Yusef Komunyakaa, “Nighttime Begins with a Line by Pablo Neruda”
So my body went on growing, by night,
went on pleading & singing to the earth
I was born to be woven back into Love,
let me see if I can’t sink my roots
deeper into you, your minerals & water,
your leaf rot & gold, your telling & un-
telling of the oldest tales inscribed
on wind-carved rocks, silt & grass,
your songs & prayers, your oaths & myths,
your nights & days in one unending lament,
your luminous swarm of wet kisses
& stings, your spleen & mind,
yur outrageous forgetting & remembrance,
your ghosts & rebirths, your thunderstones
& mushrooms, & your kind loss of memory.
The Chameleon Couch is the thirteenth book of poems by Yusef Komunyakaa. It also includes “Blue Dementia” (at the Academy of American Poets website), “Orpheus at the Second Gate of Hades” (from The New Yorker), and “Kindness” and “Memory of the Murdered Professors at the Jagiellonian” (both from Poetry).
8 April 2011 | poetry |
Susan Parr, “Untitled”
No skill to sorting rice.
The ways are multiform—
even the urge to decide on one pulls the grain.So here’s advice:
pour wherever the scoop leads your arm,
pronouncing the name of someone-syllable thing, like “sky,”
making a tiny screen
for the free-falling.
Pacific Shooter, the debut collection from Susan Parr, was the 2009 winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series prize. Poems from this collection include “Formal Manners” and “This Is Not a Lemon” (published in DIAGRAM), “Even Football” (reprinted in The Stranger) and “Poem in the Shape of a Poem” and “Brandoid Roundteen” (discussed at Incendiary Lit).
7 April 2011 | poetry |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
