Poetry
Train-Track Figure
Kay Ryan
Imagine a
train-track figure
made of sliver
over sliver of
between-car
vision, each
slice too brief
to add detail
or deepen: that
could be a hat
if it’s a person
if it’s a person
if it’s a person.
Just the same
scant information
timed to supplant
the same scant
information.
Saracen Island [excerpt 9]
David Solway (writing as Andreas Karavis)
We are standing on a bridge of chalk
imagining the ship,
sheltering from the snap-and-gust
of deck-wind.
We do not speak to one another
as we watch
the bright quicksilver islands
sail past us into
the glittering skein of sea light
—as if through a clear pane
that divides as it discloses.
We cannot make contact,
throw the rope into waiting hands and
enter into the life of these islands
which have become sheer mirrors
reflecting only ourselves
(we who have been assigned to haunt them)
in the stretch of lonely beach before us
as the sun hisses into the sea
to be put out,
in the film of moon-bleached rock
that rises like a mist above us.
Dream Days
Derek Mahon
When you stop to consider
The days spent dreaming of a future
And say then, “That was my life.”
For the days are long —
From the first milk van
To the last shout in the night,
An eternity. But the weeks go by
Like birds; and the years, the years
Fly past anti-clockwise
Like clock hands in a bar mirror.
The Wind
Ivor Gurney
All night the fierce wind blew —
All night I knew
Time, like a dark wind, blowing
All days, all lives, all memories
Down empty endless skies —
A blind wind, strowing
Bright leaves of life's torn tree
through blank eternity:
Dreadfully swift, Time blew.
All night I knew
the outrush of its going.
At dawn a thin rain wept.
Worn out, I slept
And woke to a fair morning.
My days were amply long, and I content
In their accomplishment —
Lost the wind's warning.
Illusions
Kay Sage
There was an old woman
who hadn’t a thing to wear
except holes.
So she sewed the holes together
and dressed herself with care;
but people passed her in the street
as though she were not there.
The Truisms
Louis MacNeice
His father gave him a box of truisms
Shaped like a coffin, then his father died;
The truisms remained on the mantelpiece
As wooden as the playbox they had been packed in
Or that other his father skulked inside.
Then he left home, left the truisms behind him
Still on the mantelpiece, met love, met war,
Sordor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal,
Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house
He could not remember seeing before.
And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from
And something told him the way to behave.
He raised his hand and blessed his home;
The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders
And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave.
Creeping Phlox
Amit Majmudar
Creeping flux is how my mom pronounced it.
Soon, she said, it will spread everywhere.
And it did. All around us, houses
reverted to sawdust. The knee of bone
on bone that kept locking up
changed out with a titanium hinge,
she fought the entropy of weeds
with phlox, white and blue, a static mirror
of bygone clouds in a sky that was just
passing through. Was her heartbeat
fluctuating, fluttering even then?
Change was creeping up her legs, a trellis
of veins. Which one of those blue lines
mapped the river you can’t step into
twice? You can’t live the same childhood
twice. You can’t cremate the same mother
twice. Some flowers are pollinated only
with ashes. Unless what changes, changes
back. I want alteration to hide
alternation: boyhood manhood, casket
bassinet, forest fire. Fluxes are perennial,
she told me as I knelt beside her
at the altar. These will come back
every season. Even after I am gone.
Partition
W. H. Auden
Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
"Time," they had briefed him in London, "is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you."
Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
The River
Patrick MacDonogh
Stir not, whisper not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river,
Whose whispering willows,
Whose murmuring reeds
Make silence more still
Than the thought it breeds,
Until thought drops down
From the motionless mind
Like a quiet brown leaf
Without any wind;
It falls on the river
And floats with its flowing,
Unhurrying still
Past caring, past knowing.
Ask not, answer not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river.
Untitled
Robert Melançon
We walked along the river’s edge to see
the night streaming time rushing past
between the shores drowned in darkness.
The wind flowed, the air flowed,
the black that was all the immensity
of space flowed from every side.
We heard only the water, and felt as if
the whole of the dark was enlarging,
rising like a fountain and pouring back
into itself, into the redundant blackness,
into the rippling air, the fluid night and
into the river lashed with reflections.
The Aboriginal Cricketer
Les Murray
Mid-19th century
Good-looking young man
in your Crimean shirt
with your willow shield
up, as if to face spears,
you're inside their men's Law,
one church they do obey;
they'll remember you were here.
Keep fending off their casts.
Don't come out of character.
Like you they suspect
idiosyncrasy of witchcraft.
Above all, don't get out
too easily, and have to leave here
where all missiles are just leather
and come from one direction.
Keep it noble. Keep it light.
Stooping to Drink
David Malouf
Smelling the sweet grass
of distant hills, too steep
to climb, too far to see
in this handful of water
scooped from the river dam.
Touching the sky where like
a single wing my hand
dips through clouds. Tasting
the shadow of basket-willows,
the colour of ferns.
A perch, spoon-coloured, climbs
where the moon sank, trailing
bubbles of white,
and school kids on picnics
swing from a rope — head
over sunlit heels like angels
they plunge into the sun
at midday, into silence
of pinewoods hanging over
a sunken hill-farm.
Taking all this in
at the lips, holding it
in the cup of the hand.
And further down the hiss
of volcanoes, rockfall
and hot metals cooling
in blueblack depths a hundred
centuries back.
Taking all this in
as the water takes it: sky
sunlight, sweet grass-flavours
and the long-held breath
of children — a landscape
mirrored, held a moment,
and let go again.
The Serving Girl
Gladys May Casely Hayford (Aquah Laluah)
The calabash wherein she served my food,
Was smooth and polished as sandalwood:
Fish, as white as the foam of the sea,
Peppered, and golden fried for me.
She brought palm wine that carelessly slips
From the sleeping palm tree’s honeyed lips.
But who can guess, or even surmise
The countless things she served with her eyes?
To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth
(third stanza)
Phillis Wheatley
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
In Memoriam
Norman MacCaig
On that stormy night
a top branch broke off
on the biggest tree in my garden.
It's still up there. Though its leaves
are withered black among the green
the living branches
won't let it fall.
Untitled (“In the midst of the plain”)
Bashō, trans. by R. H. Blyth
In the midst of the plain
Sings the skylark,
Free of all things.
Untitled (“The Soft Breeze”)
Shiki (trans. R. H. Blyth)
The soft breeze,
And in the green of a thousand hills,
A single temple.
Peace at Noon
Arthur Symons
Here there is peace, cool peace,
Upon these heights, beneath these trees;
Almost the peace of sleep or death,
To wearying brain, to labouring breath.
Here there is rest at last,
A sweet forgetting of the past;
There is no future here, nor aught
Save this soft healing pause of thought.
Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Mrs Icarus
Carol Ann Duffy
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.
N.B.: “Pillock” is British slang for a stupid or foolish person.
Quatrain
Rumi (Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī), trans. Farrukh Dhondy
Know only that which makes the unknown known
Before the sands of fleeting life are blown
What you think you’ve grasped is but a void
The bird in hand is that one which has flown
Cause and Effect
Rumi (Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī), trans. Farrukh Dhondy
The branch exists only to bear the fruit
The knowledge of which resides in the root
Would a gardener plant and tend the vine
Without the promise of the grape and wine?
Before this truth let all your reason pause
What you thought was effect, is but the cause.
Lot’s Wife
Anthony Hecht
How simple the pleasures of those childhood days,
Simple but filled with exquisite satisfactions.
The iridescent labyrinth of the spider,
Its tethered tensor nest of polygons
Puffed by the breeze to a little bellying sail --
Merely observing this gave infinite pleasure.
The sound of rain. The gentle graphite veil
Of rain that makes of the world a steel engraving,
Full of soft fadings and faint distances.
The self-congratulations of a fly,
Rubbing its hands. The brown bicameral brain
Of a walnut. The smell of wax. The feel
Of sugar to the tongue: a delicious sand.
One understands immediately how Proust
Might cherish all such postage-stamp details.
Who can resist the charms of retrospection?
Footnotes on Happiness
A. S. J. Tessimond
Happiness filters
Out through a crack in the door, through the net's reticulations. But also in.
The old cat Patience
Watching the hole with folded paws and quiet tail
Can seldom catch it.
Timetables fail.
It rarely stands at a certain moment a certain day
At a certain bus-stop.
You cannot say
It will keep an appointment, or pass the same street corner twice. Nor say it won't.
Lavender, ice,
Camphor, glass cases, vacuum chambers hermetically sealed, Won't keep it fresh.
It will not yield
Except to the light, the careless, the accidental hand,
And easily bruises.
It is brittle as sand.
It is more and less than you hoped to find. It has never quite
Your own ideas.
It shows no spite
Or favour in choosing its host. It is, like God,
Casual, odd.
Comment by Stephen Pentz, “First Known When Lost” poetry blog: “Tessimond rhymes the second line of the first stanza with the first line of the second stanza (and so on through all eight stanzas) — a clever touch that ties the ‘footnotes’ together.”
Nero's Deadline
C. P. Cavafy, trans. by Daniel Mendelsohn
Nero wasn’t troubled when he heard
the Delphic Oracle’s prophecy.
“Let him beware the age of seventy-three.”
He still had time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. It’s quite sufficient,
the deadline that the god is giving him,
for him to think about dangers yet to come.
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little wearied,
but exquisitely wearied by this trip,
which had been wholly devoted to days of delight—
in the theaters, in the gardens, the gymnasia…
Evenings of the cities of Achaea…
Ah, the pleasure of naked bodies above all…
So Nero. And in Spain, Galba
is secretly assembling his army and preparing it:
the old man, seventy-three years old.
Note: Galba’s army defeated Nero’s army. Galba became the new Roman Emperor, while Nero committed suicide assisted by his secretary.
Thermopylae
C. P. Cavafy, trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they’re rich, and when they’re poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping whenever they can;
always speaking the truth
yet without hating those who lie.
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.
Note: Ephialtis was the Malian Greek who led the Persians along a goat path where they blocked then slaughtered the Spartan-led Greeks at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, 480 BC. Medes refers to the Persians.
High Diver
Robert Francis
How deep is his duplicity who in a flash
Passes from resting bird to flying bird to fish,
Who momentarily is sculpture, then all motion,
Speed and splash, then climbs again to contemplation.
He is the archer who himself is bow and arrow.
He is the upper-under-world commuting hero.
His downward going has the air of sacrifice
To some dark seaweed-bearded seagod face to face
Or goddess. Rippling and responsive lies the water
For him to contemplate, then powerfully to enter.
Pitcher
Robert Francis
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.
Visit to an Artist
Elizabeth Jennings
Window upon the wall, a balcony
With a light chair, the air and water so
Mingled you could not say which was the sun
And which the adamant yet tranquil spray.
But nothing was confused and nothing slow:
Each way you looked, always the sea, the sea.
And every shyness that we brought with us
Was drawn into the pictures on the walls.
It was so good to set quite still and lose
Necessity of discourse, words to choose
And wonder which were honest and which false.
Then I remembered words that you had said
Of art as gesture and as sacrament,
A mountain under the calm form of paint
Much like the Presence under wine and bread –
Art with its largesse and its own restraint.
Part for the Whole
Robert Francis
When others run to windows or out of doors
To catch the sunset whole, he is content
With any segment anywhere he sits.
From segment, fragment, he can reconstruct
The whole, prefers to reconstruct the whole,
As if to say, I see more seeing less.
A window to the east will serve as well
As window to the west, for eastern sky
Echoes the western sky. And even less—
A patch of light that picture-glass happens
To catch from window-glass, fragment of fragment,
Flawed, distorted, dulled, nevertheless
Gives something unglassed nature cannot give:
The old obliquity of art, and proves
Part may be more than whole, least may be best.
Diminishing Returns
Susan McLean
On noticing that, in rejection slips, size matters
Most journals seem intent on conservation:
a half sheet for a personal rejection,
a quarter sheet for stock elimination.
What future shrinkage waits for my inspection?
A fortune cookie’s squib for my perusal—
Same chance in hell as last year’s ball of snow—
or, worse, the grim confetti of refusal:
a rain of dots, each stamped with a small no.
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
Howard Nemerov
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Lily of the Valley
Rhina P. Espaillat
Down on my knees to clear away what’s lost,
I track them by their fragrance first, and then
fall into their green ambush, find the frost
of their unlikely bivouac again
under the blackened leaves of winter kill.
Who would have held out hope for them, so much
around them ravaged, brought to nil
by small degrees, long nights, January’s touch!
Blessed be all that lives to come unbidden
to our astonished love—the bloom, the child,
each serendipitous joy that springs half hidden
from last year’s death, this human gift for wild
surprised retrieval out of less and less,
this gift of tongues that teaches us to bless.
Psalm
Dorianne Laux
Lord, there are creatures in the understory,
snails with whorled backs and silver boots,
trails beetles weave in grass, black rivers
of ants, unbound ladybugs opening their wings,
spotted veils and flame, untamed choirs
of banjo-colored crickets and stained-glass cicadas.
Lord, how shall we count the snakes and frogs
and moths? How shall we love the hidden
and small? Mushrooms beneath leaves
constructing their death domes in silence,
their silken gills and mycelial threads, cap scales
and patches, their warts and pores. And the buried
bulbs that will bloom in spring, pregnant with flower
and leaf, sing Prepare for My Radiance, Prepare
for the Pageantry of My Inevitable Surprise.
Note on the April First author: Trébōr Ydênnęk was raised in a quaint Eastern European village spelled with a lot of consonants and diacritical marks. Later immigrating to the U.S., he attended the Nipsey Russell Academy of Verse. After being expelled, he quickly, and thankfully, sank into obscurity.
An Elephant and a Leporid Walk into a Bar
Trébōr Ydênnęk
Miss Annabel Le Banna,
the palindromic pachyderm,
was genial in nature,
but on one thing she stood rock firm.
While seated in her favorite haunt
for a nip of eau de vie,
she insisted on attention
from the mustached maître d’.
Viscount Harold Herald,
the homophonic hare,
‘tween sips of gin and lime
looked up slyly to stare.
As the waiter neared their corner
with some peanuts for the pair
Harold’s schadenfreude sprang up:
love would soon turn to despair.
“I suggest we skip the cheese course,”
he confided across the table.
“To avoid a scene of chaos,
map an escape route while you’re able.”
Perplexed by the odd advice,
Anna thought the baron quite mad.
Her gaze transfixed on the sight
of the approaching Galahad.
Harold’s nose twitched at the cool rebuff
from the myopic, ivoried upstart.
He squeezed the twist as he softly spoke,
“’Tis a mouse you’ve let into your heart.”
Amidst clanging trays, upended guests,
with sounds of a trumpet blare,
the tippled musophobe left apace
reaching safety by a hair.
Meh
Trébōr Ydênnęk
Since pococurante won the spelling bee,
should that make a great difference to me?
Will it enrich my life with lexical ornamentation,
or simply slip my tongue with syllabic frustration?
Whatever the outcome will ultimately be,
the sting of the contest is a fait accompli.
Note: Sai Gunturi won the 2003 National Spelling Bee by spelling “pococurante” correctly. Pococurante means “indifferent” and is derived from the Italian word for “caring little.”
Visiting the Taoist Priest Chang
Liu Changqing
Under the faint trail’s guidance, I discover
a footprint in the phosphorescent moss,
a tranquil lake where low clouds like to hover,
a lonely door enhanced by rampant grass,
a pine grown greener since the thundershowers
and cold springs fed by mountains far away.
Mingling with these truths among the flowers,
I have forgotten what I came to say.
[untitled]
Nōin (988-1050), translated by Steven Carter
To a mountain village
at nightfall on a spring day
I came and saw this:
blossoms scattering on echoes
from the vespers bell.
Crowded Skies
A. M. Juster [Michael J. Astrue]
As a matter of fact, I did notice
a sow followed by a string of piglets,
straining to stay airborne
with their unfamiliar wings
as they crossed my line of vision
outside the kitchen window.
Then the doorbell rang,
and I found a crisply dressed
but sumptuous woman at my door.
She announced she was
from the Registry of Motor Vehicles,
apologized for the long line of the past,
and handed me my new license.
When she asked if there was anything else
she could do for me,
I had a failure of imagination.
Then the phone throbbed.
It was Blue Cross Blue Shield,
apologizing for the three years
they spent trying to bill me
for a very expensive hysterectomy
I never had.
They said they fired the incompetents
simplified everything,
and my next operation was on them.
When the mail came that afternoon,
there was a sweet-smelling, handwritten note
from the cheerleader who rejected
my invitation to the junior prom.
She regretted any distress
her handling of that matter
might have caused me.
I gather air traffic controllers
are up in arms about the crowded skies,
but they will work it out,
I’m sure.
The Pier
W. R. Rodgers
Only a placid sea, and
A pier where no boat comes,
But people stand at the end
And spit into the water,
Dimpling it, and watch a dog
That chins and churns back to land.
I had come here to see
Humbug embark, deported,
Protected from the crowd.
But he has not come today.
And anyway there is no boat
To take him. And no one cares.
So Humbug still walks our land
On stilts, is still looked up to.
Rootbound
Rose Kelleher
Every cell still tells it to dig in the dirt
as far as roots can reach; to make it rain
upside down, to fly in earth, to stretch
down, away from the sun, finding the route
to heaven through a harder, darker sky.
Flying Crooked
Robert Graves
The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has -- who knows so well as I? --
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
Message Taken
Norman MacCaig
On a day of almost no wind,
today,
I saw two leaves falling almost, not quite,
perpendicularly -- which
seemed natural.
When I got closer, I saw
the leaves on the tree were
slanted by that wind, were pointing
towards those that had fallen.
When I got closer than that, I saw
the leaves on the tree
were trembling.
And that seemed natural too.
Everything is Going to be All Right
Derek Mahon
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Byzantine Coin
Dick Davis
How many hands, vicissitudes,
Have worn this gold to the thin ghost
That gleams in the shopkeeper’s palm?
A millennium flickers, eludes
Us, is gone, as we bend engrossed
In blurred words and a surface charm.
Peace at Noon
Arthur Symons
Here there is peace, cool peace,
Upon these heights, beneath these trees;
Almost the peace of sleep or death,
To wearying brain, to labouring breath.
Here there is rest at last,
A sweet forgetting of the past;
There is no future here, nor aught
Save this soft healing pause of thought.
A Belated Discovery
Siegfried Sassoon
Admitting ignorance, comprehensive and uncharted,
Of all that is beyond my localized concerns,
I come to the conclusion — cocksure though I started —
That next to nothing known is the last thing one learns.
This world, encyclopaedic subject, for my mind
Remains existent as an undiscovered land:
Therefore the apparition named myself I find
The only matter that I can hope to understand.
One Almost Might
A. S. J. Tessimond
Wouldn't you say,
Wouldn't you say: one day,
With a little more time or a little more patience, one might
Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight
One of the moment's hundred strands, unfray
Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey
Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch
Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch
Or cuff or bruise but touch with finger-tip, ear-
Tip, eyetip, creeping near yet not too near);
Might take up life and lay it on one's palm
And, encircling it in closeness, warmth and calm,
Let it lie still, then stir smooth-softly, and
Tendril by tendril unfold, there on one's hand . . .
One might examine eternity's cross-section
For a second, with slightly more patience, more time for reflection?
Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother
A. E. Stallings
First—hell is not so far underground—
My hair gets tangled in the roots of trees
& I can just make out the crunch of footsteps,
The pop of acorns falling, or the chime
Of a shovel squaring a fresh grave or turning
Up the tulip bulbs for separation.
Day & night, creatures with no legs
Or too many, journey to hell and back.
Alas, the burrowing animals have dim eyesight.
They are useless for news of the upper world.
They say the light is "loud" (their figures of speech
All come from sound; their hearing is acute).
The dead are just as dull as you would imagine.
They evolve like the burrowing animals—losing their sight.
They may roam abroad sometimes—but just at night—
They can only tell me if there was a moon.
Again and again, moth-like, they are duped
By any beckoning flame—lamps and candles.
They come back startled & singed, sucking their fingers,
Happy the dirt is cool and dense and blind.
They are silly & grateful and don't remember anything.
I have tried to tell them stories, but they cannot attend.
They pester you like children for the wrong details—
How long were his fingernails? Did she wear shoes?
How much did they eat for breakfast? What is snow?
And then they pay no attention to the answers.
My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.
But here there is no fodder for small talk.
The weather is always the same. Nothing happens.
(Though at times I feel the trees, rocking in place
Like grief, clenching the dirt with tortuous toes.)
There is nothing to eat here but raw beets & turnips.
There is nothing to drink but mud-filtered rain.
Of course, no one goes hungry or toils, however many—
(The dead breed like the bulbs of daffodils—
Without sex or seed—all underground—
Yet no race has such increase. Worse than insects!)
I miss you and think about you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Though I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same thing as mushrooms.
Yet no dog is so loyal as the dead,
Who have no wives or children and no lives,
No motives, secret or bare, to disobey.
Plus, my husband is a kind, kind master;
He asks nothing of us, nothing, nothing at all—
Thus fall changes to winter, winter to fall,
While we learn idleness, a difficult lesson.
He does not understand why I write letters.
He says that you will never get them. True—
Mulched-leaf paper sticks together, then rots;
No ink but blood, and it turns brown like the leaves.
He found my stash of letters, for I had hid it,
Thinking he'd be angry. But he never angers.
He took my hands in his hands, my shredded fingers
Which I have sliced for ink, thin paper cuts.
My effort is futile, he says, and doesn't forbid it.
Bouquet
Julia Nemirovskaya trans. Boris Dralyuk
No, I won’t throw it out, for the sake of that tulip:
still fresh and so white, that satiny curl—
a sea-captain’s collar folded over his tunic,
a theatrical backcloth, like a windowless wall.
Its petals are like cupped and half-turned palms,
Its bloom a head, a gleaming cherry in its mouth.
…if it must go, let somebody else throw it out—
As God will say of me when my turn comes.
An Observation
May Sarton
True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.
[Untitled]
Kishū, trans. by R. H. Blyth
An autumn evening;
Without a cry,
A crow passes
A Day in Autumn
R. S. Thomas
It will not always be like this,
The air windless, a few last
Leaves adding their decoration
To the trees' shoulders, braiding the cuffs
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening
In the lawn's mirror. Having looked up
From the day's chores, pause a minute,
Let the mind take its photograph
Of the bright scene, something to wear
Against the heart in the long cold.
A Reading
Wendy Cope
Everybody in this room is bored.
The poems drag, the voice and gestures irk.
He can’t be interrupted or ignored.
Poor fools, we came here of our own accord,
And some of us have paid to hear this jerk.
Everybody in this room is bored.
The silent cry goes up, “How long, O Lord?”
But nobody will scream or go berserk.
He won’t be interrupted or ignored,
Or hit by eggs, or savaged by a horde
Of desperate people maddened by his work.
Everybody in this room is bored,
Except the poet. We are his reward,
Pretending to indulge his every quirk.
He won’t be interrupted or ignored.
At last it’s over. How we all applaud!
The poet thanks us with a modest smirk.
Everybody in the room was bored.
He wasn’t interrupted or ignored.
Rummage Sale
X. J. Kennedy
Here are the dregs of bookshelves cast aside:
Book of the Month Club choices now refused,
The memoirs of some general swelled with pride,
Labor-intensive cookbooks still unused—
The castoffs of a season of demeaning,
Cleared from the house relentlessly as sweepers
Rout dust clouds in a merciless spring cleaning.
Book buyers these folks were, but not book keepers.
I wonder at this thick tome’s long regress,
Hacked out by one whose fame and sales were stellar,
Now cast down from the tower of success
To molder in a spiderwebbed best cellar.
Leaves
Derek Mahon
The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.
It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.
Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfilment.
How to Live
Horace, Ode 11, Book 1, translated by Derek Mahon
Don't waste your time, Leuconoe*, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisible future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine. The days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.
*loo-CON-oh-way
[Untitled]
Chiyo-ni (1701-1775) trans. by R. H. Blyth
Autumn's bright moon,
However far I walked, still afar off
In an unknown sky.
[Untitled]
Kotomichi (1798-1868) trans. by R. H. Blyth
Down from the mountain,
The moon
Accompanied me,
And when I opened the gate,
The moon too entered.
Portrait of an Administrator with Strategic Plan and Office Supplies
Jehanne Dubrow
To sit on her couch was to be silenced
by upholstery, plush muffling of cushions
from which it was difficult to rise.
Arendt writes, in politics obedience
and support are the same, and for a time
I was obedient, my reports in ordered bullets:
collaborations, programs, opportunities.
The provost preferred speech contained—
a line of staples in a box. I remember
the fold between one week and the next.
She said to me, these people are unreasonable.
She said, these people are quite reasonable.
Inside her office everything was cream.
She told me what I heard I hadn’t heard,
our last meeting like a memo full of typos
whited out, then shuffled through
the copier machine, language turned to shiny blurs.
Arendt writes, most people will comply.
For a time, it was easy to ignore the sharp
wedge of the provost’s hair. I should have seen
she resembled more a letter opener on a desk,
how like a knife the piece of metal looks.
I told her what I heard I heard.
I told her that my expertise was words.
Arendt writes, the holes of oblivion do not exist.
A gifted bureaucrat, the provost taught me
truth was thin as paper—the little circles
she punched in it remain, and still
I hold this punctured story to the light.
Smuggler
Norman MacCaig
Watch him when he opens
his bulging words—justice,
fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank look, his visas, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light.
Nobody with such luggage
has nothing to declare.
There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings
Donald Justice
1
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,
And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
Share in its charity equally with the cross.
2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
I say the song went this way: O prolong
Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.
3
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
[Note: The first stanza refers to Christ’s crucifixion, the second to a scene from the Orpheus myth, and third is a paraphrase of the character Sonya Alexandrovna speaking in Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.]
Aurora
Timothy Steele
Your sleep is so profound
This room seems a recess
Awaiting consciousness.
Gauze curtains, drawn around
The postered bed, confute
Each waking attribute—
Volition, movement, sound.
Outside, though, chilly light
Shivers a puddle’s coil
Of iridescent oil;
Windows, sun-struck, ignite;
Doves strut along the edge
Of roof- and terrace-ledge
And drop off into flight.
And soon enough you’ll rise.
Long-gowned and self-aware,
Brushing life through your hair,
You’ll notice with surprise
The way your glass displays,
Twin-miniatured, your face
In your reflective eyes.
Goddess, it’s you in whom
Our clear hearts joy and chafe.
Awaken, then, Vouchsafe
Ideas to resume.
Draw back the drapes: let this
Quick muffled emphasis
Flood light across the room.
Fireflies flying
Ikkadō Jōa (translated by Steven Carter)
Fireflies flying
in gaps between branches --
a grove of stars.
I Love to See the Summer
John Clare
I love to see the summer beaming forth
And white wool sack clouds sailing to the north
I love to see the wild flowers come again
And mare blobs stain with gold the meadow drain
And water lilies whiten on the floods
Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood
Where from her hiding place the Moor Hen pushes
And seeks her flag nest floating in bull rushes
I like the willow leaning half way o'er
The clear deep lake to stand upon its shore
I love the hay grass when the flower head swings
To summer winds and insects happy wings
That sport about the meadow the bright day
And see bright beetles in the clear lake play
The Wood
Andrew Young
Summer’s green tide rises in flood
Foaming with elder-blossom in the wood,
And insects hawk, gold-striped and blue,
On motion-hidden wings the air looks through,
And ‘Buzz, buzz, buzz’,
Gaily hums Sir Pandarus,
As blue ground-ivy blossom
Bends with the weight of a bee in its bosom.
Heavy with leaves the bough lean over
The path where midges in a loose ball hover,
And daisies and slow-footed moss
And thin grass creep across,
Till scarcely on the narrow path
The sparrow finds a dusty bath,
And caterpillars from the leaves
Arch their green backs on my coat-sleeves.
Bright as a bird the small sun flits
Through shaking leaves that tear the sky in bits,
But let the leaf-lit boughs draw closer,
I in the dark will feel no loser
With myself for companion.
Grow, leafy boughs; darken, O sun,
For here two robins mate
That winter held apart in a cold hate.
The Minor Masters
Boris Dralyuk
On Santa Monica I know someone who’ll etch
forms of a hair’s breadth in a rubber stamp.
No molds or lasers: just the human touch.
If darkness overwhelms an heirloom lamp,
head west on Beverly, and east of Kings you’ll find
Pairpoint’s Prometheus. If age brittles a book,
on Cahuenga there’s a man who’ll bind
its outcast leaves. Such people make things look
Immune to time and innocent of pain,
intact, immaculate, as none of us remain.
Long live the masters whose quaint crafts are holy.
They work in solitude. Now by appointment only.
Rummage Sale
X. J. Kennedy
Here are the dregs of bookshelves cast aside:
Book of the Month Club choices now refused,
The memoirs of some general swelled with pride,
Labor-intensive cookbooks still unused—
The castoffs of a season of demeaning,
Cleared from the house relentlessly as sweepers
Rout dust clouds in a merciless spring cleaning.
Book buyers these folks were, but not book keepers.
I wonder at this thick tome’s long regress,
Hacked out by one whose fame and sales were stellar,
Now cast down from the tower of success
To molder in a spiderwebbed best cellar.
Twilight
Ryōkan, translated by John Stevens
Twilight — the only conversation
on this hill
Is the wind blowing through the pines.
Anima
John Hall Wheelock
The silence there
Had a certain thing to say could not be said
By harp or oboe, flute or violoncello
Or by the lesser strings; it could not be said
By the human voice; but in sea-sounds you heard it
Perhaps, or in the water-dripping jargon
Of summer birds: endless reiteration
Of chat or vireo, the woodcock’s call,
Chirrup and squeegee, larrup, squirt and trill
Of liquid syrinxes – bright drops of song
Spangling the silence.
Man in a Park
Elizabeth Jennings
One lost in thought of what his life might mean
Sat in a park and watched the children play,
Did nothing, spoke to no one, but all day
Composed his life around the happy scene.
And when the sun went down and keepers came
To lock the gates, and all the voices were
Swept to a distance where no sounds could stir,
This man continued playing his odd game.
Thus, without protest, he went to the gate,
Heard the key turn and shut his eyes until
He felt that he had made the whole place still,
Being content simply to watch and wait.
So one can live, like patterns under glass,
And, like those patterns, not committing harm.
This man continued faithful to his calm,
Watching the children playing on the grass.
But what if someone else should also sit
Beside him on the bench and play the same
Watching and counting, self-preserving game,
Building a world with him no part of it?
If he is truthful to his vision he
Will let the dark intruder push him from
His place, and in the softly gathering gloom
Add one more note to his philosophy.
Below the Surface-Stream
Matthew Arnold
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel — below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel — there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
The Bright Field
R. S. Thomas
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Quiet, Now
Rhina P. Espaillat
Quiet, now; the wind is reading a story,
riffling through green volumes of spruce and balsam,
unearthing fables from the runes of lichen,
elucidating parables of crows propped
open on the lectern of naked maples.
Patience: the wind is reading a long story
with miracles in it, rumors of the marsh
weeping for joy over the sky’s reflection,
promise of resurrections, of pale crocus
lifting its crown from the wreckage of summer.
Skimming every field, uncovering old plots
on those white pages time writes on, the wind goes
where the snake waits in its hold, deaf as the heart
in its cage of longing. Be still now: listen:
the wind, the wind is reading you a story.
The Swan Song
Joshua Mehigan
The retired actor watched the sky grow dim.
The porch, walled in by junipers and stone,
seemed a setting, a set, for someone else,
though it was his alone.
He leaned along the wall as he once had
at restaurant bars to eavesdrop on the chatter,
though here the alders asked continually
the same thing: “What’s the matter?”
But then, sometimes, gravel against a tire,
or the blown page of a book left on his chair,
or ice that settled in a forlorn glass
applauded his despair.
Those times he’d step inside the sliding door,
enchanted with his high, tragic style,
pull down the curtains on the maudlin moon,
and crack his old, arch smile.
Winter Garden
Norman MacCaig
The dunnock in the hedge—is he fearful
or fastidious? His eyes are fixed on the bird table
where five free-for-all sparrows
peck in a shower bath of crumbs.
A mouse zigzags
among the frozen raspberry canes,
going nowhere elaborately.
Three apple trees look as if they'd get on rehearsing
as Macbeth's witches
if they had the energy.
And, only seven hours old,
the day begins to die.
—The sparrows have gone, telling everybody, and the dunnock
is giving us all
a lesson in table manners.
Untitled
Bashō, translated by Robert Hass
A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
Shinto
Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Hoyt Rogers
When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.
Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us —
touch us and move on.
Rooster
Eric Ormsby
For Tippy
I like the way the rooster lifts his feet,
So jauntily exact,
Then drops one springy yellow claw aloft
Just like a tailor gathering up a pleat.
And then there are those small surprising lilts,
Both rollicking and staid,
That grace his bishop’s gait,
Like a waltzer on a pair of supple stilts
Or a Russian on parade.
I like the way he swivels and then slants
His red, demented eye
To tipsy calibrations of his comb
And ogles the barnyard with a shopkeeper’s stance.
Sometimes his glossy wattles shudder and bulge
As he bends his feathered ear
And listens, fixed in trance,
When drowsy grubs below the ground indulge
And then stretch up for air,
How promptly he administers his peck,
Brisk and executive,
And the careless victim flipflops in his grip!
I like the way his stubby little beak
Produces that dark, corroded croak
Like a grudging nail tugged out of stubborn wood:
No ‘cock-a-doodle-doo” but awk-a-awkI!
He yawps whenever he’s in the mood
And the thirst and clutch of life are in his squawk.
Chiefly I love the delicate attention
Of the waking light that falls
Along his shimmery wings and bubbling plumes
As though light pleasured in tangerine and gentian
Or sported like some splashy kid with paints.
But Rooster forms his own cortège, gowns
Himself in marigold and shadow, flaunts
His scintillant, prismatic tints—
The poorest glory of a country town.
Vultures Mating
Dana Gioia
On the branch of a large dead tree
a vulture sits, stinking of carrion.
She is ripe with the perfume of her fertility.
Half a dozen males circle above her,
slowly gliding on the thermals.
One by one, the huge birds settle
stiffly beside her on the limb,
stretching their wings, inflating their chests,
holding their red scabrous heads erect.
Their nostrils dilate with desire.
The ritual goes on for hours.
These bald scavengers pay court politely—
like overdressed princes in an old romance—
circling, stretching, yearning,
waiting for her to choose.
The stink and splendor of fertility
arouses the world. The rotting log
flowers with green moss. The fallen chestnut
splits and drives its root into the soil.
The golden air pours down its pollen.
Desire brings all things back to earth,
charging them to circle, stretch, and preen—
the buzzard or the princess, the scorpion, the rose—
each damp and fecund bud yearning to burst,
to burn, to blossom, to begin.
The Yellowjackets Speak
Peter Vertacnik
“Most homeowners consider yellowjackets a pest, but their diet actually makes them an important part of garden pest control.”
You recognized too late we were not bees
and, stung repeatedly too near our nest
in the garden you were certain you possessed,
immediately deemed us enemies.
Even just one disrupted barbecue
was more than you could handle. “Kill them now!”
you squealed in comic rage, making a vow
to see us dead, yet careful to eschew
the act by calling on professionals,
who showed up promptly in protective gear
and felt, it seemed, neither disgust nor fear,
just as you felt guiltless. No confessionals
were needed here. In fact, you looked empowered.
Your flowers, though, will slowly be devoured.
Dirge Without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
February 18, 1943
Catherine Tufariello
In memory of Hans and Sophie Scholl,
Leaders of the White Rose student resistance movement,
executed February 22, 1943
I imagine how easily you could have gotten away,
Standing in the Ludwigstraße in the sun
That improbably springlike February day,
The not-quite-empty suitcase slung
Between you—like two students on holiday,
Let out of class, on your way to catch a train.
Relieved and out of breath,
You stood for a moment blinking in the sun,
Tasting the early spring that caught all Munich unawares
After bleak weeks of cold.
How hopeful the light must have looked, how far from death.
Was it that you suddenly felt young?
—Another nose-thumbing at the omnipotent State!
Or was it the recklessness of the desperate?
Not furtively, but in the pale spun-gold
Of full daylight, like farmers casting grain,
You’d left your leaflets scattered on the floors
In the hallways, on windowsills, at the doors
Of the lecture rooms, and, ignoring their stony stares,
In the marble laps of Ludwig and Leopold.
Was it the change in weather
That made your glances catch, a glance that said
Almost gaily, Why waste any? so that instead
Of slipping away as planned, you raced together
Back to the empty hall,
And up the stairs, to let the last ones fall?
I imagine, then, how you leaned from the great height
Of the gallery railing into a well of light;
How, giddy with boldness and vertigo,
You popped the latch, and—hurriedly this time—scooped
The leftover handfuls out.
For a few seconds, the pages must have swooped
Like wind-torn blossoms, sideways in the air,
Filling the gallery with a storm of white,
While under the skylight with its square of blue
Your arms were still flung wide;
And while, rounding a corner down below,
For just a moment, the porter, Jakob Schmid,
Must have stopped to stare,
Not indignant yet, but merely shocked,
Blinded for an instant by the glare,
Before he recovered himself and did
His job as he’d been taught;
Before milling students spilled into the hall
From morning lectures, but not quite fast enough;
Before Schmid gave a shout,
And surging forward in the tumult, caught
The dark-haired young man’s shoulder in a rough
Policeman’s grip that would not be shaken off,
Though he didn’t try, and the girl stayed by his side;
Before, in a sudden hush, the crowd withdrew,
And the doors all locked.
Footnotes on Happiness
A. S. J. Tessimond
Happiness filters
Out through a crack in the door, through the net's reticulations.
But also in.
The old cat Patience
Watching the hole with folded paws and quiet tail
Can seldom catch it.
Timetables fail.
It rarely stands at a certain moment a certain day
At a certain bus-stop.
You cannot say
It will keep an appointment, or pass the same street corner twice.
Nor say it won't.
Lavender, ice,
Camphor, glass cases, vacuum chambers hermetically sealed,
Won't keep it fresh.
It will not yield
Except to the light, the careless, the accidental hand,
And easily bruises.
It is brittle as sand.
It is more and less than you hoped to find. It has never quite
Your own ideas.
It shows no spite
Or favour in choosing its host. It is, like God,
Casual, odd.
Pad, pad
Stevie Smith
I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.
What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
Wallace Stevens
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur —
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone —
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
A Dead Mole
Andrew Young
Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?
Onto the Rain Porch
Takahama Kyoshi (trans. by Steven Carter)
Onto the rain porch
from somewhere outside it comes —
a fallen petal.
Thermopylae
C. P. Cavafy (trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they’re rich, and when they’re poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping whenever they can;
always speaking the truth
yet without hating those who lie.
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.
[Note: Ephialtis [or Ephialtes] was the Malian Greek who led the Persians (Medes) along a goat path where they blocked and slaughtered the Spartan-led Greeks at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, 480 BC.]
November Poem
E. Castendyk Briefs
Leaves
no wind
could wrench
from earlier
trees,
in this
windstill
now
let go.
Their fall
is soundless
vertical
as a spider’s
twig-
to-
ground
descent
deus
ex
machina.
Flowers by the Sea
William Carlos Williams
When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s
edge, unseen, the salt ocean
lifts its form—chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone
but color and the movement—or the shape
perhaps—of restlessness, whereas
the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem
The Jellyfish
Marianne Moore
Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.
The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles
A. E. Stallings
Believe what you want to. Believe that I wove,
If you wish, twenty years, and waited, while you
Were knee-deep in blood, hip-deep in goddesses.
I’ve not much to show for twenty years’ weaving—
I have but one half-finished cloth at the loom.
Perhaps it’s the lengthy, meticulous grieving.
Explain how you want to. Believe I unraveled
At night what I stitched in the slow siesta,
How I kept them all waiting for me to finish,
The suitors, you call them. Believe what you want to.
Believe that they waited for me to finish,
Believe that I beguiled them with nightly un-doings.
Believe what you want to. That they never touched me.
Believe your own stories, as you would have me do,
How you only survived by the wise infidelities.
Believe that each day you wrote me a letter
That never arrived. Kill all the damn suitors
If you think it will make you feel better.
Mrs. Lazarus
Eric Ormsby
Believe me, it isn’t easy
Even in a king-size bed
To sleep with the living dead.
You think I can enjoy
Buttering his morning toast
When the butter’s not so cold as his grey ghost?
And he’s always so theatrical:
‘Honey, what I’ve been through!’
I say, ‘Be a little stoical.
You could be lying in that sleazy
Mausoleum. Instead, you’re here. With me.’
And let me tell you straight,
It’s no mean trick to stimulate
A man like that
Fresh from a grimy grave;
He needs a paramedic just to shave.
At night his chilly skin
Sweats like a ripening cheese
And little bits keep dropping off
Till the poor guy’s scared to sneeze.
And the pills, the specialists, the life supports!
There’s even Streptomycin in his shorts.
I don’t like the way he sits and squints
Or tilts off to one side in his La-Z-Boy.
Wouldn’t you think he’d have a few small hints
For the living? Instead he whimpers Ach! Or Oy!
‘Honey,” is all he says, ‘it wasn’t Vegas!’
All night I smell his interrupted death.
It’s my own individual hell.
All night I hug his contagious
Carcass dripping with verminous breath.
I calm him as he dreams and squirms.
I who adore Chanel
Now lie down with worms.
Small Prayer
Weldon Kees
Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes.
Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen,
That time may find its sound again, and cleanse
Whatever it is that a wound remembers
After the healing ends.
The Owl
Edward Thomas
Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.
Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Carrying a Ladder
Kay Ryan
We are always
really carrying
a ladder, but it’s
invisible. We
only know
something’s
the matter:
something precious
crashes; easy doors
prove impassable.
Or, in the body,
there’s too much
swing or off-
center gravity.
And, in the mind,
a drunken capacity,
access to out-of-range
apples. As though
one had a way to climb
out of the damage
and apology.
The Critic
Rhina P. Espaillat
Regret reads us, trying to decide
what should have been deleted: words unsaid;
words we said wrong, whose echoes, multiplied
by time, play themselves over in a dark
new key; words said that never found their mark
and left a silence there instead.
How clever
regret proves then, revising, bit by bit,
the tone of both the living and the dead,
reworking scene by scene, with here a small
twist to a phrase that gentles its intention,
and there a glance to say the opposite
of words that once made wounds too old to heal.
Regret, in time, attempts outright invention,
speaks over the misspeakings of the real.
And why not? The text is finished, after all,
printed on air, unedited forever.
Reluctance
Robert Frost
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question, “Whither?”
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on the roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
In Praise of Self-Deprecation
Wislawa Szymborska
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.
The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.
The killer-whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
The Seven Deadly Sins
Dana Gioia
Forget about the other six, says Pride.
They’re only using you.
Admittedly, Lust is a looker,
but you can do better.
And why do they keep bringing us
to this cheesy dive?
The food’s so bad that even Gluttony
can’t finish his meal.
Notice how Avarice
keeps refilling his glass
whenever he thinks we’re not looking,
while Envy eyes your plate.
Hell, we’re not even done, and Anger
is already arguing about the bill.
I’m the only one who
ever leaves a decent tip.
Let them all go, the losers!
It’s a relief to see Sloth’s
fat ass go out the door.
But stick around. I have a story
that not everyone appreciates—
about the special satisfaction
of staying on board as the last
grubby lifeboat pushes away.
Spiderweb
Kay ryan
From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
Early Morning
Janet Lewis
The path
The spider makes through the air,
Invisible
Until the light touches it.
The path
The light takes through the air,
Invisible
Until it finds the spider’s web.
Murder at Midnight
Kay Ryan
If everyone who was told about it told two other people
Within twelve minutes, everybody on earth would know about it before morning.
Ripley's believe it or not!
But people would begin getting it a little bit
wrong. Long before daylight,
the murder at midnight would be
sugar stolen outright. The fate
of the dead man would not extend
beyond his gate. Only those
right now missing his little habits,
his footfall, his sleeping noises,
will know, and they can’t really tell;
news doesn’t really travel very well.
Childhood House
Eric Ormsby
Somehow I had assumed
That the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself,
And that what we had once possessed remained our possession
Forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
Hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
Did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
Aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
Our remembrance. I see that this isn't so, that
Memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence,
Flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes
All recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters
Unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but,
Instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically
Until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered
Wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down,
And we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity
If our astonished eyes had time.
The Mower
Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Nothing Is Lost
Dana Gioia
Nothing is lost. Nothing is so small
that it does not return.
Imagine that as a child on a day like this
you held a newly minted coin and had
the choice of spending it in any way
you wished.
Today the coin comes back to you,
the date rubbed out, the ancient mottoes vague,
the portrait covered with the dull shellac
of anything used up, passed on, disposed of
with something else in view, and always worth
a little less each time.
Now it returns, and you will think it unimportant, lose
it in your pocket change as one more thing
that’s not worth counting, not worth singling out.
That is the mistake you must avoid today.
You sent it on a journey to yourself. Now hold it in your hand. Accept it as the little you have earned today.
And realize that you must choose again but over less.