Give (#3)

After the Moon                                                      Marianne Boruch

eclipsed itself, the rumor or darkness

true, the whole radiant business

almost over, only a line,

an edge, like some

stray part of a machine

                                                          not one of us

can figure any more:

what it thrashed or cut, what it sewed

quietly together, what it scalded

or brought back from the dead. After this,

I came inside to sleep.      

                                            But it’s the moon still,

pale run of it shaping

the door closed against the half-lit hall.

The eye is its own

small flicker orbiting under the lid

a few hours.

                        Not so long,

bright rim,

giving up its genius

briefly, mountains under dark, craters

where someone, then no one

is walking.

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Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. ~Henri Poincare

Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing. ~Anonymous

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Miss Congeniality                             Laura Kasischke

There's a name given
after your death
and a name you must answer to while you're alive.

Like flowers, my friends — nodding, nodding. My
enemies, like space, drifting
away. They

praised my face, my enunciation, and the power
I freely relinquished, and the fires
burning in the basements

of my churches,
and the pendulums swinging
above my towers.
And my

heart (which was a Boy Scout

lost for years in a forest). And my

soul (although the judges said
it weighed almost nothing
for goodness had devoured it).

They praised my feet, the shoes
on my feet, my feet
on the floor, the floor —
and then

the sense of despair
I evoked with my smile, the song

I sang. The speech
I gave
about peace, in praise of the war. O,

they could not grant me the title I wanted

so they gave me the title I bore,

and stubbornly refused
to believe I was dead
long after my bloody mattress

had washed up on the shore.