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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 2h

Winter is coming, folks W.S. Merwin, born on this day in 1927

W. S. Merwin
DUSK IN WINTER

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
goes down believing in nothing
When it has gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i stand up / through your destruction / i stand up Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton

MISS ROSIE

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Again and again the leaves / enact their beauty Marianne Boruch

Over the Twilight Street

Fall. And the boys are cold, without jackets the football their milkweed pod
bursting over the twilight street. They jump and release themselves, crying
like birds. Hours from the morning fog
the air is chilled good water
taken from a stream
with a cupped hand. They can barely keep themselves inside their bodies, vivid as light
through leaves, though now the leaves
have their own lifetime to consider
pressing back
into trance: a red brilliance
which listens for no one, an iridescence too complete to translate. I bike by them the football spinning above me,
a blurred planet. Boys who will be men, boys who will be taken by surprise by failure. Again and again the leaves enact their beauty.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?" The sign on the wall in the Time Safari office at the end of Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952)

TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

you hear the word loaded / and a sensory constellation / is lit The Thomas Lux poem I keep coming back to

THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard.
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice.
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer wrote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally--some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirrr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows...
And "barn" is only a noun--no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.

--THOMAS LUX

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Ian LeTourneau @ianletourneau.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Tonight! Don't forget to sign up to receive the link!

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Kim Fahner @kimfahner.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It’s just so lovely to see so many writer friends and colleagues here in The Fiddlehead’s latest edition, a special issue titled Disability: The Revolution. Kudos to The Fiddlehead & to the editors of this special edition—Amanda Leduc, Reese Es, phillip crymble, Christine Wu, Grace R. Taylor. ❤️✨✍️📚

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Looking forward to hosting this virtual launch tomorrow. Don't forget to register. Hope to see you then!

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky Anne Carson

FATHER'S OLD BLUE CARDIGAN

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face--
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A poem for the equinox by Elizabeth Bishop as it first appeared in The New Yorker 70 years ago this month. This one hits a little different if you've spent time in Bishop's childhood home.

SESTINA

September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house were both foretold by the almanac, but only known to a grandmother. The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house. Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the heartless almanac
on its string. Like a bird, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears. She shivers and says she thinks the house feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove. It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. I know what I know, says the almanac. With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

-ELIZABETH BISHOP

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The epigraph to Kim Addonizio's Now We're Getting Somewhere (2021)

Everybody knows the captain lied.

-- Leonard Cohen

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A Poem from my 2016 collection Not Even Laughter featuring Leonard Cohen, who was born on this day in 1934.

Music for Airports

Up late drinking Polish lager, pulling records
out of Mylar sleeves, stoned on medical sativa,
cuing tracks by Johnny Cash, The Fall, and Nico

on your second-hand Technics. While the D3s kicked
out Jackson, Pay your Rates, The End, and English
Scheme, you chain-smoked Dunhills -- browsed.

the plywood shelves for doubles, poked through
Sealtest crates. One Sunday two years later,
searching listlessly for Astral Weeks, I find the pile

of ring worn albums that you gave to me to keep--
Hot Buttered Soul, a James Last import, Space Age
percussion suites for hi-fis, Brian Eno's landmark

foray into soundscapes, its water-damaged cover
stained and wrinkled -- the disc inside like Leonard
Cohen's shy one -- unplayed and still pristine.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Why do you worry so, / when none of us is spared? Jill Bialosky

ANOTHER LOSS TO STOP FOR

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,

to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

--JILL BIALOSKY

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Derek Pollard, PhD @doc-pollard.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Long before I became Series Editor, the Poets on Poetry Series taught me about inquiry and craft. What an honor, then, that two of our books were nominated for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the @poetry.foundation. Congratulations, @philipmetres.bsky.social and Jason Schneiderman.

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Gregory Crosby @monostich.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Oh, right: "Batman day." Here's my elegy for Adam West, from my first book.

Meanwhile, at Stately Wayne Manor

Adam West (1928-2017)

If life’s a cabaret, old chum, it’s also
a circus: the only question is
fishnets or tights. We have our roles to play,
masks to don, poles to slide down, into
costumes that fit us like a blueblack gloves.
Amidst all our disguises, our voices
betray us, but no one seems to mind;
if you show me your Utility Belt,
I’ll show you mine. After all, who needs
one Catwoman when you can have three?
This life’s an embarrassment of riches,
but we feel no shame (no shame, no gain).
Down in the Batcave, we’re bright with the grace
that zaps villains & pulls tongues out of cheeks
with a pun, a knowing wink. That’s our kink:
Holy Happiness! It’s as if our parents
were never gunned down in the first place.
The good, bright fight we fight goes on, same
Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel. Goodnight, chum.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Simon Armitage's boy wonder throwing shade to close out Batman Day

Kid

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order to grow up, then let me loose to wander leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather, in the gutter... well, I turned the corner. Now I've scotched that 'he was like a father to me' rumour, sacked it, blown the cover on that 'he was like an elder brother' story, let the cat out on that caper
with the married woman, how you took her downtown on expenses in the motor. Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker! Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover, I'm not playing ball boy any longer Batman, now I've doffed that off-the-shoulder Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper; now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older. Batman, it makes a marvellous picture: you without a shadow, stewing over chicken giblets in the pressure cooker, next to nothing in the walk-in larder, punching the palm of your hand all winter, you baby, now I'm the real boy wonder.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Reminded, today, of the poem Robert Frost recited at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration

THE GIFT OUTRIGHT
The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

So much joy in this wordplay masterclass by Thomas Lux

A SMALL TIN PARROT PIN

Next to the tiny bladeless windmill
of a saltshaker
on the black tablecloth
is my small tin parrot pin
bought from a bin,
75¢, cheap, but not pure tin--an alloy,
some plastic toy tin?
The actual pin, the pin that pins the pin,
will fall off soon,
and thus the parrot,
if I wear it, which I will,
on my lapel. I'll look down
and it'll be gone.
Let it be found by a child,
or someone sad, eyes
on the sidewalk, or what a prize
it would be for a packrat's nest.
My parrot's paint
is vivid: his head's red, bright yellow of breast
and belly, a stripe of green,
then purple, a soft
creamy purple, then bright--you know
the color--parrot-green
wing feathers. Tomorrow I think
I'll wear it on my blue shirt.
Tonight, someone whom I love
sleeps in the next room,
the room next to the room with the black tablecloth,
the saltshaker, the parrot pin.
She was very sleepy
and less impressed than I
with my parrot
with whom, with which
I am very pleased.

-- Thomas Lux

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Raymond Carver with a word to the wise

Loafing

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw --
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I've set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Two weeks from tonight! Really looking forward to this Poetry Weekend event featuring the fabulous Kirby.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"How long can the world go on with no new word from God" David Berman, from "Margaritas at the Mall"

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

turn your face again / toward me Frank Bidart

THE YOKE

don't worry
I know you're dead
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn
I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
see
upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke
don't worry
I know you're dead
but tonight
turn your face again

-FRANK BIDART

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I knew that we / were in training for a strange / future Bruce Taylor

Moon Town

Life is short, but afternoons are long.
Adrift in the vastness of
a tuesday, I used to put my cheek
up to the perforated hardboard
behind the TV to feel its heat,
looking in at the red vitals
of our modernity, and I knew that we
were in training for a strange
future, for lives filled with
dial gauges and horseshoe magnets,
moon towns and mechanical pets.
And it has been strange,
but one thing has never changed, I still
look into the future
closely inspecting the days left,
staring at them until they grow transparent,
like the blades of a fan.

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Dr. Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I’m just going to need people to be more thoughtful. Disabled people—and we are all disabled by illness or health, at some point—don’t need your crappy poem/metaphor/joke.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Remember / me? Remember me / in any case. John Ashbery

WITHIN THE HOUR

The tea is too hot.
The curtain in the window blew around.
Rind rotting on brown chairs.
In the valley of bartenders the one-eyed stooge is king.

What I'm doing now is write.
That's the real stuff.
It doesn't work!
I got a card from him yesterday I could ask Dick.

What is the lively approach?
Your mini body coming unto me, unshelled
as pavanes in savanes no one undertakes
not without a woofing in the chest-o-ciser.

Two strokes and it's gone.
You owed the fresh kind.
Why yes. Remember
me? Remember me
in any case.

-JOHN ASHBERY

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Raoul Fernandes @raoulfernandes.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This starts in less than a week! Well, if I get a few more students!? 😬 So doing one more push to let you know, and to let your budding (or more blossomed) writer friends know. Feel free to DM me if you have questions

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

but what sort of thing is poetry? Wislawa Szymborska

SOME LIKE POETRY

Some-
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority. Not counting school, where one must,
and poets themselves,
there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like-
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry-
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

-WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

(Translated, from the Polish, by Joanna Trzeciak.)

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Keep coming back to this D.H. Lawrence poem

D. H. Lawrence
THE WHITE HORSE

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

if it wasn't love I don't / know what it was Nikki Giovanni

LOVE IN PLACE

I really don't remember falling in love all that much
I remember wanting to bake corn bread and boil a ham and I certainly remember making lemon pie and when I used to smoke I stopped in the middle of my day to contemplate
I know I must have fallen in love once because I quit biting my cuticles and my hair is gray and that must indicate something and I all of a sudden had a deeper appreciation for Billie Holiday and Billy Strayhorn so if it wasn't love I don't know what it was
I see the old photographs and I am smiling and I'm sure quite happy but what I mostly see is me
through your eyes
and I am still young and slim and very much committed to the love we still have

-NIKKI GIOVANNI

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

A statement of condolence for Robert Lowell as it appeared in the pages of The Partisan Review where so many of his finest poems were first published. Lowell passed away on this day in 1977.

We are saddened by the death of
Robert Lowell
a friend and contributor.

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Ian LeTourneau @ianletourneau.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

All set up!!!

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Must you have a part in everything? William Carlos Williams, in Nancy Willard's Step Lightly: Poems for the Journey (1998)

William Carlos Williams

SMELL!

Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I boney nose
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your for ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Just a reminder that this is tomorrow afternoon, folks, and that I'll be hosting the event. Hope to see you there!

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

all those poems whisper for autumn William Stafford

William Stafford
FAME

My book fell in a river and rolled
over and over turning its pages
for the sun. From a bridge I saw this.
An eagle dived and snatched the slippery volume.

Now somewhere in the forest that book, educating
eagles, turns its leaves in the wind,
and all those poems whisper for autumn
to come, and the long nights, and the snow.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Oh, why did I let that boy go? Nancy Willard

HINDSIGHT

The two of us running up Fifth Avenue,
Michael, a long leap of a lad
in his black church clothes
and his brother's brogues,
and his hair flying,

and me with my brimmed hat hooping
down the steps of St. Pat's
till it's cocked on the wind's head,
bent on blowing me clean
out of my senses.

Oh, why did I let that boy go?
God himself loved the sight of us.
I would be the blue light in his eye,
the left one, the farseeing one,
the one he's rubbing now, maybe.

-NANCY WILLARD

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

someone / once carried the weight of my life Kim Addonizio

Gravity

Carrying my daughter to bed
I remember how light she once was,
no more than a husk in my arms. There was a time I could not put her down, so frantic was her crying if I tried
to pry her from me, so I held her
for hours at night, walking up and down the hall, willing her to fall asleep. She'd grow quiet,
pressed against me, her small being alert
to each sound, the tension in my arms, she'd take my nipple and gaze up at me,
blinking back fatigue she'd fight whatever terror waited beyond my body in her dark crib. Now that she's so heavy I stagger beneath her, she slips easily from me, down
into her own dreaming. I stand over her bed, fixed there like a second, dimmer star, though the stars are not fixed: someone
once carried the weight of my life.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The closing passage from Our World (2007). Mary Oliver wrote the text. The photographs in the book were sourced from the archives of her life partner, Molly Malone Cook. It was released two years after Cook's death in 2005.

AFTER NOTE

How often now I just sit, with my
elbows on the desk and my hands
holding my face bold and upright,
and stare into the past.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Rhina Espaillat, for your labor day weekend

"FIND WORK”
I tie my Hat--I crease my Shawl--
Life's little duties do--precisely
As the very least
Were infinite--to me--
Emily Dickinson, #443

My mother's mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love's first fruit,
moved through her father's farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
"Find work," she would reply to every grief—
and her one dictum, whether false or true,
tolled heavy with her passionate belief.
Widowed again, with children, in her prime,
she spoke so little it was hard to bear
so much composure, such a truce with time
spent in the lifelong practice of despair.
But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Translated, from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Bishop

Manuel Bandeira

My Last Poem

I would like my last poem thus

That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended things
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers
The purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds
are consumed
The passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation.

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