Tonight I'm to occupy a single breath:
to let it slowly out as an open kettle might
release its steam, left long on the stove.
Eventually all substance turns to vapor

& accumulates in the air, then falls
again as a globe under its own weight.
Bodies must be near each other, it seems,
even when the...Read more

My tail of colored feathers
hangs matted
closed behind me

It weighs me down

In this wet darkness
I can neither
dance nor fly

This darkness
weighs me down

No one here
to see my splendor

My only company
the relentless rain

...Read more

How to read a tome of Collected Poems?
Read one that pivotally changes you
and lose track of the page and title.
How to clean a house? Lose your ring in it.

Milosz not having to make peace one day
because the people are dead, nor revisit
some cities of his blood, because they are
razed. I'm still ...Read more

It is the people who remember,
but when the people are gone
we won't have anyone to remember.
People go to a lot of trouble
to make things memorable.
I would like to make things enjoyable
by watching everyone,
and wondering what is going on.
Today I am as full of this day
as the air in this ...Read more

But really
I would prefer
to sit, drink water,
reread some Russians
a while longer
-a luxury
perhaps, but why
should I, anyone,
call it that, why
should reading
what I want,
in a well-hydrated fashion,
always be what I'm
planning to finally
do, like hiking
...Read more

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,-a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
...Read more

The five old bells
Are hurrying and eagerly calling,
Imploring, protesting
They know, but clamorously falling
Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,
Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping
In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.

The silver moon
That somebody ...Read more

seems like a good way to say
I spent all last week feeling helpless
and talking about it in terms of not being

Why can't compassion change our lives
even half so completely as a suicide bomber,
or half so immediately as a natural disaster

Big ideas get me nowhere, so
the fact that breaking ...Read more

Mice drink the rainwater before dying by
the poison we set in the cupboard for them.
They come for the birdseed, and winter
is so grey here the sight of a single cardinal
can keep us warm for days. We'll justify
anything-and by we, I mean I, and by
I, I mean we, with our man-is-the-only-
animal-who and ...Read more

My closest friend emigrated West, petrified
To hop a jet back home; I exist in an equally isolated
East where fish are oblivious to their own
Water, where one loon separates from its flock.

Wind's kiteless. Names of friends drift away but acquaintances

Remain vivid. What benefit remedy when no symptoms...Read more

We decided I
should go alone
on foot. I

would find
him in
the pharmacy. If

he said 'In
the head of
God all propositions

have existed
always,' we would make
the exchange.

He was standing
in front of the
calamine lotion.

He ...Read more

Do strangers make you human
Science fiction visiting bodies as cold fact
What unknown numbers govern our genes or phones

A constant thrum from outer space

Snow makes a sound in sand

You are seen from far far above

Unheard and vanished

bodies dismember to dirt

...Read more

Only a dad with a tired face,
Coming home from the daily race,
Bringing little of gold or fame,
To show how well he has played the game,
But glad in his heart that his own rejoice
To see him come and to hear his voice.

Only a dad with a brood of four,
One of ten million men or more.
Plodding...Read more

What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant; and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
The old delight is with us but to find
That all recurring joy is pain refined,
Become a habit, ...Read more

And leave shows in shambles, viewers bereft,
And characters to death or surgery,
So do I move beyond my yesterdays
Into a new life, an acropolis
So perfect it seems built to be ruined.
Like a swimming pool at noon in summer
The future waits coolly to be entered,
But disturbances of satisfaction
Can...Read more

I walked to the end of the pier
and threw your name into the sea,
and when you flew back to me-
a silver fish-I devoured you,
cleaned you to the bone. I was through.
But then you came back again:
as sun on water. I reached for you,
skimmed my hands over the light of you.
And when the sky darkened, ...Read more

When everyone was granted their childhood
wish for invisibility, it turned out
to be less erotically useful than we all
had imagined. Since then the first

legitimately wild idea I had I tamed
and named Thom Yorke, after a pony

who'd clomped among the precincts
of my visible youth, refusing ...Read more

I could complain. I've done it before.
I could explain. I could say, for instance, that
I'm sick of being slaughtered in my life's mountain passes,
covering my own long retreat,
the rear guard of my own brutal defeat-
dysentery and frostbite and snipers,
the mules freezing to death,
blizzards whipping ...Read more

After Robert Rauschenberg's "Bed,"
oil and pencil markings on pillow, quilt, and sheet, 1955
So garish: the arc of his interior
thinking. So red,

so deceptive. The coordinates of this project fall
between sheets and box spring:

the command of horizontal passage.
The bed soaked

...Read more

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

About this poem
"A Man Said to the Universe" was published in "War Is Kind" (Frederick A. Stokes, 1899).

About Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was born in ...Read more