Stray (beneath the books of winter)

http://www.moriapoetry.com/mcintyre.html

Sally Ann McIntyre

Going to Alaska

The jacaranda are wet with color,
and the heat is a great paint brush
lending color to our lives,
and to the air, and to our faces;

but I'm going to Alaska
where there's snow to suck
the sound out from the air.

Up, yes, in the branches,
the purple blossoms,
go pale at the edges;
there is meaning in the shifting
of the sap, and I see in them traces
of last year, but then they hadn't grown
so strong, and their limbs
were more like wires. Now they are cables.
thick and alive with alien electricity,

and I am going to Alaska,
where you can go blind
just by looking at the ground,
where fat is eaten by itself
just to keep the body warm.

Because from where we are now,
it seems, really, that everything is growing
in a thousand different ways;
that the soil is soaked through
with old blood and with relatives
who were buried here, or close to here,
and they are giving rise to what is happening.
Or can you tell me otherwise?

I am going to Alaska, where the animals can kill you,
but they do so in silence, as though if no-one hears them,
then it really won't matter. I am going to Alaska.
They tell me that it's perfect for my purposes.

John Darnielle
from Taboo VI - The Homecoming.

Hear the song at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCR6DTbcpik&NR=1

Image courtesy of David Tuffley at http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~davidt/redlandbay/trees.htm

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

E.E. Cummings
in is 5 (1926)

Sculpture: Laughing Woman by Medardo Rosso (1858-1928)
http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/T/T04/T04846_9.jpg

Mise Eire

I won't go back to it --

My nation displaced
into old dactyls,
oaths made
by the animal tallows
of the candle --

land of the Gulf Stream,
the small farm,
the scalded memory,
the songs
that bandage up the history,
the words
that make a rhythm of the crime

where time is time past.
A palsy of regrets.
No. I won't go back.
My roots are brutal:

I am the woman --
a sloven's mix
of silk at the wrists,
a sort of dove-strut
in the precincts of the garrison --

who practices
the quick frictions,
the rictus of delight
and gets cambric for it,
rice-coloured silks.

I am the woman
in the gansy-coat
on board the 'Mary Belle',
in the huddling cold,

holding her half-dead baby to her
as the wind shifts East
and North over the dirty
water of the wharf

mingling the immigrant
guttural with the vowels
of homesickness who neither
knows nor cares that

a new language
is a kind of scar
and heals after a while
into a passable imitation
of what went before.

Eavan Boland
1987

WTF

Hurry up and eat
We roll out in 20
Tonight just doesn't seem right
The feeling won't shake
Can't smoke enough cigarettes
Why are these vehicles fucking with me
I shine my spotlight, he pulls over
The other stomps on the gas
Oh fuck, another car bomb
I shoot
Someone shouts, This one's dead
At camp people shake my hand
I'm just upset and pissed
It was a doctor
The investigation said it was done by the books
I ask myself, What the fuck kind of war is this

Noah Charles Pierce
(1983-2007)
suicide

See other poems here:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/files/noahpoems.pdf

Soldier Smoking a Pipe
by Franz van Mieris (1662)
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.worcesterart.org/Images/Collection/Photos/Acquisitions