I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee
Dona Nelson, Party on a Plain, 1988, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 inches. Courtesy of Scott Hanson Gallery.
Seacoast
Beneath its cusp
poised absence of the wave’s black hollow
a lip
a gate
crucible of resemblance
shifting zero
where purposes cross
limit
threshold
every fold of the body
every fold of the day
*
What the stones have in common is the wave
wearing their differences away
it withdraws
like gravel breathing
froth is left
salt on the tongue
rocks tossed in the spray
*
Little tremors cross the water
little disturbances
a dress bellied by wind
a skin sometimes
a path of light
the sheen of it
wind-furrowed
*
Neither patient
nor impatient
ceaseless without purpose
in the storm
the tons of spray
where the water concludes
hang in the wind a moment
drop to the rock
*
It seems alive
creature not person
less time between each wave
but without climax
heedless of its own tumult
*
The gull holds to the air
the limpet the rock
we to the days
they come and go
sunlight posted on a wall
—Cassis, 1 dec. 86
Sundown
in memory of George Quinan
This you
this form we keep using
like a lesson
like a ghost limb
until the stone of the third person is in place
*
What is remembered
is like a furnished room
made neat in the morning
still to be used
all that life to spare
all that refraining
each in his bubble of speech
*
One evening we were walking around the campus after supper, talking, not paying much attention to where we were going, enjoying the mildness of the air and light. We came to a handball court where a freshman we knew, who later became a priest, was practicing his tennis strokes. As we passed, his ball took a wild hop and rolled across the pavement toward us. We stopped. He waited for us to return it to him. We looked at it as if we had never seen anything like it on earth. He looked at us. That ball is real, he said.
*
You don’t get any older
your stillness a marker
nail come warm from the wood
we toil at joy slow as clouds
immense
*
Loew’s theater on Seventh Avenue
where I heard Billie Holiday
and the bar behind it
where we used to meet for a drink
all that sunlight and immobility
is a great hole in earth
*
Mushmouth life
its brokenness
for all that Latin
for all that harm
a blur in the clinch
all that sadness come home to the body
all that violence
*
Five o’clock. Chrysalis. The street like opening a vein. Smell of flowers in an empty elevator. Hurrying to its event. Its quantum. All the new buildings. Along the fault. Days like radio in another room. Angels of nada. Their continuous arrival. Speechless and voluble. Aimless points of impact. Beyond all likeness. The test of summer at its heart.
*
Saint Anthony will not find your lost poems
I have your nail scissors
I have the marks you made in some books
a sentence broken off
fenced lot of untouched snow
*
Blue thistle from the roadside
lamp full of seeds
and a sheaf of lavender
to press in the hand
for the compact dark
at the edge of what we can do
*
To live high, up among the cornices, from exception to exception, hearing an earthly music. Six in the evening, August, a bar on Barrow, door open to the street, Christmas lights, a horse race on TV …
Poem
The world and its likeness
given at once
The world and the world
It is not a selection
Waves slap at the jetty like a dog’s cough
I turn from the sunset
and find it reflected in an idler’s dark glasses
a bauble
a rhyming
a ghost to keep off the crows
Night
world without ornament
Earring
Summer is a glass of water
full to the brim
The surface trembles
A few shells on the table
fragile as 78s
In The Elevator
creaks like a mast
her leather jacket
as her body stirs
Michael O’Brien is the author of Veil, Hard Rain, a poetry collection.
Originally published in
Salman Rushdie, Polly Apfelbaum, Dennis Cooper, James Nares, Penny Arcade, Mats, Alexander Kluge, Robert Greene, Nancy Shaver, Abbijane, Terry Kinney, Michael Tetherow, Bill Barrette, and Carmelo Pomodoro.
I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee