The Wall

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words “I have something to tell you,” a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Brian Doyle, writer, “Joyas Voladuras”

————————– Remember this. http://lifeinshort.com

Snakecharmer

Before you begin, please read this comment, and heed its advice. by Sylvia Plath

As the gods began one world, and man another, So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere With moon-eye, mouth-pipe. He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings. And as his notes twine green, the green river

Shapes its images around his songs. He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks, No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues

Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes, Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes

Is visible. The snake-scales have become Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom

Rules the writhings which make manifest His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes From his thin pipe. Out of this green nest

As out of Eden’s navel twist the lines Of snaky generations: let there be snakes! And snakes there were, are, will be—till yawns

Consume this piper and he tires of music And pipes the world back to the simple fabric Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes

To a melting of green waters, till no snake Shows its head, and those green waters back to Water, to green, to nothing like a snake. Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.

Lay Back the Darkness

by Edward Hirsch

My father in the night shuffling from room to room on an obscure mission through the hallway.

Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream and ease his restless passage.

Lay back the darkness for a salesman who could charm everything but the shadows,

an immigrant who stands on the threshold of a vast night

without his walker or his cane and cannot remember what he meant to say,

though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy, while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room is no longer a father or a husband or a son,

but a boy standing on the edge of a forest listening to the distant cry of wolves,

to wild dogs, to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.