What are the names of the angels
and the birds? My memories swarm
round like confused flies. Among
the dead, I cherish most myself.
–Keith Flynn
You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-Sa. --Ezra Pound
via Poet.
via Valentine’s Day Poem.
I wanted a shirtless lifeguard
at the waterpark to see me, so I leapt
from the flotilla of plastic innertubes
into the waist-deep canal, where spotlit
mummies craned animatronic necks.
He came. He rustled, furious,
from a plastic hedge and banned
me from the Lost River of the
Pharaohs for life.
-Hannah Faith Notess

Who hath desired the Sea? -the sight of salt water unbounded-
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, formless, enormous and growing-
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurrican blowing —
–Rudyard Kipling
Eulogy for the Costa Rican Ghosts
Knocking bamboo ushers in their moans.
Neither missing nor white,
they wonder who you are and what you are doing
and why life has left them and spared you –
imperfect as you are.
I feel their aching in the night air
their souls shaking in the tropical trees.
I remember their presence here
and bear them closer as time goes by…
my years stealing to inevitable death.
–Eileen Kennedy
When the black vastness overtakes us,
we stand in the tracks of shepherds
whose words on such nights
connected cold lights to form
the winged horse and flame-born bird
and the twins that led them forward.
But to speak the astral truths,
to see our names consumed
in unquenchable heat,
to fuse with unsayable source
shooting across the skies,
straight through the holes in our eyes.
–Donald Levering
When the black vastness overtakes us,
we stand in the tracks of shepherds
whose words on such nights
connected cold lights to form
the winged horse and flame-born bird
and the twins that led them forward.
But to speak the astral truths,
to see our names consumed
in unquenchable heat,
to fuse with unsayable source
shooting across the skies,
straight through the holes in our eyes.
–Donald Levering