love, humming


Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die
Bashō, trans. Hamill
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

BY MARY JO BANG

How could I have failed you like this?
The narrator asks

The object. The object is a box
Of ashes. How could I not have saved you,

A boy made of bone and blood. A boy
Made of a mind. Of years. A hand

And paint on canvas. A marble carving.
How can I not reach where you are

And pull you back. How can I be
And you not. You’re forever on the platform

Seeing the pattern of the train door closing.
Then the silver streak of me leaving.

What train was it? The number six.
What day was it? Wednesday.

We had both admired the miniature mosaics
Stuck on the wall of the Met.

That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever

Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order

To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.

The arches of her feet are like voices
of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,
where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.
Jack Gilbert, from Finding Something
Evan Bohringer

Evan Bohringer

The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audience, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary reader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden image in the sonnet, or the profane joke in the devotional text, or the secret message in the prison diaries.
Christopher Hitchens
to Jane Cooney Baker, died 1-22-62

I will not find you on the street
nor will the phone ring, and each moment will not
let me be in peace.
it is not enough that there are many deaths
and that this is not the first;

it is not enough that I may live many more days,
even perhaps, more years.
it is not enough.
the phone is like a dead animal that will
not speak. and when it speaks again it will
always be the wrong voice now.
I have waited before and you have always walked in through
the door. now you must wait for me.

Charles Bukowski