"Blood pools do not"

Blood pools do not
Bleb drops of red
Like water; instead,
They flee like bullets
Down the sterile gown.

"It is getting further away"

It is getting further away
The bliss of that bleak year

The blank kiss of that warm beer;
Know I captured the square when leaves

Filtered the sun a blindman's sieve
Through to the damp grass where we lay

That year, and that late-summer's day
stayed as an aroma of fresh pie

Or a distant balloon in the eastern sky
Then buoyed by a twitter of pigeons;

And when it was softly hidden
By pillows and pastures, a snow garden

In which we never went, ever uncertain,
For the square spoke for us instead:

"The real message was misread
From the white quiet nights, laid bare

By the auburn of her silken hair
And the bliss of that bleak year".

"Lubrication works best"

Lubrication works best
On my barren cornea,

One of Leiningen's defenses here
Against nagging limbs, thorny fingers,

A cornucopia of me purging
The lunar surface of my eye

Of turgid gunk
Clogging lacrimal ducts,

A spring cleaning
In the falling snow.

Lake Water, by David Ferry

It is a summer afternoon in October.
I am sitting on a wooden bench, looking out
At the lake through a tall screen of evergreens,
Or rather, looking out across the plane of the lake,
Seeing the light shaking upon the water
As if it were a shimmering of heat.
Yesterday, when I sat here, it was the same,
The same displace out-of-season effect.
Seen twice it seemed a truth was being told.
Some of the trees I can see across the lake
Have begun to change, but it is as if the air
Had entirely given itself over to summer,
With the intention of denying its own proper nature.

There is a breeze perfectly steading and persistent
Blowing in toward shore from the other side
Or from the world beyond the other side.
The mild sound of the little tapping waves
The breeze has caused — there’s something infantile
About it, a baby at the breast.  The light
Is moving and not moving upon the water.

The breeze picks up slightly but still steadily,
The increase in the breeze becomes the mild
Dominant event, compelling with sweet oblivious
Authority alterations in light and shadow,
Alterations in the light of the sun on the water,
Which becomes at once denser and more quietly
Excited, like a concentration of emotions
That had been dispersed and scattered and now were not.
Then there’s the mitigation of the shadow of a cloud,
And the light subsides a little, into itself.

Although this is a lake it is as if
A tide were running mildly into shore.
The sound of the water so softly battering
Against the shore is decidedly sexual,
In its liquidity, its regularity,
Its persistence, its infantile obliviousness.
It is as if it had come back to being
A beginning, an origination of life.

The plane of the water is like a page on which
Phrases and even sentences are written,
But because of the breeze, and the turning of the year,
And the sense that this lake water, as it is being
Experienced on a particular day, comes from
Some source somewhere, beneath, within, itself,
Or from somewhere else, nearby, a spring, a brook,
Its pure origination somewhere else
It is like an idea for a poem not yet written
And maybe never to be completed, because
The surface of the page is like lake water,
That takes back what is written on its surface,
And all my language about the lake and its
Emotions or its sweet obliviousness,
Or even its being like an origination,
Is all erased with the changing of the breeze
Or because of the heedless passing of a cloud.

When, moments after she died, I looked into
Her face, it was as untelling as something natural,
A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,
Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.
Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;
But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.

By David Ferry


Thanks to Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/david-ferrys-beautiful-thefts.html#ixzz2HsmzowCg