charlie hensler

@chaswriter.bsky.social

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"Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you" - John Ashbery

large tide pool reflecting white clouds in a blue sky
Ars Poetica This is not a world where you can paint your black dog blue. But you can paint a blue dog on the back of Jim’s Hardware. Night blue, ten feet tall, sometimes a light in those windows for eyes.
Horses, Which Do Not Exist | Alberto Rios The strong horseshoe shape of a horse’s mouth Of his teeth, set that way of a suitcase handle And the way a bit, in just that way, pulls him: Come here to where it is I say. Like that A horse’s mouth, and so his manner, broken Those horses no longer running along the far Distance visible from a Tucson highway thirsty Stopping for water, making one of those paintings Living rooms wear as pendants. Those paintings Too unreal, laughed at and finger-poked
Vivarium | Jenny George Some people collect dirt from significant places. Or spoonfuls of cloudy ocean inside jars. Like amateur naturalists, they keep these treasures permanently on a shelf. Of course an amateur is simply a person who loves, who brings love to bear on a particular subject. Returning from one trip I failed to bring back a jar of anything. I stood outside my house where white stitches of snow were dissolving into the ground beneath the evergreens. An unset moon floated over the trees. If I stand very still, I do no further harm. I am a tiny theater of non-harming. My breath watches raptly. Sees how everything is still alive.
Suburban Dusk | Bert Meyers One girl in a red dress leaves the shopping center with empty hands: and you believe in the future—you've seen a drop of blood flee from the luminous cells of a corpse. But the sky slips a coin in the slot between two buildings. Lights go on. Distorted creatures appear. A car, like an angry heart, explodes. And a vast erysipelas spreads over the hills. What can you do? Each night, the city becomes a butterfly, trembling in its oil.
Poem With Tulips, Bowl, And Frisbee This arrangement. Photos arrive, vanish. The red tulips. Because you looked, collapsed. As if the room collects every word: a blue bowl. Must each word embrace the one before until silence arrives? Its large velvet hands. The street. From here. To the park. The frisbee. The dog. The frisbee soaring out of its plastic halcyon heyday arriving yellow as the sun in summer.
Last Journal | Charles Wright Out of our own mouths we are sentenced, we who put our trust in visible things. Soon enough we will forget the world. And soon enough the world will forget us. The breath of our lives, passing from this one to that one, Is what the wind says, its single word being the earth’s delight. Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our own mouths we are sentenced…
Photo of beach and pools of receding tidal waters, the sun and feathery clouds above.
In the Grove: The Poet at Ten | Jane Kenyon She lay on her back in the timothy and gazed past the doddering auburn heads of sumac. A cloud—huge, calm, and dignified—covered the sun but did not, could not, put it out. The light surged back again. Nothing could rouse her then from that joy so violent it was hard to distinguish from pain.
Vetiver | John Ashbery Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet. It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar Palaces and also lines of care At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks, The color once known as "ashes of roses." How many snakes and lizards shed their skins For time to be passing on like this, Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now, Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand As a change is voiced, sharp As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed Past us into a basin called infinity.
Uche Nduka A Green Dream Winter frock marigold robe between brownstones where yearning confesses its nature when the mail makes you happy even when this circle begs to be part of a square it’s madness to hate the visitation of grackles
The Sensual World | Louise Glück I call to you across a monstrous river or chasm to caution you, to prepare you. Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly, subtly, not to say with connivance. I was not prepared: I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen, holding out my glass. Stewed plums, stewed apricots– the juice poured off into the glass of ice. And the water added, patiently, in small increments, the various cousins discriminating, tasting with each addition– aroma of summer fruit, intensity of concentration: the colored liquid turning gradually lighter, more radiant, more light passing through it. Delight, then solace. My grandmother waiting, to see if more was wanted. Solace, then deep immersion. I loved nothing more: deep privacy of the sensual life,
Nowhere To Hang My Hat Let the day tick—a clock, a string drawn taut beneath a bow. I’ve hauled my husk to the shore of this white, wide page again. Out of the sky, over the lake an airplane falls—small, silver, a samara spiraling into a blue mirror. And tonight, the night will wear your captain’s hat high in the bare-branched maple.
photo of a trail in the woods. a leaning alder. sun through the trees.
late fall foliage in the pacific northwest
photograph of a line of smaller maples, across a green park lawn, under a partly cloudy fall sky
Passing | Victoria Chang Someone said, at first we want romance, then for life to be bearable, at last, understandable. I am frightened, now that the trees look like question marks, how the moon makes strange noises but it’s daytime. Bells have begun to notice me.
Ghost In the late, tilted hours I can find you sitting in a derelict sedan hood in the blackberries, last sun slanting through the dusty glass. I did not choose my absences you will tell me—the days became a parade of ghosts, one introducing the next— one made of tattered newspaper, another colored shapes gliding behind beaded glass. Such presence—you can’t imagine you will say, folding back into your blue silence, lighting a cigarette though you never smoked.
The Music Lover The adagio was the shadowed street deep in the neighborhood, unnamed, a window open on the green afternoon. No one walked there. No one came. When she did, she stepped into a wind, a lush crescendo and looked, looked back again— disappeared in the sudden arms of violins.
Matins | Louise Glück You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?
Fireplace scene from The Big Lebowski. Mr. Lebowski sits dejected before the fire, questioning his life in light of the kidnapping of his wife, while The Dude smokes a jay, all to Mozart's Requiem.
Close up of a vibrant red dahlia bloom.
To A Reader | Robert Hass I’ve watched memory wound you. I felt nothing but envy. Having slept in wet meadows, I was not through desiring. Imagine January and the beach, a bleached sky, gulls. And look seaward: what is not there is there, isn’t it, the huge bird of the first light arched above first waters beyond our touching or intention or the reasonable shore.
Suddenly Autumn, And The Light We have come down from summer pockets empty. The sun tilts low again and the rhododendrons follow, gray-green and chromatic. The boulevard crows, wings folded, contemplate the long shadow just clinging to their tree. How the festival goers have become the color of late grasses and leaves, the balloons gone in the particle wind. Even now the towers are calmly sealed, the disappeared behind the blue glass, heads bent, reflecting. See how the sun skips off the lake, its platinum sheen. Cool in your hand the smooth, flat stone you found at summer’s graveled edge, and kept. - Charles Hensler
The Resemblance Between Your Life And A Dog | Robert Bly I never intended to have this life, believe me— It just happened. You know how dogs turn up At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain. It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice Your face has become deranged trying to adjust To it. Your face thought your life would look Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten. That was a clear river touched by mountain wind. Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed. Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers, Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee. You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you, But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow. Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles, Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.
“He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freer …” John Berryman He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freer than Henry, hovers. Something is being made or is a something⁠—⁠Henry no seer⁠— he may go into that line⁠—unmade being? Now Henry too is drifting away black.
Image from the movie Phoenician Scheme, directed by Wes Anderson. A bathroom from above, with Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) in the bathtub, with breakfast and a book, a phonograph nearby, a bottle of champagne(?) on ice in the bidet.
A sunny deck with potted plantings, crossed legs i. the foreground.
Elegy | Aracelis Girmay What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things.
Describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem. The poem engages all of the traditional and founding patterns of poetry: the tragic pattern (all verbal meaning grows in opposite ratio to breath, at the expense of breathing); the spiral (verse turns and turns, creating a spiral, a nautical chamber that is God-bearing, or God-revealing, since the Fibonacci spiral, present in all things, is the fingerprint of God); syntax (sentence pattern); the structure of definitions, which requires that the Word never appear in the definitions of the Word (the pattern of True Love).
A lush hillside full of pink and white foxglove.
A bright pink peony in full bloom.
A picture of “My Heresies” by Alina Stefanescu, which has arrived in the mail.
Backyard | Alice Notley The cat’s eye marble is green. One sandal. Shade. If I were a girl from the Sagamon River, or if I am. I then turned to the page called Free. The wind in my hair & the church in my head & the reticence of. No I haven’t been waiting. Expression of engine of an intimate clime It must still be love which I talk. But you see. Shaky as pale lavender ones. High talk to cure an old tired fear. There’s an old plastic coffee cup in the forest of the lemon tree. But what I mean is. White oleanders in sky attached to leaves. If you love me, all of nature, let the wind blow.
Photograph of barred owl perched in a tree, staring intently at the camera. Its feathers are white and grey/brown.
A cormorant on a pier, wings extended.
To A Reader | Robert Hass I’ve watched memory wound you. I felt nothing but envy. Having slept in wet meadows, I was not through desiring. Imagine January and the beach, a bleached sky, gulls. And look seaward: what is not there is there, isn’t it, the huge bird of the first light arched above first waters beyond our touching or intention or the reasonable shore.
A bird nest in a bike helmet hanging on a wall.
Eye | Beckian Fritz Goldberg It was not by accident the eye was attracted to the water, the eater of doubles: the good cattail and the bad cattail, one rising from the other like the memory—the gnat and the gnat, the sycamore reaching up to heaven and the sycamore hanging down to that heaven…So the dizziness that beauty is, losing is. And with this bark-colored eye, this eye that was a father's and a mother's, I drank back the helpless world—the one that is all body, not spirit, not a bit—that is silt, sex, and germ and the Temple of Being Beside. I was young beside you, water, and my father and I were on your face, there were willows, and this was in early summer or at least it has become early summer, that double of once.
The Bark | Mary Ruefle I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water's edge and barked, the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.
Fruit | Adam Zagajewski —for Czeslaw Milosz How unattainable life is, it only reveals its features in memory, in nonexistence. How unattainable afternoons, ripe, tumultuous, leaves bursting with sap; swollen fruit, the rustling silks of women who pass on the other side of the street, and the shouts of boys leaving school. Unattainable. The simplest apple inscrutable, round. The crowns of trees shake in warm currents of air. Unattainably distant mountains. Intangible rainbows. Huge cliffs of clouds flowing slowly through the sky. The sumptuous, unattainable afternoon. My life, swirling, unattainable, free. Translated by Renata Gorczyńska and C. K. Williams
A large field of bright yellow daffodils in long rows under clouds and blue sky
Of Disappearances I held you, an inch of broken bone against the sun, called as a bird is called to the pane. There is no more than this frame of blue, a little snow that fell on the wrong side of the window, all tinsel, made of rain, a watermark evaporating from a polished sill, your box of parts scattered to tide, or cloud, or wash of the moon (did you choose?), the rest left here beneath the sun, unfolding now as a shadow unfolds in a sunlit room, growing still, still attached to you.
I Dreamed I Gave The Last Poetry Reading And my words, as they entered the air, became laughter, and rose with the crowd’s laughter, until the room gave in to laughing— a bottomless laughter, a sea of laughter driven by helpless relief, as if all we could know, all we could say shook free from the struggle, the grip of words, as if the tangle-kneed, many voiced beast who crowded our door, unappeased, had departed. At first, a silence; then, a breeze.
The Problem of Anxiety | John Ashbery Fifty years have passed since I started living in those dark towns I was telling you about. Well, not much has changed. I still can’t figure out how to get from the post office to the swings in the park. Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction, and my hair is the color of dandelion fluff. Suppose this poem were about you—would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily people behave toward each other? Naw, that’s all in some book it seems. For you I’ve saved the descriptions of chicken sandwiches, and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
Quote by Mark Strand: Poetry is language performing at its most beguiling and seductive while being, at the same time, elusive, even seeming to mock one’s desire for reduction, for plain and available order. It is not just that various meanings are preferable to a single dominant meaning; it may be that something beyond “meaning” is being communicated, something that originated not with the poet but in the first dim light of language, in some period of “beforeness.”
Encounter | Czeslaw Milosz We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
A quote by Louise Gluck: The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.
Quote by A.R. Ammons: Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
White Box A sound of gray wind and traffic floods the park, arriving at my feet in an empty white box. A little heavy, not too large—I carry it into the evening street where behind the rain the windshields are going dark.
The Geese, by Lisa Russ Spaar Just as God is not my sorrow, neither does this prow above our gable where a love has died owe me any more than life has promised us an ending. Though it has. Is it true the sadder we are, the more things stand still? Rudder of dusk, perhaps this love of shape betrays my taste for death. Even more, I love their going—pioneers— beyond my knowing.
Broom | Jim Harrison To remember you’re alive visit the cemetery of your father at noon after you’ve made love and are still wrapped in a mammalian odor that you are forced to cherish. Under each stone is someone’s inevitable surprise, the unexpected death of their biology that struggled hard, as it must. Now to home without looking back, enough is enough. En route buy the best wine you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms. Have a few swallows then throw the furniture out the window and begin sweeping. Sweep until the walls are bare of paint and at your feet sweep until the floor disappears. Finish the wine in this field of air, return to the cemetery in evening and wind through the stones a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.
A photo of the cover of Epiphany Lit's fall/winter issue, 2024. Entitled "Wonder". The collage art work (greens, oranges, collage) - depicts a gently smiling woman.
Trust Fall Two tail lights arc across a desert, through a city, through a wave of voices from an infinite stadium announcing the next to fall, to fail, next to exit into the the glittering dark, the swerve of broken glass to a house, a home, the lamp light low under the night shoulders of a star heavy roof an architecture of enameled affections, the hushed machinery of need, haunt of the small bright thing, nearly forgotten— how once we knew how to fall backward into the salt blue arms of the sea.
A Room in the Past | Ted Kooser It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill with a morning light so bright you can’t see beyond its windows into the afternoon. A kitchen falling through time with its things in their places, the dishes jingling up in the cupboard, the bucket of drinking water rippled as if a truck had just gone past, but that truck was thirty years. No one’s at home in this room. Its counter is wiped, and the dishrag hangs from its nail, a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist, blue aprons of rain, my grandmother moved through this life like a ghost, and when she had finished her years, she put them all back in their places and wiped out the sink, turning her back on the rest of us, forever.
Mouth Slightly Open | Robert Hass The body a yellow brilliance and a head Some orange color from a Chinese painting Dipped in sunset by the summer gods Who are also producing that twitchy shiver In the cottonwoods, less wind than river, Where the bird you thought you saw Was, whether you believe what you thought You saw or not, and then was not, had Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness That hums a little in you now, and is not bad Or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear. The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here.
Chronicles on Disappearance | Shangyang Fang There are seven sadnesses that don’t belong to men. Seven cicadas make one motorcycle, testing its engine in the dark. Everyone lugs their sorrow in their boots. Everyone a half-open kitchen window, with souls sultry as boiled meat. Invalid are all objects, closed to sorrow. Don’t wake them up. Don’t look, so that they let you (me) be your (my) self. After all, our eyelids, another empress of a tyrannic dawn. In this country, go to the grocery store in the carcass of a pickup, return with carnivals. In another land, the windshield wipers are lashes of a monk, lulling the world into one scarlet-dusted reverie. On some evenings, above the Three Gorges cliffs, the monkeys fold their arms, rocking gently in the rain. Identical to stones.
Ode to My Husband’s Lego Garden by Bethany Jarmul O, garden of plastic petals, of pink frogs-turned -blossoms, of grape-shaped leaves, of tentacle-vines & reflective purple pearls—brick-by-brick you build my smile when I pass with a heavy hamper of toddler -peed sheets & bloodied shorts. O, orchid, your sentient sister in danger on our kitchen island—dry dirt, beheaded blossoms, leaves browning—but your leaves & petals shine like my husband’s bald head finally surfaced from seawater. O, bonsai tree, my husband is your Mother Nature—changing your colors by season. You’ve no snow -coated leaves. No frozen roads, no loved ones lost to black ice, car wrecks, blizzards or frostbite. O, astridia & lotus blossom. O, burro’s tail & spider plant. O, purple pearl & pink moon cactus—praise your plastic permanence! Even starved or drowned, bat-smashed or car-crashed, even torn to bits, even so: instructions for resurrection.
Museum of the Thing | Karen Solie Sad storm of objects becoming things, the objective correlative, tired of me as I am of it. I embody everything it hates about itself. People don’t stand in for each other the way things do. Someone for whom Wednesday means groceries might animate Wednesday with, among other realities, the inability to possess it, as one might a derelict potato-chip factory co-opted to ventriloquize one’s state of mind. It’s impossible to really know what a trip to the Real Canadian Superstore