Book of Music

A Book of Music

-Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

Mary Oliver, Sherod Santos, and Melissa Stein: You Wonders, You

A Pretty Song
Mary Oliver

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.


A Woman Named Thucydides
by Sherod Santos

Having slept in a turnout in the backseat
of her car, she awoke before dawn, shivering,
hungover, unsure of where she was.
To her surprise, the sodium lights on the billboard
she had parked beside were no longer on.
Wind gusts, the smell of rain, the raw, unbroken
landscape like a field of ice. If this had been a movie,
someone would've been sitting up front,
someone who held her fate in his hands.
Though she couldn't see them, she could hear
birds passing overhead. Why do they even bother
to cross so vast and empty a space?
At the moment, none of the usual explanations
made sense. Her head ached, her feet were cold,
she couldn't find the words. And the man up front,
what did he think? What would he do?
Must something still happen before the end?

Olives, Bread, Honey, and Salt
Melissa Stein

The lanes are littered with the bodies of bees.
A torrent took them, swarming in branches
just as the white buds loosened their hearts
of pale yellow powder. Each body is a lover:
the one with skin blank as pages; the one
so moved by the pulse ticking in your throat;
the one who took your lips in his teeth
and wouldn’t let go; the one who turned
from you and lay there like a carcass. If we were
made to be whole, we wouldn’t be so lost
to each offering of tenderness and a story.
Therefore our greatest longing is our home.
There is always the one bee that circles and circles,
twitching its sodden wings.

Love Letter
Melissa Stein

I don’t know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I’m willing to lose even more — erasing
all this body’s known, relearning it with you.