Category: language

                    for Frank O’Hara

Frank, we have become an urban species
     at this moment many millions of humans are
          standing on some corner waiting like me

for a signal permitting us to go,
     a signal depicting a small pale pedestrian
          to be followed by a sea-green light

we do not use this opportunity
     to tune in to eternity
          we bounce upon our toes impatiently

It is a Thursday morning, Frank, and I feel
     rather acutely alive but I need a thing of beauty
          or a theory of beauty to reconcile me

to the lumps of garbage I cannot love enclosed
     in these tough shiny black plastic bags
          heaped along the curb of 97th Street, my street—

like a hideous reminder of the fate we all expect
     letting the bulky slimy truth of waste
          attack our aesthetic sense and joie de vivre

reliably every Thursday. Let me scan the handsome amber
     columned and corniced dwellings
          reflected in rear windows of parked cars, let me wish

luck to their hives of intimacies, people
     in kitchens finishing a morning coffee
          saying see you later to the ones they live with

Let me raise my eyes to the blue veil adrift
     between and above the artifice of buildings
          and at last I am slipping through a flaw in time

where the string of white headlights approaching, the string
     of red taillights departing, seem as if
          they carry some kind of message

perhaps the message is that one block west
     Riverside Park extends its length
          at the edge of Manhattan like the downy arm

of a tender, amusing, beautiful lover,
     and after that is the deathless river
          but waiting for the light feels like forever

Waiting for the Light, Alicia Ostriker

“what remains is//always, only, voice.”

“what thou lovest well/remains,”

Jorie Graham

“What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage… What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.”

Canto LXXXI, Ezra Pound

Refusing to Look Away, Anahid Nersessian. A review of Killing Spree, by the poet Jorie Graham. (New York Review August 20, 2026)

If Killing Spree were merely a lament for a greener, cooler, unpoisoned planet it would still be full of beautiful poems, but it would not achieve the moral sublimity that Graham does. This is a book in which ecocide and genocide go hand in hand, as they do in real life. Several of Graham’s poems appear to be set in Gaza, where war has severely polluted the water and soil. (I say they appear to be set in Gaza although, of course, the location might also be Lebanon or Iran.) “The Zero Point” describes a father in a tent with his son just after the tent is hit by a missile. Graham addresses this father as “you” and also speaks of him in the third person, as if to remind the reader that it is only thanks to an accident of history that she is sitting somewhere in safety, reading a book of poetry, while thousands of miles away some of the world’s wealthiest nations cheerfully drop bombs on refugee camps:

What is that springing forth,
that deep inhalation followed by
nothing.
It’s the trees. Listen to me, think of wind in trees.
Yes the drones pass over and this is their wind.
But it’s still a precious thing. A pure thing. Wind.
It will brush you as though there were leaves, as though there were trees.
When is the last time you saw trees

The Killing Spree, Jorie Graham

I do not know how
she felt, but I keep

thinking of her—
screaming out to an empty street.

I had been asleep
when I heard a voice

screaming, Help!
and frantic, when I opened my door.

I remember her shoulders
in the faded towel I found   

before she put on my blue sweats
and white T-shirt. Call 911

please, she said.
When the officer arrived

I said, I found her there after the—
But she said,

No, that wasn’t what
happened.

What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Here—in a poem?
And elsewhere

Spaces, Jenny Johnson