Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.
Short Talk On Hedonism
Anne Carson
beauty makes me hopeless. i don’t care
why anymore i just want to get away.
when i look at the city of paris i long
to wrap my legs around it. when i
watch you dancing there is a heartless
immensity like a sailor in a dead calm
sea. desires as round as peaches
bloom in me all night, i no longer
gather what falls.
‘Please?’
Vincent O’Sullivan
Saying ‘please’ isn’t enough, though
time and again they’ve said it,
her knowing how he’d rather
circuit to a script than rev up
from scratch, a new clutch
of words to fool the dark—so he’s like
a man say just released from some
distant and scarcely dangerous
institution, who gets a lift
to town and buys a bunch of flowers,
flowers maybe for the first time,
and carries them, this beguiling torch
in front of himself, thinking she’ll
know what it is he carries, a flare
that shows he travels a new road
for once, but she thinks as she sees
it surprising the night, why’s
he trying to light the road
he’s always been on?
That’s how
different ‘please’ can be when
different people say it. A light
on the road. Or just more road.
