My Time in Hanoi by Sean Singer

Outside the threshold, kneeling full of dust
Hanoi sprouts in the salt. Its leafy barbs
are the lingual equivalency of a vu quang ox
sucking a river. Honey jars & bear
gall bladders hang in a shop window.

A childless couple visits the Perfume Pagoda
to douse their wick. Where the cyclo descends
into the sea, a dragon unfurls her muscular canoe.

Hanoi trades me 11,000 dong if I do a little
monkey dance. At the moment I’m supposed
to twirl & jig-a-jug, a typhoon crashes through
the thatched wall, a seedblown bloodlamp singing:

Em oi / doi khong co em / Nhu pho / khong co nuoc leo:
O my beloved / life without you is like / pho without its broth.

A Cradle Song by William Butler Yeats

The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:
I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,	5
And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.
Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;
Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;
Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat
The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;	10
O heart the winds have shaken; the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles before Maurya’s feet.

Dawn Air by Vicente Huidobro

My soul's above the sea and whistling a dream
Tell the shepherds the wind is saddling its horse
And waving as it leaves in the pride of its youth
I love a woman proud and dreamlike
Silent stepping out from the center
Shepherds know that you should watch me
And watch your dreams and watch your songs
And the dance of the waves
Like the joy of their pride and beauty

Ah sky blue for the queen in the wind
Ah herd of goats and white hair
Lips of praise and red hair
Animals lost in her eyes
Speak to the skeleton combing its hair
From the tip of the earth to the end of the ages
Tunic and scepter
Amplification of memories
Sound of insects and highways
Speak of the land as the ocean flows
Ah the wind
The wind stops for the queen who steps out from her sky

Hidden and Wrinkled by Arthur Rimbaud

Hidden and wrinkled like a budding violet
It breathes, gently worn out, in a tangled vine
(Still damp with love), on the soft incline
Of white buttocks to rim of the pit.

Thin streams like rivers of milk; innocent
Tears, shed beneath hot breath that drives them down
Across small clots of rich soil, reddish brown,
Where they lose themselves in the dark descent...

My mouth always dribbles with its coupling force;
My soul, jealous of the body's intercourse,
Makes it tearful, wild necessity.

Ecstatic olive branch, the flute one blows,
The tube where heavenly praline flows,
Promised Land in sticky femininity.

Exotic Perfume by Charles Baudelaire

When, on an autumn evening, with closed eyes,
I breathe the warm dark fragrance of your breast,
Before me blissful shores unfold, caressed
By dazzling fires from blue Unchanging skies.

And there, upon the calm and drowsing isle,
Grow luscious fruits amid fantastic trees :
There, men are light : the women of those seas
Amaze one with their gaze that knows no guile.

Your perfume wafts me thither like a wind :
I see a harbour thronged with masts and sails
Soil weary from the tumult of the gales;

And with the sailors' song that drifts to me
Are mingled odours of the tamarind,
--And all my soul is scent and melody.

To Atthis by Sappho

Though in Sardis now,
she thinks of us constantly

and of the life we shared.
She saw you as a goddess
and above all your dancing gave her deep joy.

Now she shines among Lydian women like
the rose-fingered moon
rising after sundown, erasing all

stars around her, and pouring light equally
across the salt sea
and over densely flowered fields

lucent under dew. Her light spreads
on roses and tender thyme
and the blooming honey-lotus.

Often while she wanders she remem-
bers you, gentle Atthis,
and desire eats away at her heart

for us to come.

Crow by Shinkichi Takahashi

The crow, spreading wide wings,
Flapped lazily off.
Soon her young will be doing the same,
Firm wings rustling.

It's hard to tell the male
Crow from the female,
But their love, their mating
Must be fresh as their flight.

Asleep in a night train,
I felt my hat fly off.
The crow was lost in mist,
The engine ploughed into the sea.

Lightning at Rest by Octavio Paz

Sprawled out,
stone made of noon,
half-open eyes in which whiteness becomes blue,
half-ready smile.
Your body rouses; you shake your lion's mane.
Again lying down,
a fine striation of lava in the rock,
a sleeping ray of light.
While you sleep I stroke and polish you,
slim axe,
arrow with whom I set the night on fire.

The sea fighting in the distance with its swords and feathers.

Children of Light by Robert Lowell

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones; Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland, Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night, They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light; And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock The riotous glass houses built on rock, And candles gutter by an empty altar, And light is where the landless blood of Cain Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

I've Never Had it Done So Gently Before by Richard Brautigan

The sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
I’ve never had it done so gently before.
You have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.

(On looking into a deep valley) by Issa

On hands and knees on
a shaky bridge: a cuckoo
cries far below

Summer's first melon
lies firmly hugged to the breast
of a sleeping child

Minstrels by William Wordsworth

The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.

And who but listened?—till was paid
Respect to every inmate’s claim,
The greeting given, the music played
In honour of each household name,
Duly pronounced with lusty call,
And “Merry Christmas” wished to all.

Song (Go And Catch A Falling Star) by John Donne

Go and catch a falling star,
 Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
 Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
       And find
       What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be’st born to strange sights,
 Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
 Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
       And swear
       No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find’st one, let me know;
 Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
 Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,
       Yet she
       Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.

Snakecharmer 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.

The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean by Robinson Jeffers

Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.

The old monster snuffled, "Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.

"The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.

"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.