How Is Your Heart?
~ Charles Bukowski

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn’t call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.

it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.

to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror-
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.

what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

Song of the Shattering Vessels
~ Peter Cole

Either the world is coming together
or else the world is falling apart—
here—now—along these letters,
against the walls of every heart.

Today, tomorrow, within its weather,
the end or beginning’s about to start—
the world impossibly coming together
or very possibly falling apart.

Now the lovers’ mouths are open—
maybe the miracle’s about to start:
the world within us coming together,
because all around us it’s falling apart.

Even as they speak, he wonders,
even as the fear departs:
Is that the world coming together?
Can they keep it from falling apart?

The image, gradually, is growing sharper;
now the sound is like a dart:
It seemed their world was coming together,
but in fact it was falling apart.

That’s the nightmare, that’s the terror,
that’s the Isaac of this art—
which sees that the world might come together
if only we’re willing to take it apart.

The dream, the lure, isn’t an answer
that might be plotted along some chart—
as we know the world that’s coming together
within our knowing’s falling apart.

Field Notes
~ Devon Balwit

Where is my David Attenborough,

tracking me in my habitat,

ennobling my idiosyncrasies

in his mellifluous voice?

David Attenborough

tell our daughters
~ besmilr brigham

each is beautiful
a woman’s life
makes it (that awareness)
through her touch

descendants
of strict age
set against vanity

not secure in loveliness

a girl is born
like a little bird opening its wing
she lifts her face
in a down of feathers

a rose,
opens its leaves
with such a natural care
that we give words for
petal deep
in the imagination
a word becomes
a bitter thing
or a word is
an imagination

tell our daughters they are
fragile as a bird
strong as the rose
deep as a word

and let them make
their own growing time
​
big with tenderness

Roses and Clematis

In Blackwater Woods
~Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.