More on: poetry

People need more than just practical support, but things to feed the soul, to brighten the gray of limbo and the toxic boredom of being in between one life and the next.

A certain way I was is gone,
I admit, the ways that I was young.

A bird sits the branch in beauty for
It has recently killed.

To be a poet you must write
more than you know

You feet! I resign myself to you—I know what you —–mean, I behold in my hands your soft heel, your crooked toes I shape like couplets a cow’s hide, I make it understand —–the length of your walk, the refrain of your adventures, —–the places you will see I put bows on the pink shoes…

Modern coins the sizes of shine swept off my friend’s bureau in Ghent and pocketed by my careless habit— not brown pennies too dull to return they include designer Devlin’s sculpture of the duckbilled animal swimming up to the top swirl and five kangaroo tails mixed to a dollar. When the Irish attained their republic…

Margaret Gibson is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Broken Cup, and a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter. Her second book, Long Walks in the Afternoon, was a Lamont Selection (now the James Laughlin Award) of the Academy of American Poets in 1982, and Memories of the Future in 1986 was co-winner of…

Sentient, it seemed, the snowflakes’ descent, making a midair lake, hovering in the somewhere between weakness and ghost, careless as orchids after Christmas. Beyond the veil of a twelfth-century statue, one congregant took off his Reeboks to pray more ardently in the aisle. The monks were in agreement, voice-wise, with the twilight, the work of…

The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) May it be as it was in our rhapsodies. Tethered to you, oneiric assemblage of sea salt ivory: you playing me as I imagine the gods have, cavorting on their mountain of stone. Forgive me. This our default condition: each of us versions of the other’s own making. Call me…

      The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) This, the ocean’s rustled babble— was it the first sound the first woman heard as she was cut out of another body’s desire, wet and sand-soaked as a shell pried out from the shore? How could it not have been thus— like now with you, expected one, shuttered in,…