The Circuit Judge

Edgar Lee Masters

Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain —
Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred
Were marking scores against me,
But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,
Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
Not on the right of the matter.
O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone!
For worse than the anger of the wronged,
The curses of the poor,
Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
Hanged by my sentence,
Was innocent in soul compared with me.

Outage

Rae Armantrout (2010)

1

We like to think
that the mind
controls the body.

We send the body on a mission.

We don't feel the body,
but we receive conflicting reports.

The body is catching flak
or flies.

The body is sprouting grapefruit.

The body is under-
performing in heavy
trading.

2

Reception is spotty.

Someone "just like me"
is born
in the future
and I don't feel a thing?

Like only goes so far.

In My Grandfather's Library

Jon Montague (2010)

In my grandfather’s library
there were many volumes,

Bibles massive as flagstones;
heavy print my eye could trawl along:

the thunder of the Old Testament.

I climbed the Mount with Moses,
stood in the presence of the Lord,
or listened as he spake from a cloud.

For, lo, I had suffered the long exodus
from Brooklyn, and New York, where
they worshipped the Golden Calf

which now staggers, newly born,
rasped clean by its mother’s tongue,
on the cobblestones of our farmyard.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/04/26/100426po_poem_montague#ixzz0lbhbGdOA

Following a Stream

David Wagoner (2010)

Don’t do it, the guidebook says,
if you’re lost. Then it goes on
to talk about something else,
taking the easy way out,
which of course is what water does
as a matter of course always
taking whatever turn
the earth has told it to
while and since it was born,
including flowing over
the edge of a waterfall
or simply disappearing
underground for a long dark time
before it reappears
as a spring so far away
from where you thought you were
and where you think you are
it might never occur
to you to imagine where
that could be as you go downhill.

What Kind of Times Are These

Adrienne Rich (2002)

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

I have to tell you

Dorothea Grossman (2010)

I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.

Fairy-tale Logic

A.E. Stallings (2010)

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bones; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it's impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.