Because he believes we are helpless to fate,
a blindfolded six-year-old Calvin
pushes off the hilltop in his red wagon

as he asks his friend the old question:
Why are we powerless to rush toward oblivion?
Though Hobbes is a tiger

that believes in free will, he knows
also that humans are stupid to consequence
and so covers his eyes.

The friends, one named after a theologian,
the other a philosopher, hurtle pell-mell
down eight panels of hill,

between haphazard probabilities of trees,
past stones waiting to chock rubber wheels
and pitch them into a watercolor sky.

The Radio Flyer instead hits a tufted ramp of grass.
Our illusion of control is shown in the wagon’s flight,
how we ride backseat to our own lives,

thinking for a moment we can make choices
other than those allowed by who we are.
Hobbes’s furry bottom is where the artist wants it

and in the last panel, Calvin has once more
released the steering handle, one arm crossed
to his other elbow,

a finger thoughtfully to his black dot of mouth.
Hobbes peers over his paws clamped
to the wagon’s rim, electric and goggle-eyed

at the ground rushing to meet them.

(Source: allyourprettywords)

april-is:

Rain, Eurydice, more rain.
It seems these mountains are married
to cold, damp clouds. I’ve known
no sun here, where you are
not. I sit by this window
and peel the skin from a pear.
Darling, I needed to see you
and now I see rain, hotel porn.
Somebody sent chrysanthemums,
some roses, an orchid. They smell
nothing like you. My nose is wasted
on onions and cilantro’s summer noise.
I won’t cry any more. I won’t wake
in the middle of the night and reach
for the phone to call you.
This rain, how it seems to seethe
like water hissing from the lips
of the kettle, begging one more dance
with Darjeeling. I watch the news
of India, a 70-year-old couple killed
in their hotel room. Didn’t Dickinson say
the world was made for lovers?
Well, she died alone and this pear
tastes like salt. O little town
with your shut-down steel factories,
build me a ship, there is a river
I need to cross with waters so dark
dawn looks like night and my own name
is sung on the waves like a curse.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

        —After Catullus

My house disgusted me, so I slept in a tent.
My tent disgusted me, so I slept in the grass. The grass disgusted me,
so I slept in my body, which I strung like a hammock from two ropes.
My body disgusted me, so I carved myself out of it.

My use of knives disgusted me because it was an act of violence.
My weakness disgusted me because “Hannah” means “hammer.”
The meaning of my name disgusted me because I’d rather be known
as beautiful. My vanity disgusted me because I am a scholar.

My scholarship disgusted me because knowledge is empty.
My emptiness disgusted me because I wanted to be whole.
My wholeness would have disgusted me because to be whole
is to be smug. Still, I tried to understand wholeness

as the inclusiveness of all activities: I walked out into the yard,
trying to vomit and drink milk simultaneously. I tried to sleep
while smoking a cigar. I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing.
I’m whole only in that I’ve built my person from every thought I’ve ever loved.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
the same message: how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was.
People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others, and “and” for me
in this poem, “and” that is good
for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise
go about going away, bereft of us and us
of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing
like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,
empty of everything but a scarf, still opens
its doors at every stop, because this
is what a train does, this is what a man does
with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,
why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,
and then it had just begun.

(via tj)