Epilogue
From the Greek etymology, epilogue means “words attached at the end.” However, we believe that endings are often elliptical. One cycle ends, another begins; one story ends, another begins, in perpetuity. These poems ask us to open our memory boxes, to reflect on change, and acknowledge that a spectre between nothing and nothing is still remarkable.
You and I and the World
Translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Elleström
Don’t ask who you are or who I am
and why what is, is.
Let the professors sort it out,
it’s their job.
Place the scale on the kitchen table
and let reality weigh itself.
Put your coat on.
Turn the light off in the hallway.
Close the door.
Let the dead embalm the dead.
Here we walk now.
The one wearing white rubber boots
is you.
The one wearing black rubber boots
is me.
And the rain falling on us both
is the rain.
The Darling Letters
By Carol Ann Duffy
Some keep them in shoeboxes away from the light,
sore memories blinking out as the lid lifts,
their own recklessness written all over them. My own…
Private jokes, no longer comprehended, pull their punchlines,
fall flat in the gaps between endearments. What
Are you wearing?
Don’t ever change.
They start with Darling, end in recriminations,
absence, sense of loss. Even now, the fist’s bud flowers
into trembling, the fingers trace each line and see
the future then. Always…Nobody burns them,
the Darling letters, stiff in their cardboard coffins.
Babykins…We all had strange names
which make us blush, as though we’d murdered
someone under an alias, long ago. I’ll die
Without you. Die. Once in a while, alone,
We take them out to read again, the heart thudding
like a spade on buried bones.
My Life In Art
By James Harms
She felt the edges of the moment like the smooth face of a dime.
I felt her face with my eyes closed against the sparks, the spray
around her fingers as she opened an orange.
She guessed about my money. She showed me the buttons on the inside.
For hours the rain thickened into snow then back again.
She said, OK, enough, just talk about your brother,
the last good wave you caught before leaving but don’t
don’t do that. But she let me. The clasp
is what I’d call it. A hook, she said, and I had it in my teeth
as she lit a cigarette and said, It’s snow now for good.
We heard the same small voice become a crocus in the earth
beside the path, a car in the cough descending the staircase.
You can’t afford this, she said. Or that. I showed her my fake eye,
my blond marble, my wallet photo of Katharine Ross as Etta Place.
She sang instead of anything, though she held me a while,
or part of me. And when I floated away I left a gift in her hand.
A little pearl.
Untitled
By Tadeusz Dąbrowski
This is verse one. This verse has no meaning.
And this is verse two, in which you’re no longer yourself,
i.e., you’re not the man from verse one,
and now you’re not even the one you were
in verse two and three, and four, or still
in verse five. This poem is life, I do everything
to be myself in every verse, to have each verse
miraculously bend my way, while you,
willy-nilly, must outlive this life, and in
the last verse, as close to the end as possible,
you must dare an opinion, the subject of which will be
you. You’ll survive only if you decide
this poem speaks about God. The last verse will arrive
yet much faster
than
Glass
by Michelle A. Galo
Life, I have let
the glass grow dirty
between myself and you.
Three Trees, Two Glasses, Two Chairs and One Small Table
By Mark DeFoe
There were two glasses and two chairs.
and two people with one pulse.
– Louis MacNeice
Near Grandpa’s three noble spruce, two chairs invite,
and we come, you in sun dress, me in shorts,
nonchalant in our summer skins.
This table is small, but most satisfactory.
Now is the time for tea or coffee,
For the cold swig of beer. For the yeasty,
Mellow hunks of a country cheese and slabs
Of herbal black bread. Around us gathers
A profundity of shade and sun,
Metaphysics of flitting swallowtails,
Darting hummingbirds, chittering sparrows.
And we send what seems real enough,
Our laughter, over rag-tag cosmos, pink and white,
Over dahlias, circus orange, passion peach. Against
The heaped clouds the swifts weave up another day.
Little bats paddle the pooling shadows.
The air grows heavy and fireflies spark. We look
Across the lawn to where the good dog is buried,
And cats wise and odd, and sundry creatures
Of someone’s heart. Time touches us, tickling
Like this cool grass. Far thunder mutters. A breeze
Insinuates another world, another dream.
We let the night come slow around us.
Here in our garden. Here in our two chairs.
Morning in Tunis
for Zweli and Katlego
by Keorapetse Kgositsile
Of the paradise and glory
Of the never-ending time
Of a place none can point at
No matter how many preachers are born
There will be no celebration of life
Except where memory collected and collective
From then now and then guides us
Now even though
My children have never known peace
I would like the children of the world
To see with their ear
And sing the sunrise in Tunis
It is heart-of-watermelon red
Mellow like an amber slice of moon
As it emerges from high rock and low cloud
Suspended near the bluesless sky
A spectre between nothing and nothing
Without a single ray of light
As if simply to say
Don’t you know the world is remarkable