Revelation david whyte

Water Picture. Water Picture by May Swenson In the pond in the park all things are doubled: Long buildings hang and wriggle gently. Chimneys are bent legs bouncing on clouds below.

A flag wags like a fishhook down there in the sky. The arched stone bridge is an eye, with underlid in the water. In its lens dip crinkled heads with hats that don't fall off. Dogs go by, barking on their backs.

A baby, taken to feed the ducks, dangles upside-down, a pink balloon for a buoy. Treetops deploy a haze of cherry bloom for roots, where birds coast belly-up in the glass bowl of a hill; from its bottom a bunch of peanut-munching children is suspended by their sneakers, waveringly.

A swan, with twin necks forming the figure 3, steers between two dimpled towers doubled. Fondly hissing, she kisses herself, and all the scene is troubled: water-windows splinter, tree-limbs tangle, the bridge folds like a fan. Round by Tom Sleigh Somebody's alone in his head, somebody's a kid, somebody's arm's getting twisted—a sandwich flies apart, tomatoes torn, white bread flung, then smeared with shit and handed back to eat—I dog dare you, I double dog dare you Not a poem, but sharing it here anyway.

The sage and her student were standing by a pool discussing longing and ambition. At that moment, the sage tackled the student and shoved his head beneath the water. Accustomed to letting his teacher shape the unpredictable contours of his education, he did not resist. One minute went by.

Then another. The student began to struggle and kick. His teacher was strong. Finally she released her grip and the student surfaced, fighting for breath. An Evening Train.

An Evening Train by Timothy Liu whistles past hacked-down fields of corn, heading towards a boy who whittles an effigy of himself. We go on sleeping through sirens and crimson strobes flashing on remains no one can identify till we line up at dawn to see who's missing.

At the zoo this morning, a girl found half-devoured in a moat, two lions licking their chops, Little Rock, Arkansas the only proof left on her body to show how far she was from home, a tattered copy of The Odyssey later found in her purse. Did she love her life? We warn our children not to lay their ears down on the tracks in wintertime, knowing how it's not always best to know what's coming our way. Leo Said. Leo Said by Eileen Myles you've gotta write clearer so you can be read when you're dead.

If They Come in the Night. He explained we lay together on a cold hard floor what prison meant because he had done time, and I talked of the death of friends. Why are you happy then, he asked, close to angry. I said, I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands, that I forgot to do some little piece of the work that wanted to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine, the muted light off the waters of the bay at night, the white light of the fog stealing in, the first spears of morning touching a face I love.

We all lose everything. We lose ourselves. We are lost. Only what we manage to do lasts, what love sculpts from us; but what I count, my rubies, my children, are those moments wide open when I know clearly who I am, who you are, what we do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor, with all my senses hungry and filled at once like a pitcher with light.

Keeping Quiet. Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep quiet. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness. Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare wars wars with gas, wars with fire victories with no survivors would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about; I want no truck with death. If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Queer by Frank Bidart Lie to yourself about this and you will forever lie about everything. Everybody already knows everything so you can lie to them. That's what they want. But lie to yourself, what you will lose is yourself. Then you turn into them. Or not. Foundational narrative designed to confer existence.

If I had managed to come out to my mother, she would have blamed not me, but herself. The door through which you were shoved out into the light was self-loathing and terror. You learned early that adults' genteel fantasies about human life were not, for you, life. You think sex is a knife driven into you to teach you that.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. Tonight No Poetry Will Serve by Adrienne Rich Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence. A Green Crab's Shell.

A Green Crab's Shell by Mark Doty Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like-- though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws' gesture of menace and power.

A gull's gobbled the center, leaving this chamber --size of a demitasse-- open to reveal a shocking, Giotto blue. Though it smells of seaweed and ruin, this little traveling case comes with such lavish lining! Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer's firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if we could be opened into this-- if the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky.

Now and Then Billy Collins. Song of Myself. Song of Myself by Walt Whitman You sea! I resign myself to you also - I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me, We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

Sea of stretch'd ground-swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd yet always-ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others' arms. Maine Seafood Company. Once out of the box The wooden box The metal box The box, the box, the box Dragged up from the salt Things don't feel too bad And then they do And then they don't And waves. Number 8 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Number 8 It was a face which darkness could kill in an instant a face as easily hurt by laughter or light 'We think differently at night' she told me once lying back languidly And she would quote Cocteau 'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking' Then she would smile and look away light a cigarette for me sigh and rise and stretch her sweet anatomy let fall a stocking Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Larry Levis in Provincetown. We are permitted to choose but one companion for the great journey, so Garcia Lorca is here with me;—we arrived last week as "guest worker summer help. Or that I would again be permitted access to the knowledge that comes in a love amplified by the stirrings of the world. Haunted by Naomi Shihab Nye We are looking for your laugh.

Trying to find the path back to it between drooping trees. Listening for your rustle under bamboo, brush of fig leaves, feeling your step on the porch, natty lantana blossom poked into your buttonhole. We see your raised face at both sides of a day. Your rumble of calm poured into me. There was the saving grace of care, from day one, the watching and being watched from every corner of the yard. My life has been the poem I would have writ. A Windmill Makes A Statement.

You are right. If seasons undo me, you are my season. And you are the light making off with its reflection as my stainless steel fins spin. On lawns, on lawns we stand, we windmills make a statement.

We turn air, churn air, turning always on waiting for your season. There is no lover more lover than the air.

You care, you care as you twist my arms round, till my songs become popsicle and I wing out radiants of light all across suburban lawns. You are right, the churning is for you, for you are right, no one but you I spin for all night, all day, restless for your sight to pass across the lawn, tease grasses, because I so like how you lay above me, how I hovered beneath you, and we learned some other way to say: There you are.

You strip the cut, splice it to strips, you mill the wind, you scissor the air into ecstasy until all lawns shimmer with your bluest energy. Poetry about multiple sclerosis. Statues in the Park. A horse rearing up with two legs raised, you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted, the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds; and if four legs were touching the ground, as they were in this case— bronze hooves affixed to a stone base— it meant that the man on the horse, this one staring intently over the closed movie theater across the street, had died of a cause other than war. In the shadow of the statue, I wondered about the others who had simply walked through life without a horse, a saddle, or a sword— pedestrians who could no longer place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly recumbent on their cold stone bed, the suicides toeing the marble edge, statues of accident victims covering their eyes, and murdered covering their wounds, the drowned silently treading the air. And there was I, up on a rosy-gray block of granite near a cluster of shade trees in the local park, my name and dates pressed into a plaque, down on my knees, eyes lifted, praying to the passing clouds, forever begging for just one more day.

Hidden by Naomi Shihab Nye If you place a fern under a stone the next day it will be nearly invisible as if the stone has swallowed it. If you tuck the name of a loved one under your tongue too long without speaking it it becomes blood sigh the little sucked-in breath of air hiding everywhere beneath your words. No one sees the fuel that feeds you.

Dead Doorknob. Dear Doorknob by David Hernandez I turned you and you slipped off—cold, heavy brass in my bewildered hand as your counterpart dropped on the other side, baritone clunk against the hardwood, nothing to say but what rose to my lips: "Whoops. There is a click, a round gold sound that tells me I fixed you. Dharma by Billy Collins.

The Hokey Pokey Shakespearean Style. O proud left foot, that ventures quick within Then soon upon a backward journey lithe. Anon, once more the gesture, then begin: Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.

Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke. A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl. To spin! A wilde release from heaven's yoke Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl. The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about. This is how I go about it: I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door. Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair. I slide it off my bones like a silken garment. I do this so that what I write will be pure, completely rinsed of the carnal, uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body. Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them on a small table near the window.

I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat. Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin. I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on. I find it difficult to ignore the temptation. Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter. In this condition I write extraordinary love poems, most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death. I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting. After a spell of this I remove my penis too. Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.

Just the absolute essentials, no flounces. Now I write only about death, most classical of themes in language light as the air between my ribs. Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset. I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage and speed through woods on winding country roads, passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds, all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Half Mile Down. Half Mile Down by Michael Ryan My sick heart and my sick soul I'd gladly fasten in a bag and drop into an ocean-hole to float in darkness as a rag. Would it learn to make its light? Maybe in a million years. A million years of constant night in which it can't stop its fears flaring their nightmare tentacles and bioluminescent eyes as cold and sharp as icicles under moonless, starless skies: medusae, spookfish, cephalopods, jellies with no eyes or brains, lethal and beautiful as gods, locked in endless predation chains.

How seamless then the world would seem, which life on earth never did, the living water like a dream crowded with prowling vampire squid that want only to stay alive among other monsters innocent of all but the pure drive to survive without self-judgment.

Sex by Michael Ryan After the earth finally touches the sun, and the long explosion stops suddenly like a heart run down, the world might seem white and quiet to something that watches it in the sky at night, so something might feel small, and feel nearly human pain.

But it won't happen again: the long nights wasted alone, what's done in doorways in the dark by the young, and what could have been for some. Think of all the lovers and the friends! Who does not gather his portion of them to himself. Sex eased through everyone, even when slipping into death as into a beloved's skin, and prying out again to find the body slumped, muscles slack.

Then no one minds when one lover holds another, like an unloaded sack. But the truth enters at the end of life. It enters like oxygen into every cell and the madness it feeds there in some is only a lucid metaphor for something long burned to nothing, like a star. How do you get under your desire? How do you peel away each desire like ponderous clothes, one at a time, until what's underneath is known? We knew genitals as small things and we were ashamed they led us around, even if the hill where we'd lie down was the same hill the universe unfolded upon all night, as we watched the stars, when for once our breathing seemed to blend.

Each time, from that sweet pressure of hands, or the great relief of the mouth, a person can be led out of himself Isn't it lonely in the body? The myth says we ooze about as spirits until there's a body made to take us, and only flesh is created by sex. That's why we enter sex so relentlessly, toward the pleasure that comes when we push down far enough to nudge the spirit rising to release, and the pleasure is pleasure of pure spirit, for a moment all together again. So sex returns us to beginning, and we moan.

Pure sex becomes specific and concrete in a caress of breast or slope of waist: it flies through itself like light, it sails on nothing like a wing, when someone's there to be touched, when there's nothing wrong. So the actual is touched in sex, like a breast through cloth: the actual rising plump and real, the mind darting about it like a tongue.

This is where I wanted to be all along: up in the world, in touch with myself. Sex, invisible priestess of a good God, I think without you I might just spin off. I know there's no keeping you close, as you flick by underneath a sentence on a train, or transform the last thought of an old nun, or withdraw for one moment alone. Who tells you what to do or ties you down! I'd give up the rest to suck your dark lips. I'd give up the rest to fix you exact in the universe, at the wildest edge where there's no such thing as shape.

What a shame I am, if reaching the right person in a dim room, sex holds itself apart from us like an angel in an afterlife, and, with the ideas no one has even dreamed, it wails its odd music for pure mind. After there's nothing, after the big blow-up of the whole shebang, what voice from what throat will tell me who I am?

Each throat on which I would have quietly set my lips will be ripped like a cheap sleeve or blown apart like the stopped-up barrel of a gun. What was inside them all the time I wanted always to rest my mouth upon? I thought most everything stuck dartlike in the half-dome of my brain, and hung there like fake stars in a planetarium. It's true that things there changed into names, that even the people I loved were a bunch of signs, so I felt most often alone.

This is a way to stay alive and nothing to bemoan. We know the first time we extend an arm: the body reaches so far for so long. We grow and love to grow, then stop, then lie down. I wanted to bear inside me this tender outcome. I wanted to know if it made sex happen: does it show up surely in touch and talk?

I wanted my touching intelligent, like a beautiful song. Divestiture by Connie Deanovich Here's your mistake back you never made it here's the cushion reshaping the couch your shadow slips under the threshold you never crossed it private paradise is just another storm splitting in space the sheets you never crumpled fold up again the words you spoke were never spoken when I walk into the library I'm not thinking of you when my heart drains like sand from a shoe I'm not thinking of you something was having trouble ending think of energy's mutations not of you yesterday I devirginized my own story stuck my fingers in and out of my own future until I broke its promise today I'm not thinking of you but of a souvenir tossed on the compost a smelly time unpetalling blackening rain and garbage.

A Lover. Would I oscillate in two or three dimensions? Would I summon a beholder and change chirality for "him? Ask what it means to pass through the void. Ask how it differs from not passing. Chaos is the New Calm.

Chaos is the New Calm by Wyn Cooper Chaos is the new calm violence the new balm to be spread on lips unused to a kiss.

Left is the new right as I brace for a fight with a man who stands on his remaining hand. Fetid harbor harbor me until someone is free to drive me away from what happened today. Don't strand me standing here.

If you leave, leave beer. Making a Forest. David Shumate It's a delicate and ancient process. You must offer each seed to the soil tenderly. As if it were a virgin and you were a friend of the family. You must arrange to bring water - a river, a soaking rain, a brigade of a thousand buckets.

The rest you give over to time. If you don't have any seeds, you can make a forest out of whatever you have handy. I knew a man who made a forest out of a lifetime of regrets. Then he stepped inside and no one ever saw him again.

I once made a forest out of a few carefully chosen words. My neighbors woke up the next morning and claimed that a forest like that could do their children irreparable harm and had it cut down by experts who, I have to admit, did an extraordinary job. I'm rather tired now, but tomorrow I think I'll make a forest out of all the pettiness in this world. I will stretch a thousand miles, from here to the coast and deep into the sea. Appalachian Trail. Appalachian Trail by Ted Mathys I am in the main on the mend I am in Maine on the wagon on Katahdin in an animal skin I am a pencilmaker breaking a stolen mirror metaphor over the peak to make Maine lakes glint in sun I broke like a main clause over the forest of the page and paused to drink from a literal canteen.

Sorrows by Lucille Clifton who would believe them winged who would believe they could be beautiful who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin sometimes we hear them in our dreams rattling their skulls clicking their bony fingers envying our crackling hair our spice filled flesh they have heard me beseeching as I whispered into my own cupped hands enough not me again enough but who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire.

Variation on the Word Sleep. Margaret Atwood I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. RE: Poetry. The Falling Star. The Falling Star by Sara Teasdale I saw a star slide down the sky, Blinding the north as it went by, Too burning and too quick to hold, Too lovely to be bought or sold, Good only to make wishes on And then forever to be gone.

Planets Are Pretty Big. Planets Are Pretty Big by Shanna Compton Some theories suggest our iron cores attracted and merged beneath the sunset stripes of a reducing atmosphere. Formed a system of two coincidentally, obliquely met, eclipses total eliminating wobble. Planets are pretty big. They don't blow up instantly. Vapor squirts out, escaping under pressure. What you're seeing now, gauzy with particulars and reflected light, we consumed together eons ago.

When you start remembering. Forms of Love. I love you but I wish you had more hair. I love you more. I love you more like a friend. I love your friends more than you. I love how when we go into a mall and classical muzak is playing, you can always name the composer. I love you in spite of the restraining order. I love you from the coma you put me in. I love how you get me. I love how emotionally unavailable you are.

I love your hair. I love you secretly. I love your tacos! I love your stick deodorant! I love it when you tie me up with ropes using the knots you learned in Boy Scouts, and when you do the stoned Dennis Hopper rap from Apocalypse Now! I love your extravagant double takes! I love everything about you except your hair. House Spiders. House Spiders by Judith Vollmer Streetlights out again I'm walking in the dark lugging groceries up the steps to the porch whose yellow bulb is about to go too, when a single familiar strand intersects my face, the filament slides across my glasses which seem suddenly perfectly clean, fresh, and my whole tired day slows down walking into such a giant thread is a surprise every time, though I never kill them, I carry them outside on plastic lids or open books, they live so plainly and eat the mosquitoes.

More like the one who lived in the corner of the old farm kitchen under the ivy vase and behind the single candle-pot--black with curved crotchety legs. Maya, weaver of illusions, how is it we trust the web, the nest, the roof over our heads, we trust the stars our guardians who gave us our alphabet? I feel less and less like a single self, more like a weaver, myself, spelling out formulae from what's given and from words.

Darkly Shifting Flux. Darkly Shifting Flux by George Bilgere At noon I teach my summer school class, during which some significant Middle English poems on the subject of mortality are strenuously appreciated for one hour and fifty minutes. After that I swim about half-a-mile under a series of cloudy metaphors at the public pool, and then I bike home.

Now it's 3 o'clock, and the next scheduled event of the summer is dinner at I am in my house, my domestic setting, with my furniture.

We exist together in the dining room for a moment, the breakfront, the table, the buffet, and I. How lucky we are to be here, so stable and serene, in the darkly shifting flux of the cosmos.

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Be the first to start one ». About David Whyte. David Whyte. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The author of seven books of poetry and three books of prose, David Whyte holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops.

His life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical enquiry and the world of vocation, work and organizational leadership. An Associate Fellow at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many European, American and international companies.

In spring of he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Neumann College, Pennsylvania. As if you were meant to be exactly where you are, as if like the dark branch of a desert river. As if your place in the world mattered and the world could neither speak nor hear the fullness of. Revelation Must Be Terrible Revelation must be terrible with no time left to say goodbye.

Imagine that moment staring at the still waters with only the brief tremor of your body to say you are leaving everything and everyone you know behind. When you open your eyes to the world you are on your own for the first time. No one is even interested in saving you now and the world steps in to test the calm fluidity of your body from moment to moment as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness.