A Different Light

Talking just like this late at night
all depends on a sense of mystery;
the same things in a different light.

Your whiskey glass and the watercolour
just off-centre are
part of this. The electric pallor

of that apple, also. And the slow
arc of an indoor palm, the vase beside it blooming
with shadows. Do you remember how

the power cuts caught us unawares?
No candles and no torch. It was high
summer. A soft brightness clung in the poplars,

for hours it seemed. When it went out,
everything we knew how
to look for had disappeared. And when light

came back, it came back as noise:
the radio; the deep freeze singing.
Afterwards we talked of it for days -

how it felt at the upstairs window,
to stand and watch and still miss the moment
of gable ends and rooftops beginning

to be re-built. And that split second when
you and I were, from a distance,
a neighbourhood on the verge of definition.

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by Eavan Boland, 1990

Music

     If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in The Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35 cents, it's so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
     I must tighten my belt.
It's like a locomotive on the march, the season
     of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter's
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they're putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
     But no more fountains and no more rain,
     and the stores stay open terribly late.

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by Frank O'Hara, 1953

Balance

On the small, imaginary
kitchen scales,
I place on one side
all the scraps memory
has left me, as if I could make
a meal of them;
and on the other, all
I can surmise of the indelible
future: anniversaries,
losses. On one side I place
my mother's suede glove -
that emptied udder;

on the other the mitten
my grandson just dropped -
a woolen signpost he'll soon
outgrow. He is three;
she has been gone three years
exactly. Equilibrium is simply
that moment when the present
is as real as the past
or the future, when the air
that nourishes us
we breathe
without thinking.

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by Linda Pastan, 1995

Movement

Why did I take my life in my hands to see a few fish
And some gigantic cakes of ice
And to meet a few South American writers?
I could have imagined all this without coming here
And slightly increased my changes of staying alive.
I used to think it didn't matter how long I lived
But didn't know how it did matter how much I saw
And could write about and how many people I met.
I'll have to take my life in my hands again  now to go back
From life "down here"
I say "down here" because of the way it is on the map.
I have gone mainly east and south because that's where everything was
     that I wanted to see.
Finally, when I was almost sixty I went west, to China.
Where were things I wanted to see but I hadn't known
I could get to with my physical presence
Which is everything, the reason for life.

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by Kennth Koch, 2002

The Stillness of the World Before Bach

There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters' axes,
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child's ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater's stillness before Bach.

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by Lars Gustafsson
translated by Philip Martin

Oysters

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
and philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
in the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

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Seamus Heaney, 1979

Dunes

Taking root in windy sand
     is not an easy
way
to go about
     finding a place to stay.

A ditchbank or woods-edge
     has firmer ground.

In a loose world though
     something can be started -
a root touch water,
     a tip break sand -

Mounds from that can rise on
     on held mounds,
a gesture of building, keeping,
     a trapping
into shape.

Firm ground is not available ground.

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by A.R. Ammons, 1972

Growing Up

I am reading Li Po. The TV is on
with the sound off.
I've seen this movie before.
I turn on the sound just for a moment
when the man says, "I love you."
Then turn it off and go on reading.

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by Linda Gregg, 2011

Psalm

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down -
That they are there!

                           Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

                            The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                            Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                            The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

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by George Oppen, 1963

A Mathematics of Breathing

I
Think of any of several arched
colonnades to a cathedral,

how the arches
like fountains, say

or certain limits in calculus,
when put to the graph-paper's cross-trees,

never quite meet any promised heaven,
instead at their vaulted heights

falling down to the abruptly ending
base of the next column,

smaller, the one smaller
past that, at last

dying, what is
called perspective.

This is the way buildings do it.

II
You have seen them, surely, busy pairing
the world down to what it is mostly,

proverb: so many birds in a bush.
Suddenly they take off, and at first

it seems your particular hedge itself
has sighed deeply,

that the birds are what come,
though of course it is just the birds

leaving one space for others.
After they've gone, put your ear to the bush,

listen. There are three sides: the leaves'
releasing of something, your ear where it

finds it, and the air in between, to say
equals. There is maybe a fourth side,

not breathing.

III
In my version of the Thousand and One Nights,
there are only a thousand,

Scheherazade herself is the last one,
for the moment held back,

for a moment all the odds hang even.
The stories she tells she tells mostly

to win another night of watching the prince
drift into a deep sleeping beside her,

the chance to touch one more time
his limbs, going,

gone soft already with dreaming.
When she tells her own story,

Breathe in,
breathe out

is how it starts.

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by Carl Phillips, 1994

Mirrors at 4 a.m.

You must come to them sideways
In rooms webbed with shadow,
Sneak a view of their emptiness
Without them catching
A glimpse of you in return.

The secret is,
Even the empty bed is a burden to them,
A pretense.
They are more themselves keeping
The company of a blank wall,
The company of time and eternity

Which, begging your pardon,
Cast no image
As they admire themselves in the mirror,
While you stand to the side
Pulling a hanky out
To wipe your brow surreptitiously.

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By Charles Simic, 1996

Naming the Stars

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.

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by Joyce Sutphen, 2004

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
- Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
- A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
- Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
- Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
- And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there ... No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

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by Elizabeth Bishop, 1965

Silence and Dancing

"Schweigen and tanzen" are words spoken by Elektra near the end of the opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.


Silence and dancing
is what it comes down to
in the end for them,
as they struggle from wheelchair to bed,
knowing nothing changes,
that the poor, who are themselves,
will become even poorer
and the fatuous voices on the screen
will go on gabbling about another
war they cannot do without.

What defense against this
except silence and dancing,
the memory of dancing -

O, but they danced, did they ever;
she danced like a devil, she'll tell you,
recalling a dress the color of sunrise,
hair fluffed to sea-foam,
some man's some boy's
damp hand on her back
under the music's sweet, hot assault

and wildness erupting inside her
like a suppressed language,
insisting on speaking itself
through her eloquent body,
a far cry
from the well-groomed words on her lips.

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by Lisel Mueller

We grow accustomed to the Dark

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

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by Emily Dickinson, #428

Scouting

I'm the man who gets off the bus
at the bare junction of nothing
with nothing, and then heads back
to where we've been as though
the future were stashed somewhere
in that tangle of events we call
"Where I come from." Where I
came from the fences ran right
down to the road, and the lone woman
leaning back on her front porch as she
quietly smoked asked me what did
I want. Confused as always, I
answered, "Water," and she came to me
with a frosted bottle and a cup,
shook my hand, and said, "Good luck."
That was forty years ago, you say,
when anything was possible. No,
it was yesterday, the gray icebox
sat on the front porch, the crop
was tobacco and not yet in, you
could hear it sighing out back.
The rocker gradually slowed as
she came toward me but never
stopped and the two of us went on
living in time. One of her eyes
had a pale cast and looked nowhere
or into the future where without
regrets she would give up the power
to grant life, and I would darken
like wood left in the rain and then
fade into only a hint of the grain.
I went higher up the mountain
until my breath came in gasps,
my sight darkened, and I slept
to the side of the road to waken
chilled in the sudden July cold,
alone and well. What is it like
to come to, nowhere, in darkness,
not knowing who you are, not
caring if the wind calms, the stars
stall in their sudden orbits,
the cities below go on without
you, screaming and singing?
I don't have the answer. I'm
scouting, getting the feel
of the land, the way the fields
step down the mountainsides
hugging their battered, sagging
wire fences to themselves as though
both day and night they needed
to know their limits. Almost still,
the silent dogs wound into sleep,
the gray cabins breathing steadily
in moonlight, tomorrow wakening
slowly in the clumps of mountain oak
and pine where streams once ran
down into little white rock gullies.
You can feel the whole country
wanting to waken into a child's dream,
you can feel the moment reaching
back to contain your life and forward
to whatever the dawn brings you to.
In the dark you can love this place.

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by Philip Levine, 1990

from Three Songs at the End of Summer

A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned
to water-ski. They have, or they haven't.
Sounds of the instructor's megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. "Relax! Relax!"

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lanes, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

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by Jane Kenyon, 1988

The Cormorant

for Eunice

Up through the buttercup meadow the children lead

their father. Behind them, gloom

of spruce and fir, thicket through which they pried

into the golden ruckus of the field, toward home:

this rented house where I wait for their return

and believe the scene eternal. They have been out

studying the economy of the sea. They trudged to earn

sand-dollars, crab claws, whelk shells, the huge debt

repaid in smithereens along the shore:

ocean, old blowhard, wheezing in the give

and take, gulls grieving the shattered store.

It is your death I can't believe,

last night, inland, away from us, beyond

these drawling compensations of the moon.

If there's an exchange for you, some kind of bond,

it's past negotiation. You died alone.

Across my desk wash memories of ways

I've tried to hold you: that poem of years ago

starring you in your mater dolorosa phase;

or my Sunday picnic sketch in which the show

is stolen by your poised, patrician foot

above whose nakedness the party floats.

No one can hold you now. The point is moot.

I see you standing, marshalling your boats

of gravy, chutney, cranberry, at your vast

harboring Thanksgiving table, fork held aloft

while you survey the victualling of your coast.

We children surged around you, and you laughed.

Downstairs, the screen door slams, and slams me back

into the present, which you do not share.

Our children tumble in, they shake the pack

of sea-treasures out on table, floor, and chair.

But now we tune our clamor to your quiet.

The deacon spruces keep the darkest note

though hawkweed tease us with its saffron riot.

There are some wrecks from which no loose planks float,

nothing the sea gives back. I walked alone

on the beach this morning, watching a cormorant

skid, thudding, into water. It dove down

into that shuddering darkness where we can't

breathe. Impossibly long. Nothing to see.

Nothing but troughs and swell

over and over hollowing out the sea.

And, beyond the cove, the channel bells.

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by Rosanna Warren, 1990

The Idea

for Nolan Miller


For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold
That ice on the valley's lakes cracked and rolled,
And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,
And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,
Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white
Among false curves and hidden erasures;
And never once did we feel we were close
Until the night wind said, "Why do this,
Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;"
And there appeared, with its windows glowing, small,
In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;
And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,
And would have gone forward and opened the door,
And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,
But that it was ours by not being ours,
And should remain empty. That was the idea.

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by Mark Strand, 1990

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house.  It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew smoke up the chimney,
and cried for awhile because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, the sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

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by Margaret Atwood, 1995

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry - the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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by Wallace Stevens, 1916

"Hemlock" by Joan Mitchell, 1956; inspired by "Domination of Black"

Crossing Kansas by Train

The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Waterhole this
Is Kansas the
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer's
Sons asleep
In their workclothes

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by Donald Justice, 1967

Summer at the Beach

Before we started camp, we went to the beach.

Long days, before the sun was dangerous.
My sister lay on her stomach, reading mysteries.
I sat in the sand, watching the water.

You could use the sand to cover
parts of your body that you didn't like,
I covered my feet, to make my legs longer;
the sand climbed over my ankles.

I looked down at my body, away from the water.
I was what the magazines told me to be:
coltish. I was a frozen colt.

My sister didn't bother with these adjustments.
When I told her to cover her feet, she tried a few times,
but she got bored; she didn't have enough willpower
to sustain a deception.

I watched the sea; I listened to other families.
Babies everywhere: what went on in their heads?
I couldn't imagine myself as a baby;
I couldn't picture myself not thinking.

I couldn't imagine myself as an adult either.
They all had terrible bodies: lax, oily, completely
committed to being male and female.

The days were all the same.
When it rained, we stayed home.
When the sun shone, we went to the beach with my mother.
My sister lay on her stomach, reading her mysteries.
I sat with my legs arranged to resemble
what I saw in my head, what I believed was my true self.

Because it was true: when I didn't move I was perfect.

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by Louise Gluck, 2001

Somnambulisma

On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

The generations of the bird are all
By water washed away. They follow after.
The follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

Without this bird that never settles, without
Its generations that follow in their universe,
The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

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by Wallace Stevens, 1943

At the Cafe

I must look like I'm confident,
white cup for tea on the table before me,
my son in his indigo bunting,
asleep in the stroller.
When I take out my pen
I must look like a woman
who knows what her work is
while citron and currant
bake in ovens behind me.
Newspaper, lily -
I read in the book that poetry is about the divine.
God came to the window while I was in labor.
Tenderness, tenderness!
I have never forgotten that
sparrow among the clay tiles.
Who knows my name knows I mash
oatmeal, change diapers,
want truly to enter divinity.
God knows it too, knows that
wherever I go now I leave out
some part of me.
I watch my son's face like a clock;
he is the time I have.
If I choose this window, this black-and-white notebook,
I must appear to be what I am:
a woman who has chosen a table
between her sleeping child
and the beginning of everything.

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by Patricia Kirkpatrick, 2004

A Glass of Water

Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbours
their reception.
Outside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors
the exception
of city from sky, hills snug with houses
and a glass of water standing on the railing,
half empty or half full. In the failing
afternoon light
brightening buildings counterpoint the darkness,
glinting upside-
down inside the glass, and the newly-weds,
seen from outside
joining hand to hand for the wedding reel,
glide under its meniscus, head over heels.

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by David Musgrave, 2010

Song at Drumholm

My liveliest self, I give you fair leave
in these windblown weathers,
heather-hearted and human and strange,
to turn every blackberry corner
of yesterday's summer.

The robin, singing her love-me-forever,
kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather
blues, sings tide flow
and autumn's turning and white
winds folding.

Cattle along all hedges wind winter
into their frosty
breathing, their slow eyes dreaming
barn, bullock, and fodder
under all hedges.

But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world
is wider than weather.
Blackberries darken the corners
I turn, and gold seas turning
darken, darken.

My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed
on our farings,
The bronze path at evening.           Toward summer,
then,                    My hand, your hand -
as if first meeting.

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by John Unterecker, 1977

Witness

An ordinary evening in Wisconsin
seen from a Greyhound bus - mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,

the tables of the single lit cafe awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking: outside town

the barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withhold the shudder of a warped terrain -
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks

(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches: purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell it how it looks.

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by Amy Clampitt, 1985

After a Month of Rain

Everything I thought I wanted
is right here,
particularly when the sun
is making such a comeback,

and the lilac engorged
with purple has recovered
from its severe pruning,
and you will be back soon

to dispel whatever it is
that overtakes me like leaf blight,
even on a day like this. I can still
hear remnants of the rain

in the swollen stream
behind the house, in the faint
dripping under the eaves,
persistent as memory.

And all the things I didn't think
I wanted, cut like the lilac back
to the root, push up again
from underground.

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by Linda Pastan, 2011

Beauty Shop

What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?
           Samson to the Philistines


          1

Named for the archangel Michael
this twice-born barber
snips my hair, his scissors
describing a halo
around my head
as if I were to be a nun
or Jewish bride.


          2

I had forgotten
the shape
of the skull
defined by a wet comb,
and how my grandmother
braided my hair
so hard my eyes would ache.
She wore, in a silver locket
at her throat, the hair
of her long-dead child.


          3

In this place perfumed
with flowers
and singed hair, girls
with the lowered eyes
of penitents
make of each woman's nails
a row of shields.


          4

We are dreaming
of transformations,
of walking
into the world
somebody else.


          5

In Rome once
standing before Titian's
Sacred and Profane Love,
I gazed at the women,
each coiffed
in that luminous paint,
and wondered
which was which.


          6

I used to cut
my lover's hair myself.
Curls as delicate
as shaved wood
covered the floor,
and later the swaying curtain
of my hair
was all there was
between us.


          7

Hair line crack. . . .
Hair trigger. . . . Hair shirt. . . .
I cross a palm
with silver
and sense the pillars
shake.

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by Linda Pastan, 1988

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.

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by Seamus Heaney, 1985

A Perfect Mess

For David Freedman


I read somewhere
that if pedestrians didn't break traffic laws to cross
Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,
    the whole city
would stop, it would stop.
Cars would back up to Rhode Island,
an epic gridlock not even a cat
could thread through. It's not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keep us all flowing. Today I loved
the unprecedented gall
of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand
up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical
as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,
the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black
as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant
it burst. A downpour like a fire hose.
For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,
paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.
And it was my pleasure to witness a not
insignificant miracle: in one instant every black
umbrella in Hell's Kitchen opened on cue, everyone
still moving.  It was a scene from an unwritten opera,
the sails of some vast armada.
And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress
to accompany the piano movers,
each holding what might have once been
lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next
the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled
under the corner awning,
in line for an open call - stork-limbed, ankles
zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette
around. The city feeds on beauty, starves
for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,
to my deserted block with its famously high
subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure
longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon
opened its mouth to drink on high...

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by Mary Karr, 2012

Instruction

My hands that guide a needle
    In their turn are led
Relentlessly and deftly,
    As a needle leads a thread.

Other hands are teaching
    My needle; when I sew
I feel the cool, thin fingers
    Of hands I do not know.

They urge my needle onward,
    They smooth my seams, until
The worry of my stitches
    Smothers in their skill.

All the tired women,
    Who sewed their lives away,
Speak in my deft fingers
   As I sew today.

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by Hazel Hall, 1921

Midsummer

A green world, a scene of green, deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter's face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
                                        And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm,  as though
with berries.  We are here.  We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

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by William Bronk, 1955

Sins of Omission

Suppose hell were a room
where the lovers you broke
up with, the spouses you left,
the friends you discarded

all were waiting to question
you, with no time limit ever
but the explanations could last
halfway into eternity. Who

wouldn't sooner leap into
a fire? There is no excuse
for the end of love or for
the fact that it never started

its engine into that lovely
roar but just coughed again
and again until you gave up
and got out and went off.

Some friendships are just not
sturdy enough to bear the daily
wear and weight. How to say,
but simply you bored me.

Then all the people you did
not help, the ones you hung
up on, the letter unanswered,
loans denied, calls not returned

that endless line will be snaking
through the horizon, waiting
to demand what you would
not give, life's unpaid bills.

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by Marge Piercy, 2015

Double Dutch

The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant's pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she's
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps in mid-air
as if she's jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
long enough to fit a second thought in,
she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
as she flutter-floats into motion
like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
thumbed alive. Once inside,
the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
who've lain in the dust since the Dutch
acquired Manhattan. How she dances
patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
its travels in scale before the hive. How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.

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by Gregory Pardlo, 2007

Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

Jean-Baptiste Chardin
is painting a woman
in the last summer light.

All summer long
he has been slighting her
in botched blues, tints
half-tones, rinsed neutrals.

What you are watching
is light unlearning itself,
an infinite unfrocking of the prism.

Before your eyes
the ordinary life
is being glazed over:
pigments of the bibelot
the cabochon, the water-opal
pearl to the intimate
simple colours of
her ankle-length summer skirt.

Truth makes shift:
the triptych shrinks
to the cabinet picture.

Can't you feel it?
Aren't you chilled by it?
The way the late afternoon
is reduced to detail -

the sky that odd shape of apron -

opaque, scumbled,
the lazulis of the horizon becoming

optical greys
before your eyes
before your eyes
in my ankle-length
summer skirt

crossing between
the garden and the house,
under the whitebeam trees,
keeping an eye on
the length of the grass,
the height of the hedge,
the distance of the children

I am Chardin's woman

edged in reflected light,
hardened by
the need to be ordinary.

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by Eavan Boland, 1987

The Death of Fred Clifton

11/10/84
Age 49


I seemed to be drawn
to the center of myself
leaving the edges of me
in the hands of my wife
and I saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that I had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning,
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.

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by Lucille Clifton

In Fog

In fog a tree steps back.

Once gone, it joins those hordes
blizzards rage for over tundra.

With new respect I tell
my dreams to grant all claims;

Lavishly, my eyes close between
what they saw and that far flood

Inside: the universe happens
deep and steadily.

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by William Stafford, 1967

The Crack

While snow fell carelessly
floating indifferent in eddies of
rooftop air, circling the black
chimney-cowls,

a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed window,
wearing

a loose Russian shirt of
light silk.
                For this, then,
that slanting
line was left, that crack, the pane
never replaced.

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by Denise Levertov, 1963

Walking the Dunes

In the movies when the hero is about to die,
He scatters a few phrases in a place like this,
Hoping the words will come up again
Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him
As now they do for us.

Someone has planted a row of little trees
To stop the wind. Instead they've learned
To bend like the elect
In one direction only; they know
The sea will shatter them.

Isn't it always like this?
Something uncontrollable becomes the hero,
Taking off its dress, the ice plants
Sunburn from the center out
So we can see their deaths

Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours,
We are allowed again the glare
Of the sand, the druid hills,
The grasses brushing the legs, though
Just to have felt it once would have been enough.

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by Brenda Hillman, 1985

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us;
strong forces, weak forces,
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

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by Jane Hirshfield, 1988

Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon's sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake -
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us as we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

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by Peter Everwine, 2008

from Jiangnan Melodies

Floating with the current I pull waterweed leaves.
Along the banks I pick tender reed shoots.
To avoid disturbing two mandarin ducks,
I let my painted boat slide gently.

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by Chu Guangxi, 742 AD

My Grandmother's Love Letters

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

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by Hart Crane, 1920

That the Science of Cartography is Limited

- and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

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by Eavan Boland, 1994

In Favor of One's Time

The spent purpose of a perfectly marvellous
life suddenly glimmers and leaps into flame
it's more difficult than you think to make charcoal
it's also pretty hard to remember life's marvellous
but there it is guttering choking than soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it's practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least something's going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness or peat

an angel flying slowly, curiously singes its wings
and you diminish for a moment out of respect
for beauty then flare up after all that's the angel
that wrestled with Jacob and loves conflict
as an athlete loves the tape, and we're off into
an immortal contest of actuality and pride
which is love assuming the consciousness of itself
as sky over all, medium of finding and founding
not just resemblance but the magnetic otherness
that that that stands erect in the spirit's glare
and waits for the joining of an opposite force's breath

so come the winds into our lives and last
longer than despair's sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvellous is not just a poet's greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights

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by Frank O'Hara, 1960

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it is a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

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by Adrienne Rich, 1972