Monday, December 31, 2012

The Cult of Relics

My father's serviette ring,
silver incised with a design
of Scotch thistles, the central medallion
uninitialled, a blank oval.
                                        The two massive
German kitchen knives, pre-1914, not-stainless steel,
which my mother carefully scoured with Vim
after each use.
                        My daily use
of these and other such things
links me to hands long gone.

Medieval con-men disgust and amuse us,
we think we'd never have fallen
for such crude deceptions - unholy
animal bones, nails from any old barn,
splinters enough from the Cross to fill
a whole lumber-yard.
                                   But can we
with decency mock the gullible
for desiring these things?
                                      Who doesn't want
to hold what hands belov'd or venerated
were accustomed to hold? - You? I?
                                                who wouldn't want
to put their lips to the true chalice?

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by Denise Levertov, 1996

Monday, December 24, 2012

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

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by Robert Frost, 1923


Monday, December 17, 2012

An Imaginable Conference

MR. HENRY GREEN, INDUSTRIALIST, AND MR. WALLACE STEVENS,
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE HARTFORD ACCIDENT & INDEMNITY CO.,
MEET IN THE COURSE OF BUSINESS


Exchanging gentle grips, the men retire,
prologued by courteous bumbling at the door -
retreat to where a rare room deep exists
on an odd floor, subtly carpeted. Here walls

wear charts like checkered vests and blotters ape
the green of cricket fields. Glass multiplies
the pausing men to twice infinity.
An inkstand of blue marble has been carven;

no young girl's wrist is more discreetly veined.
An office boy misplaced and slack intrudes,
apologizes speaking without commas
"Oh sorry sirs I thought" which signifies

what well-meant wimbly wambly stuff it is
we seem to be made of. Beyond the room,
the gander sun's pure rhetoric ferments
imbroglios of bloom. The stone is so.

The pair confer in murmurings, with words
select and Sunday-soft. No more is known,
but rumor goes that as they hatched the deal,
vistas of lilac weighted their shrewd lids.

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by John Updike, 1955

Monday, December 10, 2012

My Idle Dreams Roam Far

My idle dreams roam far,
To the southern land where spring is fragrant.
Wind and strings play on a boat on the river's clear surface,
The city is full of catkins flying like light dust.
People are occupied admiring the flowers.
My idle dreams roam far,
To the southern land where autumn is clear.
For a thousand li over rivers and hills cold colours stretch far,
Deep in flowering reeds, a solitary boat is moored.
Beneath the bright moon, a flute plays in the tower.

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by Li Yu, 970 AD

Monday, December 3, 2012

Departures

They seemed to all take off
at once: Aunt Grace
whose kidneys closed shop;
Cousin Rose who fed sugar
to diabetes;
my grandmother's friend
who postponed going so long
we thought she'd stay.

It was like the summer years ago
when they all set out on trains
and ships, wearing hats with veils
and the proper gloves,
because everybody was going
someplace that year,
and they didn't want
to be left behind.

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by Linda Pastan, 1985

Monday, November 26, 2012

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
   It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
   And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
   Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
   Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
   In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city's
   Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
   Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
   Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
   And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
   A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
   Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
   Road that is right entirely.

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by Louis MacNeice, 1940

Monday, November 19, 2012

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

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by Wendell Berry, 1994

Monday, November 12, 2012

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

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by Mary Oliver, 2003

Monday, November 5, 2012

Coming Clearing

A clarifying high
wind in October's
shanky last days -

maples luminous
mounds or
glacial hills dressed

down shiny to outline:
and thickets
only darkness could travel

in, clearly
keeping nothing worth
looking for: October

winds change things,
from
the scarlet of

frost-scorched boughs
to whistling gray
branch and clatter,

readying plenty of
clarification
coming ice can seal.

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by A. R. Ammons, 1988

Monday, October 29, 2012

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on top of a ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday,

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

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by Billy Collins, 1995

Monday, October 22, 2012

At the Loom

You sit at the loom,
your hands raised
like silhouetted birds,
or like a harpist poised
at the strings of an instrument
whose chords are colors,
their slow accumulation,
thread by thread -
a kind of bleeding upward
the way the sky bleeds
from the horizon up
after certain sunsets.
Monk's belt and rosepath . . .
plainweave and twill . . .
The shuttle moves back
and forth, trailing
its wake of yarn
as if by accident,
and patterns that seem
random at first multiply
into beauty.
No wonder Penelope burned
with patience.
Somewhere a sheep bleats
in the night, a silkworm
stirs in its cocoon.
You weave a spell,
I wear it on my back,
and though the chilly stars
go bone naked
we are clothed.

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by Linda Pastan, 1986


Monday, October 15, 2012

The Attic Which Is Desire

the  unused  tent
of

bare  beams
beyond  which

directly  wait
the  night

and  day  -
Here

from  the  street
by

  * * *
  * S *
  * O *
  * D *
  * A *
  * * *

ringed  with
running  lights

the  darkened
pane

exactly
down  the  center

is
transfixed

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by William Carlos Williams, 1930

Monday, October 8, 2012

How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill - more of each
than you have - inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

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by Wendell Berry, 2005

Monday, October 1, 2012

After the Point of No Return

After that moment when you've lost all reason
for going back where you started, when going ahead
is no longer a yes or no but a matter of fact,
you'll need to weigh, on the one hand, what will seem
on the other, almost nothing against something
slightly more than nothing and must choose
again and again, at points of fewer and fewer
chances to guess, when and which way to turn.

That's when you might stop thinking about stars
and storm clouds, the direction of wind,
the difference between rain and snow, the time
of day or the lay of the land, about which trees
mean water, which birds know what you need
to know before it's too late, or what's right here
under your feet, no longer able to tell you
where it was you thought you had to go.

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by David Wagoner, 2012

Monday, September 24, 2012

Smoke

We loiter in the cobblestone alley,
Beans, Clams, Yom-Yom and me,
smoking punk. Snip the wiry stem,
trim the nubby end, scratch the fire
from a zipper then pass the stink around.
William Penn designed these blocks
squared off, brick, crosshatched by alleys
to prevent the spread of fire. So fire
runs down my throat, reed
turning to iron inside my lungs.

Yom-Yom has an uncle in Bucks County.
Country boys sneak behind barns and puff
on cedar bark. Smoke's the only thing
we have in common. Smoke when our breath
meets cold moist air, though no smoke rings
in winter, while sullen cars drag gray on gray
down city streets or country roads.
Someday I'll smoke Camels, my father's brand,
then Gauloises to prove I'm stronger than him
in burning whatever's inside that won't sleep.

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by W. S. Di Piero, 1984

Monday, September 17, 2012

A Spiral Notebook

The bright wire rolls like a porpoise
in and out of the calm blue sea
of the cover, or perhaps like a sleeper
twisting in and out of dreams,
for it could hold a record of dreams
if you wanted to buy it for that,
though it seems to be meant for
more serious work, with its
college-ruled lines and its cover
that states in emphatic white letters,
5 SUBJECT NOTEBOOK. It seems
a part of growing old is no longer
to have five subjects, each
demanding an equal share of attention,
set apart by brown cardboard dividers,
but instead to stand in a drugstore
and hang on to one subject
a little too long, like this notebook
you weigh in your hands, passing
your fingers over its surfaces
as if it were some kind of wonder.

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by Ted Kooser, 2004

Monday, September 10, 2012

The Evening Star

Tonight, for the first time in many years,
there appeared to me again
a vision of the earth's splendor:

in the evening sky
the first star seemed
to increase in brilliance
as the earth darkened

until at last it could grow no darker.
And the light, which was the light of death,
seemed to restore to earth

its power to console. There were
no other stars. Only the one
whose name I knew

as in my other life I did her
injury: Venus,
star of the early evening,

to you I dedicate
my vision, since on this blank surface

you have cast enough light
to make my thought
visible again.

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by Louise Gluck, 2006

Monday, September 3, 2012

Once in the 40's

We were alone one night on a long
road in Montana. This was winter, a big
night, far to the stars. We had hitched,
my wife and I, and left our ride at
a crossing to go on. Tired and cold -- but
brave -- we trudged along. This, we said,
was our life, watched over, allowed to go
where we wanted. We said we'd come back some time
when we got rich. We'd leave the others and find
a night like this, whatever we had to give,
and no matter how far, to be so happy again.

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by William Stafford, 1999

Monday, August 27, 2012

Why Shackleton's Stories are Being Retold in Book and Film

We are all wondering the same things
in this darkened room, the ship not enduring
after all, the men enduring despite:
How do the trials of our lives compare?

What would Shackleton have done
when the baby didn't stop crying. What
would he have done if his credit cards
were all denied or his girlfriend
slept with his brother or if he was downsized?

And would we have survived, too, if
given a chance? Kept peace and sanity
and most of our toes? Kept hope
when cell phone, wristwatch, and film advance failed and
borealis was the only electric thing within range?

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by Elizabeth Bradfield, 2010

Monday, August 20, 2012

Sea Grasses

They feed no flocks. Bread
flailed from their meagre kernels
would starve out even an anchorite
if any tried
to force these idle flats to a spiritual purpose.
At Stonington, at Seabright,
they stand, not waiting,
only swaying a little in the wind,
as though to be a fact
among other facts -
to reflect their one particular
shade of pale yellowish green,
along with clouds and whatever occasional bird
happens to fly over,
into a transient pool
that the tide will shortly come back for -
in some sense, if not ours, should be enough.

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by Katha Pollitt, 1981

Monday, August 13, 2012

from "Street Songs"

                       VI

             THE GLAZIER

The pure sun - throwing off
Too much brightness to measure -
Dazzled, contrives to doff
Its shirt on the back of the glazier.



                     VIII

THE OLD-CLOTHES WOMAN

The piercing eye with which you see
What they contain essentially
Separates my rags from me
And naked I go as a deity.



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by Stephane Mallarme, 1889

Monday, August 6, 2012

A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernavon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born;
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wainstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.

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by Denise Levertov, 1986

Monday, July 30, 2012

The House

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow's walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

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by Richard Wilbur, 2009

Monday, July 23, 2012

Bell Buoy

So we set signs over the world to say
To ourselves, returning, that we know the place,
Marking the sea too with shaped tokens
Of our usage, which even while they serve us
Make one with the unmeasured mist, sea-slap,
Green rock awash with the gray heave just
Out of sight, wet air saturated with sounds
But no breath - and in no time they are seen
To be in league with the world's remoteness
Whose features we grope for through fog and can never
Seize to our satisfaction. First the sound
Comes, and again, from the caged bell lost in the gray
Out ahead. Then into the glasses,
And gone, and again sighted, staying:
A black shape like nothing, rounded, rocking like
A chair, with a gull on top. Clearer
The dreaming bronze clangs over the lifting
Swell, through the fog-drift, clangs, not
On the sea-stroke but on the fifth second clangs,
Recalling something, out of some absence
We cannot fathom, with itself communing.
Was it we who made this, or the sea's necessity?
You can hear the wash on its rolling plates
Over your own wake, as you come near
And confirm: black can, odd number crusted
Already with gull crap over the new paint,
Green beard and rust speckling its undersides
As you see when it rolls. Nothing you can
Say as you pass, though there are only you two
And you come so close and seem to share
So much. And it will twist and stare after you
Through the closing fog, clanging. It is
A dead thing but we have agreed upon it: kept
To port, entering, starboard departing, as
May your fortune be, it can assure you
Of where you are, though it knows nothing
Of where you are going or may have been.

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by W.S. Merwin

Monday, July 16, 2012

Medusa

The tentacles, the brazen phiz whose glare
stands every fibril of the mind on end -
lust looked at backward as it were,
an antique scare tactic, either self-protection
or a libel on the sex whose periodic
blossom hangs its ungathered garland
from the horned clockwork of the moon:
as cause or consequence, or both, hysteric
symptoms no doubt figure here. She'd been
a beauty till Poseidon, in a flagrant
trespass, closed with her on Athena's temple floor.

The tide-rip torrents in the blood, the dark
gods not to be denied - or a mere indiscretion?
Athene had no time at all for talk like this.
The sea-god might be her old rival, but the woman
he'd gone to bed with was the one who paid.
A virginal revenge at one remove - there's none more
sordid or more apt to ramify, as this one did:
the fulgent tresses roiled to water-snake-
like writhe, and long lashes'
come-hither flutterings, the stare
that hardens the psyche's soft parts to rock.

The female ogre, for the Puritan
revisionists who took her over, had a new
and siren sliminess. John Milton
put her at the gate of hell, a woman to
the waist, and fair; but ending foul, in
many a scaly fold, voluminous and vast -
whose name indeed was sin. And in the den
of doctrine run amok, the armored glister
of a plodding Holiness revealed her
as likewise divided but, all told, most
loathsome, filthy, foul, and full of vile disdain.

The Gorgon, though, is no such Manichean tease,
no mantrap caterer of forbidden dishes,
whose lewd stews keep transgression warm.
The stinging jellyfish, the tubeworm,
the tunicate, the sea anemone's
whorled comb are privier than her mysteries:
her salts are cold, her home-
land Hyperborean (the realm that gave us
the Snow Queen and the English gentleman),
her mask the ravening aspect of the moon,
her theater a threshing floor that terror froze.

Terror of origins: the sea's heave, the cold mother
of us all; disdain of the allure that draws us in,
that stifles as it nurtures, that feeds on
what it feeds, on what it comforts, whether male
or female; ay, in the very tissue of desire
lodge viscid barbs that turn blood to coral,
the heartbeat to a bed of silicates. What surgeon
can unthread those multiplicities of cause
of hurt from its effect; dislodge, spicule by spicule,
the fearful armories within; unclench the airless
petrifaction toward the core, geode's rigor?

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Amy Clampitt

Monday, July 9, 2012

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Jane Kenyon, 1996

Monday, July 2, 2012

On a Picture by Cezanne

There's no description in the braided stone,
the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark,
bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth.
The dog of work gnaws the day's short bone,
snarls a mountainside into lavender and green.
In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all.
Element of pitcher, sky, rockface; blank canvas
plastic and vast in one off-center patch.
To copy what's invisible, to improvise
a soul of things and remake solid life
into fresh anxious unlifelike form.


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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by W.S. Di Piero, 1995

Monday, June 25, 2012

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Stll warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now,
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Donald Justice, 1997

Monday, June 18, 2012

The Reader

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffed sound.
Onward they come again, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world,
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city's maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who will live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in the bloody field
Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps
She meets them this time with a wiser eye,
Noting that Julien's calculating head
Is from the first too severed from his heart.
But the true wonder of it is that she,
For all that she may know of consequences,
Still turns enchanted to the next bright page
Like some Natasha in the ballroom door -
Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,
The blind delight of being, ready still
To enter life on life and see them through.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Richard Wilbur, 2004













Monday, June 11, 2012

Ascending

The grapes just forming are green beads
as tight on the stalk as if hammered into place,
the swelling unripe juveniles are almost
burgundy, promising yet withholding
and the ones they have come for, the highest
blue-black clusters wearing a dusting of white,
veiled dancers, tantalize in the wind.
Wrens weaving in and out, small bugs, pale sun.
Two bony old people in the back forty,
one holding the ladder, the other ascending.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Maxine Kumin, 2007

Monday, June 4, 2012

What's in My Journal

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
things, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by William Stafford, 1998

Monday, May 28, 2012

Alchemy

Deep night, deep woods,
valley far below the steep
thigh of the hill, the sky too
a hazy darkness - yet the moon,
small and high, discovers
a wide stretch of river
to be its mirror, steel
brighter than its own
fogmuffled radiance.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Denise Levertov

Monday, May 21, 2012

The Happiest Day

It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn't believe. Our children were asleep
or playing, the youngest as new
as the new smell of lilacs,
and how could I have guessed
their roots were shallow
and would be easily transplanted.
I didn't even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.
So we sat on the porch
in the cool morning, sipping
hot coffee. Behind the news of the day -
strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere -
I could see the top of your dark head
and thought not of public conflagrations
but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder.
If someone could stop the camera then...
if someone could only stop the camera
and ask me: are you happy?
perhaps I would have noticed
how the morning shone in the reflected
color of lilac. Yes, I might have said
and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Linda Pastan, 1999

Monday, May 14, 2012

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound ...
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

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by Anna Akhmatova

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Poet's Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead    it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft    a poem would have had some
distance to go    days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it    many friends
will say    why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadnesses I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership    I do not
want to wait a week    a year    a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Grace Paley, 2001

Monday, April 30, 2012

For a Five Year Old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Fleur Adcock, 1967

Monday, April 23, 2012

Starting the Subaru at Five Below

After 6 Maine winters and 100,000 miles,
when I take it to be inspected

I search for gas stations where they
just say beep the horn and don't ask me to

put it on the lift, exposing its soft
rusted underbelly. Inside is the record

of commuting: apple cores, a bag from
McDonald's, crushed Dunkin' Donuts cups,

a flashlight that doesn't work and one
that does, gas receipts blurred beyond

recognition. Finger tips numb, nose
hair frozen, I pump the accelerator

and turn the key. The battery cranks,
the engine gives 2 or 3 low groans and

starts. My God it starts. And unlike
my family in the house, the job I'm

headed towards, the poems in my briefcase,
the dreams I had last night, there is

no question about what makes sense.
White exhaust billowing from the tail pipe,

heater blowing, this car is going to
move me, it's going to take me places.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Stuart Kestenbaum, 1990

Monday, April 16, 2012

My Lyre

I, too, wish to sing of heroic deeds
(about the Atreides, and about Kadmus)
but the lyre's strings
can only produce sounds of love.
Recently, I changed the strings,
and then the lyre itself,
and tried to sing of the feats of Hercules,
but still the lyre kept singing songs of love.
So, fare well you heroes!
because my lyre sings only songs of love.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Anacreon, 582-485 BC

Monday, April 9, 2012

Sharks' Teeth

Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Kay Ryan, 2005

Monday, April 2, 2012

Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I saw a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Frank O'Hara, 1962











From 1964, here is an audio clip of Frank O'Hara reading "Poem."

Monday, March 26, 2012

To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
   Shutting with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
   Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
   In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the Amen ere thy poppy throws
   Around my bed its lulling charities,
Then save me or the passed day will shine
   Upon my pillow, breeding many woes:
Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards
   Its strength for darkness, burrowing like the mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
   And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by John Keats, 1819

Monday, March 19, 2012

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting for work at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is - if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Philip Levine, 1991

Monday, March 12, 2012

Words

What has happened?
language eludes me
the nice specifying
words of my life fail
when I call

Ah says a friend
dried up no doubt
on the desiccated
twigs in the swamp
of the skull like
a lake where the
water level has been
shifted by highways
a couple of miles off

Another friend says
No no    my dear      perhaps
you are only meant to
speak more plainly

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Grace Paley, 2000

Monday, March 5, 2012

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
William Carlos Williams, 1921






"The Figure 5 in Gold"
by Charles Demuth, 1928
inspired by this William Carlos Williams poem

Monday, February 27, 2012

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Stanley Kunitz

Monday, February 20, 2012

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm.  Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Adrienne Rich, 1951

Monday, February 13, 2012

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers.  Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by e. e. cummings, 1926

Monday, February 6, 2012

Child on Top of a Greenhouse

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like
       accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Theodore Roethke, 1948

Monday, January 30, 2012

The Hungarian Pastry Shop & Cafe

is the only place I know in the city
where you can still see people with pen
and paper. Legal pads, spiral bound,
plain or college-ruled loose leaf, well-thumbed sheaves
of paper at every crumb-strewn table: precis,
postulations, undergraduate observations, sound
doctoral theory, a shady spot of fiction -
each hand the only one in the world
to produce such symbols, personal as finger-
prints, errant y's and flighty t's,
g's trailing their tails like apprehensive
dogs. It's a deep, low-ceilinged room, illuminated
dimly by porcelain snowdrops on the walls,
a foreign spring, ripe with words' secret burning.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Anne Pierson Wiese, 2007