Collaborative Verses

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more."

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Morning arrives like a neighbor
who doesn't knock,
just leans against the doorframe
with two cups of coffee going cold.

My father used to say
the rain here has a stubbornness to it,
the kind that gets into the wool of your coat
and stays a week.

I keep his old brass compass
in the kitchen drawer,
the needle worn so thin it wobbles
when I take it out. North
is mostly a suggestion now.

Outside, the pines shake off the night
and the ferry horn drags its low note
across the water.
Someone is setting out crab pots.
Someone is learning to forgive.

The light comes back the way it always does.
Sideways. A little late.
Asking nothing.

Low water, and the stones
come out like shy animals.
Each one holds
the shape of a passing.

I kneel where the current
thins to a thread of light.
My face arrives
in the shallows, then leaves.

Nothing is asked of me here.
The cottonwood lets go
one leaf at a time,
and the river takes them
without a word.

the plant lights hum like a held breath,
fluorescent, flickering, faithful to nothing but the grid,
and Marcus clocks in at 10:47 with a lunch pail
that his mother packed and a cough he won't name.
the machines don't care about your back.
the machines don't care about your son's recital.
they just count, and count, and count,
and somewhere a spreadsheet learns his name.

I know a woman named Dolores who folds
the same corner forty years,
and she told me once the trick is not to think
about the corner, think about the paycheck,
think about the way her daughter laughed
at something small last Sunday, hold it
like a coal in your pocket,
warm, burning, warm.

the foreman walks the floor like weather.
you learn to read the barometric pressure
of his boots. some nights it's clear skies.
some nights you keep your head down
and your hands moving and your mouth shut
and your heart a small engine
running on fumes and stubbornness.

they say the city never sleeps.
they mean the city never lets us sleep,
not the ones who pour the coffee at 4 a.m.,
not the ones who drive the bus, who clean the office,
who patch the road while you dream.
we are the pulse under the pavement,
we are the hum in the wire,
we are the ones who keep the lights on
and pay for the light we keep on.

so when the whistle blows
and the sun comes up ugly and orange
over the rail yard,
I walk out with my hands still buzzing
and my chest full of static,
and I don't say thank you
and I don't say amen,
I just breathe the cold air in
like it's the first thing
I ever owned.

First, unplug the sky. Let the wires cool
like eels asleep in a bucket. You will need
a thimble of hydrogen, the left glove
of a dead astronomer, one iron nail
rusted the color of a fox's tongue.

Fold the dark corner toward the light—
no, further, until the crease remembers
a village it burned. The villagers
are still waving. Ignore them; they are only
hydrogen, only the rumor of a bell.

Press the seam flat with your thumb.
This is where the eye of the telescope
begins to water. This is where the moth
drinks from your wrist and mistakes you
for a small, necessary moon.

Now hold the shape against your sternum.
Feel it breathing? That's the nebula
learning your ribs. It will want
to be smaller than it is. It will want
a name you can pronounce. Give it
the name of a river. Give it a spoon.

When it collapses—and it will collapse—
sweep the spill into a paper cone, salt it,
and leave it on the windowsill overnight.
In the morning, if it has rained,
lick your finger. Taste the iron.
That is how you know it was real.

The ferryman's hands are a map of the tide,
all salt-cracked and knuckled and slow,
and he counts out the coins with a click on the rail—
cold copper, the last of my fare, and I know
that the engine will cough like a man out of breath
as we push from the pier in the dark,
with the gull-light gone and the harbor lamp low
and the water as black as a dog's bark.

There was Brigid who swore she would follow me down,
but she stood on the steps with her shawl
pulled tight to her chin, and she said not a word,
and I heard the wind take the farewell from us all.
She had flour on her sleeve from the morning bread,
and I mind how she brushed it away,
as if what we'd been could be dusted right off
and swept out with the crumbs of the day.

The tide takes the harbor the way it takes all—
the rope and the rust and the name
that a boy carved deep in the boathouse door
when the summer still tasted of rain.
And the ferryman hums an old smuggling tune
that his father hummed after the war,
and the stars come out one by one overhead
like coins on a dresser drawer.

So it's over the water and into the fog,
and it's never look back at the light,
for the girl on the steps has her own road to walk
and I've mine, and the both of us right.
And the engine will cough, and the ferryman'll swear,
and the salt will come up on my lip,
and I'll carry Dunmore in the crook of my arm
like a stone that I can't let slip.

The moon is a sucked-out rind
hung on a nail of salt.
Under the lemon trees
the earth goes soft with wings—
not angels, only moths
knuckling the dark like dice.

Someone has left a guitar
face-down in the wet grass,
its belly full of rainwater
and one string humming
a note no hand has touched.
I press my ear to the wood:
it is the sound of a door
closing in a house I never lived in.

Turquoise lemons, unpeeled suns,
ripening on the branch
like small struck bells.
I bite one. The juice runs
down my chin, cold copper,
and the whole orchard tilts—
each tree a green flame
leaning toward a sea
I can hear but cannot see.

My mother's voice, far off,
calling me in for supper.
But the courtyard keeps its hoard:
a bicycle chain that squeaks
in the dark, going nowhere,
and the moths, the moths,
turning the night's slow pages.