Kiva's Bookshelf...

Kiva.D

The Singing by C.K. Williams

Outsets

Even then, though surely I was a “child,”
Which implied sense and intent, but no power,
I wasn’t what I’d learned a child should be:
I was never naïve, never without guile.
Hardly begun, I was no longer new,
Already beset with quandaries and cries.
Was I a molten to harden and anneal, the core
Of what I was destined to become, or was I
Whate I seemed, inconsequential, but free?
But if free, why quandaries, why cries?

Kiva.D

And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena K. Davis

Excerpts from 'This Is The Way I Carry Mine'

Four hours' sleep tucked behind my eyelids
and this small city starts interrogating me
under a stream of morning light...

Last night I knew what I could tell it,
I could defend myself, but this morning,
this morning it's hard to tell...

as far as I can see we're calling this day... a wash.

It's morning and the city demands to see the way
we will carry ourselves into the new light.
The city insists on receiving our dignity...

It's time to go. Time to tuck the night
lovingly, like a skateboard, under the crook
of our childhood arms...

Kiva.D

Green and Gray by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Excerpts from 'Man of Joy'

Unless I am much mistaken, everything
is music, but that's not really right.
What can one say of a desire
for new connecctions other than that it swells
up out of feeling happy, wanting
to play, not knowing how to,
traveling with a companion in the dark.
I didn't consciously remember this
main scene but I find it everwhere...
What other traveling companions
through sound and through dark can be hoped for?

Kiva.D

It's Not You, It's Me edited by Jerry Williams

Excerpts from 'Approach' by Amy Gerstler

How could I lose sight of him? I only knew that my eyes followed him as far as possible, till my gaze wandered over the horizons brink, where insight and blindness alike are insufficient. When I go for a walk in the afternoon to mail letters, avoiding my own eyes in windows or water, I frequently have the feeling I'm just about to see him. When I get into bed at night, all bundled up, the bedclothes exhale a whiff of reminiscent of him, though he's never set foot in this room. Tonight I click off the light and lie on my back... I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness... I think about him for what seems like a long time, and about how sad it is that what I jot down daily, or mull over in the walled chamber behind my eyes, can't hold a candle to the flickering images, can't show me some fresh vision of him, or explain why I constantly feel, as I drift off, that he's watching me.

Kiva.D

Work Life by Paul Kane

Excerpts from 'Maven to Her Mirror'

All beginnings are beyond their origins, at once too late and premature.
I wasn't ready to leave, but ought to have months before.
The price we pay for premonitions is regret - we know more than we know,
and less. "I saw it coming" means "I see it going away." I stand in the middle,
Janus-faced, while events intersect me at right angles. I see best obliquely.
If hindsight were foreknowledge we would walk backwards,
like angels who fear to tread. All my friends have separated,
this world is a centrifuge and the results disorienting.
I thought love a circle but it's an ellipse, with double foci,
...If I take a harsh tone, it's because I am distracted.
"I didn't mean it" means "I wasn't there."

Kiva.D

The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins

Excerpts from 'Some Final Words'

I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing,
a nonmemory, a phantom...
...It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bitter vegetation.
Leave it behind.
Take your head out of your hands
and arise from the couch of melancholy
where the window-light falls against your face
...steely behind the bare trees

Kiva.D

Sailing Alone Around The Room by Billie Collins

DESIGN

I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life, I say to no one. This is the Wheel of Fortune,
the Arctic Circle. This is the Ring of Kerry and the White Rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family, the dead fathers, the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters, my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry, I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life I say... touching my finger to my tongue.

Kiva.D

Where Shadows Will by Norma Cole

ARTIFICIAL MEMORY 9

This is the image of effort.
This is an image of two individuals,
singularities, particularities,
under the influence of impulses.
The impulse in this case
to have a conversation or disturbance
of ideas about a common topic or subject.
They must discover what of the subject
or topic is common to them.
Although at first that seems obvious,
it's a rhyming relationship.
The idea of stretching time in the form.

Kiva.D

Music of Time by David Ray

Excerpts from 'Confessions of a Happy Man'

I have come to tell you I am the music of my own defeat, it is almost breaking me.
How do you stay and not be destroyed by these voices, and these waters washing round you?
You sit, so absorbed, so oblivious, as if apprehension had left you long ago,
Made you like a silent sea that will never more endure a storm.
You have created some new and original simple-mindedness,
Some ecstacy before which my longing must bow down.
…Your dreams? Yes, now I see this
You are set upon my dreams...…

Kiva.D

Captivity by Laurie Sheck

A CRISP WHITENESS

For I have missed the feeling of being able to go somewhere else,
Delicately barred as I am
In this slow conversion of myself into nothingness--
It is as if all that visits the mind
Is a great fire on an altar but I stand before it and am cold. I watch rich folds
Of sky and feel how my eyes fail, trying to adjust, take hold--there are after-images, astigmatism
Irradiation, such movements of accommodation and convergence
As I can barely comprehend, yet they are mine.
Through this glare of self-distrust and longing I sense in the distance a crisp whiteness
But it is roughed overall with my wrong articulations, apprehensions,
And so is darked.

Kiva.D

Time and Materials by Robert Hass

Excerpt from 'Then Time'

...Studying her face, still turning over her remark.
He decides that she thinks more symbolically
Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,
For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.
She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,
Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure
In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.
It moves her - in the way that earnest limitation
Can be moving, and she is moved by her attraction to him.
Also by what he was to her. She sees her own avidity
To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate,
From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road...

Kiva.D

Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser

STARLIGHT

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

Kiva.D

A Map to the Next World by Joy Harjo

Excerpts from 'This is my Heart'

This is my heart. It is a good heart.
Bones and a membrane of mist and fear are the woven cover...
My heart is close enough to sing to yours in a language that has no use for clumsy human words.

My head, is a good head, but it is a hard head.
And it whirrs inside with a swarm of worries.
What is the source of this singing, it asks and if there's a source why can't I see it right here, right now...

This is my soul. It is a good soul.
It tells me, "come here forgetful one."
...We cook a little something to eat...then a sip of something sweet for memory.

This is my song. It is a good song.
It walked forever the border of fire and water,
Climbed the ribs of desire to my lips to sing it to you. Its new wings quiver with vulnerability.

Kiva.D

Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy

Excerpt from 'One Love Story, Eight Takes'



8


As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.

I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,


When it would be truer to say nothing.

I've invented so much and prevented more.


But I'd like to talk with you about other things,

In absolute quiet. In extreme context.


To see you again, isn't love revision?

It could have gone so many ways.


This just one of the ways it went.

Tell me another.

Kiva.D

Letters to a Stranger by Thomas James

I touched a branch of tiny desires
Stretching their coppery buds over a sky
Grown white and vacuous as a startled face.
I walked into a field grown tense with longing,
Riveted with the potent needles of rain.
I stepped into a flooded meadow
Where blue flowers swayed into the open
Like a poem spoken out…
An iteration, into the air I did not want.

Kiva.D

Ten Commandments by J. D. McClatchey

Why did we forget to talk about love?
We had all the time in the world.
What we forgot, I heard a voice
Behind me say, was everything else.
Love will leave us alone if we let it.
Besides, this world has no time for us,
The tree no questions of the flower.
One more day no help for all the night.

Kiva.D

Time You Let Me In by Naomi Nye

You never taught me how to be happy for you
on your wedding day.
You’re someone I don’t know now,
someone I have not yet learned to love.
You never told me I would be jealous,
how much I would fear you would leave our friendship behind
like the city you once lived in…

Kiva.D

Falling in Love Again by Whitney Scott

LOVE SOMETIMES NEEDS THE HELP OF THIN, PALE BLUE ENVELOPES

When your need is the greatest
go to the hall closet and reach
past the tennis racquets and open
that box behind the old sweaters.
Take out the creased and faded
envelope with the quaint old stamps.
Press it to your cheek
and try to remember the scent
that was there.

Kiva.D

Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison

Excerpt from ‘Angry Women’

The women we've mistreated
never forgive us nor should they, thus their ghostly
energies thrive at dawn and twilight in this vast
country where any of the mind's movies can be played
against this rumpled wide-screened landscape.

Our souls are travelers. You can tell when your own
is gone, and then these bleak, improbable
visits from others, their dry tears because you were
never what you weren't, so that the world
becomes only what it is, the unforgiving flow
of an unfathomable river...

Kiva.D

Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder

Excerpt from 'The Prelude'

...he could not feel
the energy. No present joy, no cheerful
confidence, just love of friends and the wind
taking his arrow away. Come to the edge
the edge beckoned softly. Take
this cup full of darkness and stay as long
as you want and maybe a little longer.

Kiva.D

Love Takes a Bow by Dan Gilmore

Excerpts from ‘Spiritual Development’

…I paused and said, “Let me self-edit. I don’t want to make anyone angry.”
And a classmate said, “You make people angry even when you self-edit.”
Another member said something I can’t remember but it included pompous…
Where does one go after flunking spiritual development …?
I admit I love leading with my mouth and asking questions later.
I discover what I’m thinking when I talk, and I sometimes delight and surprise myself
with what I say. Truth is, straining to be spiritual, thinking before I speak and being nice
for the sake of being nice, slows my world down, turns me into a politician
and paints everything human with a beige veneer of unfelt courtesy.

Kiva.D

Fire In The Sea, poetry selected by Cue Cowing

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began –
I loved my friend.
~ Langston Hughes

Kiva.D

Endpoint by John Updike

Be with me, words, a little longer, you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.

Kiva.D

The Road to the Gunpowder House by Neil Curry

Excerpt from Rock Pools

There are times when memories are not enough
And neither are poems, even when the words,
Having come so close to what we cannot say,
Gather themselves slowly around the silence.

Kiva.D

Love Songs and Sonnets edited by Peter Washington

All my goodbyes are said. Many separations
slowly shaped me since my infancy…
What's left for me is to replenish it,
and my joy, forever unrepentant
for having loved the things resembling
these absences that make us act.
~R.M. Rilke