Honda Pavarotti by Tony Hoagland

Megan

Will

I'm driving on the dark highway

when the opera singer on the radio

opens his great mouth

and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.

So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs

as I steer through the galleries

of one dilated Italian syllable

after another. I love the passages in which

the rich flood of the baritone

strains out against the walls of the esophagus,

and I love the pauses

in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale

enough oxygen to take the next plummet

up into the chasm of the violins.

In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer

is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs

while his head and legs keep kicking.

In part of the song, it sounds as if he is

standing in the middle of a coliseum,

swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,

the empire of gravity

conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,

the citadel of pride in flames

and the citizens of weakness

celebrating their defeat in chorus,

joy and suffering made one at last,

joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,

though I know the woman he is singing for

is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,

though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic

and his mismanagement of money is legendary,

as I know I have squandered

most of my own life

in a haze of trivial distractions,

and that I will continue to waste it.

But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,

because no place I could arrive at

is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience

but to which experience will never measure up.

And that dark and soaring fact

is enough to make me renounce the whole world

or fall in love with it forever.

The Yellow Bowl by Rachel Contreni Flynn









Mary

Megan

If light pours like water 

into the kitchen where I sway

with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us

is woven with tough flowers,

and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft

of fruit, the sun - warmed plums,

if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,

then loneliness has lost its shape,

and this quiet is only quiet.











Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux

Mary

Megan

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain by Delmore Schwartz

Megan

Mary

 1

A tattering of rain and then the reign

Of pour and pouring-down and down,

Where in the westward gathered the filming gown

Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane

Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain,

Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,

Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!

And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:

A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,

A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.

  2

Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence,

And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane

And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane

Of light’s story and light’s glory surrendered and ended

—A pebble—a ring—a ringing on the pane,

A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold

Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey

Came down upon the land’s great sea, the body of this day

—Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar

Allowed the voice to form appeal—to call:

By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.