“

Now reading

Dispute for Death

They dramatize the dead, as though the dead
could paint their flags, or win the right parades;
they weave imaginary graves with print
of colored stars, and turn the buried mouths.

A man who asked no pensions for his smiles,
and stored no idle flowers in his house:
his children could not feel him when he died,
since any death grows quick for cheerful men.

Who employs him then, for his peculiar joy?
He can not save his hands to advertise.
Will he explain his nether attitude?
'When could you stop to listen, if he did?

Another tore his tumbled guts with hands
that ran like rabbits in a hedge, and now-
no parlor crepe assists at his demise,
no relatives solicit his consent.

The dead restrict their compass to an inch,
and bring no summer measure to its points.
They will not wait to circle our design,
or bathe the evil figures on our charts.

41,493

poems

4,155

poets

207

poetic terms

Browse the collection

Explore the archive →

Selected

Poems worth returning to

At the eastern gate the Shaman sings, …

Ina Sizer Cassidy

The desert is butch, she dismisses your illusions …

Robin Becker

under cloud-closed skies …

A. R. Ammons

I have a need to ventilate, to have my porous body—sockets and holes—open to the bald-faced wind and have my heathen inner-stuff tweedled like a reed flute and this piffle floats out. But walking on the open road, I know even open roads, to be roads at all, are ruts. With a careless beanfield on either side, off one more time, even you, Mr. Out-in-the-Woods, might as well be stuffed in your hometown bucket. And if these grim beams of trees are truly home, Sweet, as you say they are, then the timberwolves would reclaim you by singing and that would be all. The Moon would reclaim the timberwolves—not a snarl—soft keepsakes asleep in the palm of Her hand. I would reclaim the Moon by picking a white silk chrysanthemum and resting it on the branch beside Her. Who would reclaim me? and say, “Blossom, we are not two. There is no road to or from. You cannot write a love poem. You cannot walk away.” Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones. …

Eric Ekstrand

A white bull, a cassock, an antique mirror …

Frank Stanford

How blest the land that counts among …

Ambrose Bierce

How much shall I love her? …

Thomas Hardy

Even at odds, we manage to make …

Heidy Steidlmayer

The glossary

The language about poetry

From aubade to zuihitsu, 207 definitions of the forms, figures, and schools that shape the line.

Explore the glossary→