the light that came to lucille clifton

came in a shift of knowing
when even her fondest sureties
faded away. it was the summer
she understood that she had not understood
and was not mistress even
of her own off eye, then
the man escaped throwing away his tie and
the children grew legs and started walking and
she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
"you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking."

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by Lucille Clifton, 1980

Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
          and death
whenever he performs
          above the heads
                    of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
     climbs on rime
          to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
          above a sea of faces
     paces his way
          to the other side of day
performing entrachats
          and slight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
          and all without mistaking
     any thing
          for what it may not be

For he's the super realist
          who must perforce perceive
taut truth
     before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
          toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
     with gravity
          to start her death-defying leap
And he
     a little charleychaplin man
          who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
          spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

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by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1958

Dreamwood

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child's older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn't revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.

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by Adrienne Rich, 1987

C Major

Translated by Robert Bly

As he stepped out into the street after a meeting
          with her
the snow whirled in the air.
Winter had come
while they were making love.
The night was white.
He walked fast from joy.
The streets slanted down.
Smiles passed ---
everyone smiled behind turned-up collars.
How free it all was!
And all the question marks started to sing about
          God's life.

That's how it seemed to him.
Music was free at last
and walked through the blowing snow
with long strides.
All things around him on the way toward the note C.
A trembling needle pointing toward C.
An hour risen above anxieties.
How easy!
Everyone smiled behind turned-up collars.

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by Tomas Transtromer, 1962