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phillip crymble

@phillipcrymble.bsky.social

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 9h ago

Wendy Cope, with a poem of great tenderness

To My Husband

If we were never going to die, I might Not hug you quite as often or as tight, Or say goodbye to you as carefully If I were certain you'd come back to me. Perhaps I wouldn't value every day, Every act of kindness, every laugh As much, if I knew you and I could stay For ever as each other's other half. We may not have too many years before One disappears to the eternal yonder And I can't hug or touch you any more. Yes, of course that knowledge makes us fonder. Would I want to change things, if I could,
And make us both immortal? Love, I would.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · yesterday

James Tate

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into the chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there. Why don't you try writing something?”

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2d ago

Jane Kenyon

THE SICK WIFE

The sick wife stayed in the car while he bought a few groceries. Not yet fifty,
she had learned what it's like not to be able to button a button.
It was the middle of the day-
and so only mothers with small children or retired couples
stepped through the muddy parking lot.
Dry cleaning swung and gleamed on hangers in the cars of the prosperous.
How easily they moved—
with such freedom,
even the old and relatively infirm.
The windows began to steam up. The cars on either side of her pulled away so briskly
that it made her sick at heart.

-JANE KENYON

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 3d ago

Russell Edson

When Something is Broken

When something is broken, you cannot fix it. You have taken a hammer to it, but you cannot fix it. You have banged and banged, and still it is not fixed. You have tried to mend it with your tears, but they are not thick enough. You have tried again with the hammer, and broken it only further.
Was it then that the authority removed you from your difficulty and broke you in the house of understanding?
It is from the window, there with your back to the room, looking out that you know that tears cannot mend; no matter how intent or tender, tears are not enough...

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 4d ago

Marge Piercy

August

How long can all stand at impasse?
Not a ripple stirs the grass. The bee in thick air stalls. Breath clots in my throat.
No seed drifts down or petal falls. The sun embalms
in middle air a mote
static as a bubble trapped in glass. Silence parches into thirst. Out of these turgid calms
tornados burst.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 7d ago

Mary Karr for the win

REVENGE OF THE EX-MISTRESS

Dear X-
Finally met your wife
in Beef & Beer.
She hates it that you let me pierce your ear, and time you lost to me she guessed. Still, we fell in love. Please send her clothes to my address. Best
wishes, no regrets.
-Another X
-MARY KARR

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

Another poem by Dorianne Laux, this one in a different register

Dolly's Breasts

are singing
from the rafters of her chest, swaying beneath sheeny satin, suspended in the choreography of her bra: twin albino dolphins breaching from her ball gown's rhinestone cleavage. Her breasts are sisters praying at twilight, a pair of fat-cheeked Baptists dreaming of peaches, her nipples the color of autumn: two lonely amber eyes. When she shakes her metallic bodice, tinsel swimming up her pink fonts of nourishment, the spotlight hums and shimmies with them, the audience, open-mouthed, stunned into silence as she crosses her legs and bows,
her hair hanging down, a permed curl caught in that soft, improbable seam.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

Dorianne Laux

Romance

I know we made it up, like god.
But god it hurts. Like phantom pain
in a leg that's been taken, what's gone
throbs, aches. Nothing there
and still, the pain makes a shape.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

John Ashbery, born on this day in 1927

THE HERO

Whose face is this
So stiff against the blue trees,

Lifted to the future
Because there is no end?

But that has faded
Like flowers, like the first days

Of good conduct. Visit
The strong man. Pinch him--

There is no end to his
Dislike, the accurate one.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

A childhood reminiscence by Michael Longley who was born on this day in 1939

THE BRANCH

The artist in my father transformed the diagonal Crack across the mirror on our bathroom cabinet Into a branch: that was his way of mending things, A streak of brown paint, dabs of green, an accident That sprouted leaves,

awakening the child in me To the funny faces he pulls when he is shaving. He wears a vest, white buttons at his collarbone. The two halves of my father's face are joining up. His soapy nostrils disappear among the leaves.

--MICHAEL LONGLEY

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember Another John Ashbery poem, this one from Houseboat Days (1977)

Whether It Exists

All through the fifties and sixties the land tilted
Toward the bowl of life. Now life
Has moved in that direction. We taste the conviction Minus the rind, the pulp and the seeds. It
Goes down smoothly.

At a later date I added color
And the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember. Familiarly, but without tenderness, the sunset pours its Dance music on the (again) slanting barrens.
The problems we were speaking of move up toward them.

The Fiddlehead @fiddlehd.bsky.social · last wk.

Check this out if you are interested in the history of our Journal!

Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture@memoiresdulivre.bsky.social · 2w ago

Eli MacLaren reviews Tony Tremblay's "The Fiddlehead Moment: Pioneering an Alternative Canadian Modernism in New Brunswick", which examines the origins of "The Fiddlehead", the longest-running literary magazine in Canada. doi.org/10.7202/1126...

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

A poem by Virginia Hamilton Adair, who published her debut collection at the age of 83

REUNION BETWEEN PLANES

I'm the old school friend swooping out of the sky like a Halloween witch in my Hollywood shades and my stretchable wig and a girdle of groans. Since we shrieked our goodbyes in a shower of rice
my babies have grown beards been jailed and divorced. My husband the broker embezzled, absconded, is living abroad with a kennel of bitches. I remember your dad who fondled our bottoms your mom with her bottle she hid in the sofa.
My God, they were younger by decades than we are crossing into the dusk
of this terminal bar.

-VIRGINIA HAMILTON ADAIR

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · last wk.

At this point I just assume I'll be murdered by a robot. Takes a lot of the fun out of imagining the circumstances of one's demise.

Gregory Crosby@monostich.bsky.social · last wk.

Overheard, two teens on a stoop: “I just want to make robots, robots are the future!” “I don’t want you to kill yourself.” … “Robots are the FUTURE!” “Just don’t kill yourself.”

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

An uncollected poem by John Ashbery that first appeared in The Yale Review

Dream Overture

Saddled with understanding,
It takes some getting used to,
The little bar
In which two people sat
And talked and smoked together,
The thirties.

In the streets outside it was clean,
But cheap. Inside all was fair--
All the air
That can only be inside.
There are men in cowboy hats,
Children who want no attention,
And get none.

This is what understanding
Creates: the chorus.
And if it is meant all ways,
On certain days
Becomes thin and plain again,
Trim.

1985

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

Kay Ryan

A CAT/A FUTURE

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

--KAY RYAN

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry, anyway? Mark Strand

THE GREAT POET RETURNS
When the light poured down through a hole in the clouds, We knew the great poet was going to show. And he did. A limousine with all white tires and stained-glass windows Dropped him off. And then, with a clear and soundless fluency, He strode into the hall. There was a hush. His wings were big. The cut of his suit, the width of his tie were out of date. When he spoke, the air seemed whitened by imagined cries. The worm of desire bore into the heart of everyone there. There were tears in their eyes. The great one was better than ever. "No need to rush," he said at the close of the reading. "The end Of the world is only the end of the world as you know it." How like him, everyone thought. Then he was gone,
And the world was a blank. It was cold and the air was still. Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry, anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little?
-MARK STRAND

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

A heart-wrenching miniature by Aaiún Nin in the new issue of POETRY

In the Camp

In the camp, they cannot pronounce my name
So they have given me a new one
I have lost everything
Ask me my name
Please ask me my name

Irish Literary Times @irishlittimes.bsky.social · 2w ago

Another fine poem from @phillipcrymble.bsky.social

phillip crymble@phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

For Petrarch’s birthday, an Italian sonnet as it first appeared in Cake (UK).

Phillip Crymble

Threnody

Westbound on the highway from Chicago
and the traffic slows. Sunspots flare and fade behind the road crew, blurred mid-summer fields of wheat against the oats and beans. We know the world's too close to see - mixed grains grow in furrows that a plough-team might have made in eighteen-fifty. And the sunlight strays behind the fields, its threnody in gold and red so faint it's as a candle-end left burning in a settler's pan. Floodlights hum, illuminate the caution signs
in orange, shine fluorescent. And my friend, you know, I wonder why I waste my time - remind me what I must have done, or might.

Cake | 67

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

Wendell Berry

WOODS

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

Today's weather putting me in mind of this poem by David Berman

Community College in the Rain

Announcement: All pupils named Doug. Please come to the lounge on Concourse K.
Please join us for coffee and remarks.
Dougs: We cannot come. We are injured by golf cleats.
Announcement: Today we will discuss the energy in a wing and something about first basemen.
Ribs will be served in the cafeteria.
Pep Club: We will rally against golf cleats today. The rally will be held behind the gymnasium.
There is a Model T in the parking lot with its lights on.
Dougs: We are dying in the nurse's office.
When she passes before the window, she looks like a bride.
Karen (whispers): We are ranking the great shipwrecks.
Announcement: In the classroom filled with dishwater light,
Share your thoughts on public sculpture.
All: O Dougs, where are you?
Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.

John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 2w ago

Newish work in the latest Denver Quarterly (v.60 no.3), thanks to Jane Huffman, Ian Cappelli, et al. Here’s the opening three entries (of thirty-one) out of “Notes Written in October.” Part of a manuscript called “Notes for General Circulation.”

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

Weldon Kees

THE END OF THE LIBRARY

When the coal
Gave out, we began
Burning the books, one by one;
First the set
Of Bulwer-Lytton
And then the Walter Scott.
They gave a lot of warmth.
Toward the end, in
February, flames
Consumed the Greek Tragedians and Baudelaire, Proust, Robert Burton
And the Po-Chu-i. Ice Thickened on the sills. More for the sake of the cat, We said, than for ourselves, Who huddled, shivering, Against the stove
All winter long.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

For Petrarch’s birthday, an Italian sonnet as it first appeared in Cake (UK).

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2w ago

R.S. Thomas, for your day of rest

The Empty Church

They laid this stone trap
for him, enticing him with candles,
as though he would come like some huge moth
out of the darkness to beat there.
Ah, he had burned himself
before in the human flame
and escaped, leaving the reason torn. He will not come any more
to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still striking my prayers on a stone heart? Is it in hope one
of them will ignite yet and throw
on its illumined walls the shadow
of someone greater than I can understand?

R. S. THOMAS

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 3w ago

Linda Gregg

The Invention Of Writing

It is true, all things flake and flow. The breathing horse will disappear. But the trees do root and bear out. In its different way, memory holds what we are and what we have known. When I go into the water and swim, I feel the presence of my body walking back. When I go up on the hill for the stars and hear the sheep bells, they remain. This evening the dolphins jump dark from the shining of the ocean, hang in the air and are gone. But what interests me is that
they last such a long time after.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 3w ago

kinda quiet out there tonight

Quiet Nights

I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another.
Boat all fitted out,
tugging against its rope.

RAYMOND CARVER

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 3w ago

The opening passage of Charles Wright's Littlefoot (2007)

1

It may not be written in any book, but it is written-
You can't go back,
you can't repeat the unrepeatable.
No matter how fast you drive, or how hard the slide show Of memory flicks and releases,
It's always some other place,
some other car in the driveway,
Someone unrecognizable about to open the door.

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 3w ago

Robert Pinsky

ABC

Any body can die, evidently. Few Go happily, irradiating joy,
Knowledge, love. Most
Need oblivion, painkillers, Quickest respite.
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:
X = your zenith.

Sarah Wolfson @sarahwolfson.bsky.social · 3w ago

Pleased to have a new poem (my first abecedarian) in the summer 2026 issue of @nimrodjournal.bsky.social. Gratitude to Boris Dralyuk @bdralyuk.bsky.social for his fine editorial stewardship. Thanks also to my neighbours for giving away such whacky items online, which first inspired the poem.