Henri Cole
Henri Cole Poems
Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,
with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.
Pause, I thought, say something true: It was night,
I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,
...
This well-used little bag is just the right size
to carry a copy of the Psalms. Its plain-woven
flowers and helicopter share the sky with bombs
...
The pony and the deer are trapped by tanks,
and the lady with the guitar is sad beyond words.
Hurtling across the sky, a missile has mistaken
...
A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
Coleridge, "The Three Graves"
...
[Nara Deer Park]
With my head on his spotted back
and his head on the grass—a little bored
...
My father lived in a dirty dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,
...
First I saw the round bill, like a bud;
then the sooty crested head, with avernal eyes
flickering, distressed, then the peculiar
long neck wrapping and unwrapping itself,
...
I found a baby shark on the beach.
Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.
Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.
The ocean had scraped his insides clean.
...
Tired, hungry, hot, I climbed the steep slope
to town, a sultry, watery place, crawling with insects
and birds.
In the semidarkness of the mountain,
...
I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run away
...
It is the hour of lamps.
On our knees my mother
and I, still young, color
with crayons threadbare nap
...
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
'I don't belong to nobody,' Yang insists vulgarly.
'Yang,' I reply, 'you don't know nothing.'
...
Dusty and treeless, the street sloped beneath us.
Somewhere a hammer made thunderclaps,
forging the night-sky.
...
After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
...
Born, I was born.
Tears represent how much my mother loves me,
shivering and steaming like a horse in rain.
...
There's a black bear
in the apple tree
and he won't come down.
I can hear him panting,
...
Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,
how can He love me and hate what I am?
The dome of St. Peter's shone yellowish
...
Henri Cole Biography
Born in Fukuoka, Japan, and raised in Virginia, poet Henri Cole grew up in a household where French, Armenian, and English were spoken. He earned a BA at the College of William and Mary, an MA at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and an MFA at Columbia University. In an essay on the influence of Hart Crane’s poetry on his own early development as a poet, Cole speculates on the possibility that “the pain of unsanctioned love […] was enabling to him as a poet, that an absence in life helped him to find a presence in art. Perhaps, I sometimes rationalize, the ecstasy of sexual love is not so different from the near religious fervor of creating, or rather assembling language into poetry.” Cole’s poems explore the intersection of the domestic and the ecstatic, with language that both chafes against and sings toward its source in the body. Notes critic Maureen N. McLane in a review of Middle Earth for the New York Times, “In Cole's hands [simile] becomes a dazzling figure for the self that is not identical to itself, the always self-estranged subject, the self amazed by its origins, the distances it has traveled, the desires it has fed, the death it always faces.” Cole is the author of numerous collections, including Touch: Poems (2011), LA Times Book Prize finalist Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems 1982-2007 (2010), Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner Blackbird and Wolf (2007), and Pulitzer Prize finalist and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Middle Earth (2003). He has also collaborated with visual artists Jenny Holzer and Kiki Smith. Cole has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Carmargo Foundation. From 1982 to 1988 he served as the executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Cole has taught at Ohio State University, Harvard University, and Yale University. He lives in Boston.)
The Best Poem Of Henri Cole
Poppies
Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,
with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.
Pause, I thought, say something true: It was night,
I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,
but all the water in them had been replaced
with embalming compound. So I was angry.
I loved the poppies, with their wide-open faces,
how they carried themselves, beckoning to me
instead of pushing away. The way in and the way out
are the same, essentially: emotions disrupting thought,
proximity to God, the pain of separation.
I loved the poppies, with their effortless existence,
like grief and fate, but tempered and formalized.
Your hair was black and curly; I combed it.
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