Jos Charles

                                            All that turns
                                            is a wheel  The sky
is ashen & a wheel that is turning as we cross
a bridge of stone

 

                                            It is not yet noon in the port
                                            where I live  Like any a poem
                                            that is after you  Paul at Pont Mirabeau

 

                                            We touch a bridge & therefore its stone
                                            To touch a stone is forever to touch a bridge

 

In the street
they are starting fires    It warms even us

 

                                            What was crossed out is not the same
                                            as what was never written down

 

                                            Mountains mind even us
 

 



 

Looked at last at the branch that
                                            plaits your face   Symptom
                                            like we cling gardener to each

 

Love referentless

 

From the roof of
the apartment branches break their pits seedless

 

                                            within it men in
                                            trees sing


 

 


 

In the aenigma
of a shadow

 

of a window left open
for wind
to leave     In the thought

 

that cannot account for form & having spent

 

thought
we encounter form only      In the distance

 

between the hole of
a stone & a dove within it

 

Of all we have

 

imagined & we have
imagined such distances       What is known

 

& not known You touch
the stone it could be any

 

stone I live on

 

 


 

It is falling
ash in Santa Ana falling in your year
                                                          irrecoverably
                                                          in the evening
                                    holding hands our
                                                          selves
                                                          into the evening
                                                                       we wept a
                                                                       quiet English
                                                          the day contained


 

 


 

(Such silence sudden
now in the clearing   A tarp
chains the lot of our speech
                                              Sunday         no women washing at the washing
                                                                    stones   The past is only
                                                                    the only mutable thing)

 

                                                                       A lone tanker
                                                                       in the waves swims

from the book A YEAR AND OTHER POEMS / Milkweed Editions
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"Kaveh Akbar on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem 'Facing It'"

"When I got to my bed after school and cracked open Neon Vernacular, it was one of those great moments of epiphany one only gets a couple of in a lifetime (if one is very lucky!). I was a miserable teenager, ravaged mercilessly by hostile psychopathologies. Baldly: I had not felt particularly attached to remaining alive. But holding this book, this book of poems, looking at my backpack full of poems, I acutely remember thinking, ‘Well, shit, this is worth staying alive for.’"

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What Sparks Poetry:
James Longenbach on William Butler Yeats' "The Tower"


"The series seemed to me scary in a way poems rarely are when I first read it in 1981; it seems if anything more so today. 'O what fine thought we had because we thought,' says Yeats, and a couple of months ago that iambic pentameter line shot out at me as it never had before: is thinking itself the part of the problem, the way we depict thinking in language, the way we’ve learned to recognize it?"
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