The Failure of Language by Jacqueline Berger

First day of class, I ask the students, by way
of introduction, what they believe:
Language is our best tool, or language fails
to express what we know and feel.
We go around the room.
Almost everyone sides with failure.
Is it because they’re young,
still find it hard to say what they mean?
Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body,
anything wordless as the best way in?
I think about the poet helping his wife to die,
calling his heart helpless as crushed birds
and the soles of her feet the voices of children
calling in the lemon grove, because the tool 
must sometimes be bent to work.

Sitting next to my friend in her hospital bed,
she tells me she’s not going to make it,
doesn’t think she wants to,
all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in.
I change the flowers in the vase,
rub cream into her hands and feet.
When I lean down to kiss her goodbye,
I whisper I love you, words that maybe
have lost their meaning, being asked to stand
for so many unspoken particulars.

The sky when I walk to the parking lot
this last weekend of summer
is an opal, the heat pinkening above the trees
which dusk turns the color of ash.

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

My students believe it’s important
to get the words right.
Once said, they can never be retrieved.
It takes years to learn to be awkward.
At their age, each word must be carefully chosen
to communicate the yes, but also leave room
for the not really, just kidding, a gateway car
with the engine running.

Inside us, constellations,
bit thread knotted into night’s black drape.
There are no right words,
if by right we mean perfect,
if by perfect we mean able to save us.

Four of us pack up our friend’s apartment.
Suddenly she can’t live unassisted.
I remember this glass, part of a set
I bought her years ago
when she became for a time a scotch drinker.
I bought it for its weight, something
solid to hold, and for the way an inch or two
of amber would look against its etched walls.
I wrap it in newspaper and add it to the box marked Kitchen.

It’s my friend herself who is fragile.
When I take her out to eat, each step is work.
The restaurant is loud and bright.
She wants to know if she looks normal.
I make my words soft. Fine,
which might be the most useless word in English,
everything is going to be fine.

Being and Nothingness hy Nikki Giovanni

i haven’t done anything
meaningful in so long
it’s almost meaningful
to do nothing

i suppose i could fall in love
or at least in line
since i’m so discontented
but that takes effort
and i don’t want to exert anything
neither my energy nor my emotions

i’ve always prided myself
on being a child of the sixties
and we are all finished
so that makes being
nothing

Mein Kampf by David Lernee

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money

The Poem by Donald Hall

It discovers by night
what the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself 
into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
by itself where meadows 
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still 
in a quiet row of machines.
Who knows 
what it is thinking

The Empty Places by Anna Kamienska

 Let us hurry to love people
                  Jan Twardowski

I didn’t manage to love anyone
even though I hurried so much
It was as if I had to love only empty places
the dangling sleeves without the embrace
the beret abandoned by the head
the armchair that also should get up and leave the room
the books no longer touched
the comb with a silver hair left in it
the cots babies outgrew
the drawers full of unnecessary things
the pipe with a chewed mouthpiece
the shoes molded to the shape of a foot
that departed barefooted
the phone-receiver where voices grew hush
I hurried so much to love
and naturally I didn’t manage

A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Untitled (Crickets) by Izumi Shikibu

Although
the cricket’s song
has no words,
still,
it sounds like sorrow.

A Lament on the Evanescence of Life by Yamanoue no Okura

What we must accept
  as we journey through the world
Is that time will pass
  like the waters of a stream;
in countless numbers,
in relentless succession,
it will besiege us
  with assaults we must endure.
They would not detain
  the period of their bloom
when, as maidens will,
they who were then maidens
  encircled their wrists
    with gemmed bracelets from Cathay,
and took their pleasure
  frolicking hand in hand
    with their youthful friends.
So the months and years went by,
and when did it fall –
that sprinkling of wintry frost
  on glistening hair
    as black as leopard flower seeds?
And whence did they come –
those wrinkles that settled in,
marring the smoothness
  of blushing pink faces?
Was it forever,
the kind of life those others led –
those stalwart men,
who, as fine young men will do,
girded at their waists
  sharp swords, keen-bladed weapons,
took up hunting bows,
clasped them tight in their clenched fists,
placed on red horses
  saddles fashioned of striped hemp,
climbed onto their steeds,
and rode gaily here and there?
they were not many,
those nights when the fine young men
  pushed open the doors,
the plank doors of the chamber
  where the maidens slept,
groped their way close to their loves,
and slept with their arms
  intertwined with gemlike arms.
Yet already now
  those who were maidens and youths
    must use walking sticks,
and when they walk over there,
others avoid them,
and when they walk over here,
others show distaste.
Such is life, it seems, for the old.
Precious though life is,
it is beyond our power
  to stay the passing of time.