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