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