Kindness, Joseph Lease

Kindness

*

When the soul opens  

There will be a cheap hotel  

Someone yelling  

The first snow and wrapping paper

*

I was in houses, cold, strange houses, gray
morning, just empty—broken door, broken
door, broken wall, broken

dawn—

            just empty—

*

Right there—stone and glass shine—answer, answer, yes—oxygen makes fire brighten—brilliant water, stick your hand in—nothing  ends, do you believe me—no, in waves you  must paint, from plenty to nightmare—Tuesday he’ll be dead a year—tonight, tonight—and morning comes—dead face, open mouth—dead face, open mouth—buried in snow—

*

no—

paint—

plenty to nightmare—

brightness

—no—paint angel—

flesh

  —paint—

so

 willows

            so

 lost

*

We

Are

Running

Out of

Eyes

*

just 

     squeeze 

daylight 

     from your

finger—

     just 

spill 

     lifetimes 

on the

     floor

*

so

     willows

so

     lost

so 

     open

so

     long

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease’s poems “’Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition). "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.

Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”

Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.