Poetry

  • Poetry

    “The Diagnosis” by James Tate

    ……………Lincoln was sixty years old when the
    doctor told him he only had forty more years
    to live. He didn’t tell his wife, with whom
    he confided everything, or any of his friends,
    because this new revelation made him feel all
    alone in a way he had never experienced before.
    He and Rachel had been inseparable for as long
    as he could remember and he thought that if she
    knew the prognosis she would begin to feel alone,
    too. But Rachel could see the change in him
    and within a couple of days she figured out
    what it meant.

  • Poetry,  Translation

    “Love Song” by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by David Shapiro)

    How could I stop myself
    from meeting you? Should I rise
    up over you to some other things?
    I could happily make a roof
    with someone abandoned in the dark
    in some dumb distant spot
    that never shakes, as you are trembling now.
    Yet everything that grazes you and me
    ties us together like a violin bow
    stroking two strings into one sound.
    But on what instrument have we been bound?
    And what musician has us in his hand?
    Oh sweet song.

    *

    Rainer Maria Rilke was a German-language poet and novelist,

  • Poetry

    “Bicycle Poem” by Noelle Kocot

    There were cathedrals falling out of your eyes
    And your arms were the handlebars
    I held in an abbreviated dream of crushed petals
    Strewn across the limpid avenues.

    I said, “I have poems for you”
    But my words were lost in the wind.
    I said, “I love you”
    And you drifted into sleep.

    And so I said nothing and rode you in and out of the rooms
    Where we had stretched the boundaries of the soul
    Like an endless sheet
    And I felt you waking up between my legs.