

length-skirt wraps
around her in an embrace. Suddenly
she stops and turns in front of the mirror, tiny dancing
stars stand still and fill the room
shining bright. Her hair bounces
with glee
.
fifteen years have passed and the walls
still glow from the refracted light of the shattered glass window
the living room is filled with half opened books and
scattered flowers. A couch next to the piano
partly covered by a quilt sighs
as she lays down
.
in the yellow house on the hillside hidden
among wild camellias
the not so little girl with winter on her toes
reaches out with her eyes closed
.
As her fingers trace the familiar ivory
a melody erupts and she is taken back
to her childhood; the first
wet rings on the mahogany
the first drifts of blue smoke

Its been so long

Light Is More Important Than The Lantern

Light is more important than the lantern,
The poem more important than the notebook,
And the kiss more important than the lips.
My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
The are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty
And my madness.

By Nizar Qabbani
Translated by B. Frangieh And C. Brown

#10

Goa

lonely rock in the middle
of the sea
Waits for the high tide

The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges

#9

white petals sprinkled
on grass.
Sweep the lawn