February 2010
“Their eyes met. Oh, not as they had met before at the husking. He saw the...”
– Downright Dencey by Caroline Dale Snedeker
January 2010
“Channing Way” Rod McKuen It’s always the strangers that do the most damage. The ones you never get to know. Seen in passing cars mirrored in windows and remembered. And the others- the ones that promise everything, then go away. Sometimes I think people were meant to be strangers. Not to get to know one another, not to get close enough to damage the heart made older by each...
“Colours” Yevgeny Yevtuschenko When your face appeared over my crumpled life at first I understood only the poverty of what I have. Then its particular light on woods, on rivers, on the sea, became my beginning in the coloured world in which I had not yet had my beginning. I am so frightened, I am so frightened, of the unexpected sunrise finishing, of revelations and tears and the...
“A Love Song” William Carlos Williams What have I to say to you When we shall meet? Yet— I lie here thinking of you. The stain of love Is upon the world. Yellow, yellow, yellow, It eats into the leaves, Smears with saffron The horned branches that lean Heavily Against a smooth purple sky. There is no light— Only a honey-thick stain That drips from leaf to leaf And limb to limb ...
From “Inventing Aladdin”
Neil Gaiman
She does not know where any tale waits
before it’s told. (No more do I.)
But forty thieves sounds good, so forty
thieves it is. She prays she’s bought
another clutch of days.
We save our lives in such unlikely ways.
“The Promise”
Marie Howe
In the dream I had when he came back not sick but whole, and wearing his winter coat, he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break. His silence was what he could not not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living, as we do, in time. And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff, and...
“The Soldier” Rupert Brooke If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns...
“The Moon Sails Out”
Frederico Garcia Lorca
When the moon sails out
the church bells die away
and the paths overgrown
with brush appear.
When the moon sails out
the waters cover the earth
and the heart feels it is
a little island in the infinite.
No one eats oranges
under the full moon.
The right things are fruits
green and chilled.
When the moon sails out
with a hundred faces all...
“Anti-Love Poem”
Grace Paley
Sometimes you don’t want to love the person you love you turn your face away from that face whose eyes lips might make you give up anger forget insult steal sadness of not wanting to love turn away then turn away at breakfast in the evening don’t lift your eyes from the paper to see that face in all its seriousness a sweetness of...
“The Happy Prince”
Janet Frame
In the children’s record of the Happy Prince,
before each gold flake is peeled from the Prince’s body,
the voice orders, Turn the Page, Turn the Page,
supposing that children do not know when to turn,
and may live at one line for many years,
sliding and bouncing boisterously along the words,
breaking the closed letters for a warm place to sleep.
Turn the...
From “The Grandmother Cycle”
Judith Downing
nothing she did
or said
was quite
what she meant
but still her life
could be called a monument
shaped in a slant
of available light
and set to the movement
of possible music
“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...
“And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the...”
– T. S. Eliot- Little Gidding
“Diagnosis”
Cynthia Cruz
Awkward, and almost always the idiot Savant, mutant, retard, I Travel my own effervescent weather, In my underwater Vessel, my sweet Mars, and soundless Daydream, magical sweep of Rimbaudian Reverie. Always Clumsy, and guileless, mind- Blind, and deathly shy, Winning every spelling bee, Every math contest, Done before the rest, finishing First in...
“Persephone, Falling”
Rita Dove
One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.
(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
...
“A Myth of Devotion”
Louise Gluck
When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness
Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night, first as the shadows of...
“Demeter, Waiting”
Rita Dove
No. Who can bear it. Only someone who hates herself, who believes to pull a hand back from a daughter’s cheek is to put love into her pocket— like one of those ashen Christian philosophers, or a war-bound soldier.
She is gone again and I will not bear it. I will drag my grief through a winter of my own making, refuse any meadow that recycles itself into ...
“Pluto to Persephone”
Daniel Williams
I know what it is you want from me but you see I cannot give it I am hell and hell is a nice place to visit but when you want to leave you want to leave
when you speak to me you converse with darkness hold my hand old bones rattle when you kiss me imagine kissing the skull of a saint mouldering in a cave large balloon of spirit flown...
“Redemption”
George Herbert
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old. In heaven at his manour I him sought : They told me there, that he was lately gone About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possession. I straight return’d, and knowing...
“September” Jennifer Michael Hecht Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want. I let my oars fall into the water. Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want. The night is so still that I forget to breathe. The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving. Tonight there are people getting just what they need. The air is so still that it seems to stop...
“On Turning Ten” William Collins The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light— a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten ...
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“Prayer to St. Anthony, finder of lost things”
Ryan Teitman
I have lost: churches cupped in my hands, the moon drowned in a glass, pocket watches tied to tree stumps, watchdogs swimming in lakes of whiskey, hungry fingers to the night’s saw teeth. Keep those. Please find my hearts, those thousand knotted plums fled from my body. Return the small one in the pit of my stomach,...
“Summer Fog”
Raymond Carver
To sleep and forget everything for a few hours…
To wake to the sound of the foghorn in July.
To look out the window with a heavy heart and see fog
hanging in the pear trees, fog clogging the intersection,
shrouding the neighbourhood like a disease invading a healthy
body. To go on living when she has stopped living…
A car eases by with its lights...
“Heavenly Grass” Tennessee Williams My feet took a walk in heavenly grass, All day while the sky shone clear as glass. My feet took a walk in heavenly grass, All night while the lonesome stars rolled past. Then my feet come down to walk on earth, And my mother cried when she give me birth. Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast, But they still got an itch for heavenly grass. But they...
From “The Great Lover”
Rupert Brooke
These I have loved: White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, ...
“Facts About the Moon” Dorianne Laux The moon is backing away from us an inch and a half each year. That means if you’re like me and were born around fifty years ago the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth. What’s a person supposed to do? I feel the gray cloud of consternation travel across my face. I begin thinking about the moon-lit past, how if you go...
“since feeling is first” e.e. cummings since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a far better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter...
“Adam’s Curse” W.B. Yeats We sat together at one summer’s end That beautiful mild woman your close friend And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, “A line will take us hours maybe, Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an...
“The Peace of Wild Things”
Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the...
From “Elm”
Sylvia Plath I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root; It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it. Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
***
I am inhabited by a cry. ...
“The Sun Never Says” Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) Even after All this time The sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens With a love like that, It lights the whole sky.
“To Love Life” Ellen Bass The thing is to love life to love it even when you have no stomach for it, when everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands and your throat is filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you so heavily it’s like heat, tropical, moist thickening the air so it’s heavy like water more fit for gills than lungs. When...
“What We Want”
By Linda Pastan
What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names— now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don’t remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there...
“High Flight”
John Magee
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds, —and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of —Wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there I’ve chased the shouting wind...
“The Panther”
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a...
“Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry”
Howard Nemerov
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned into 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.
“The World’s a Minefield”
Iain Crichton Smith
The world’s a minefield when I think of you. I must walk carefully in case I touch some irretrievable and secret switch that blows the old world back into the new. How careless I once was about this ground with the negligence of ignorance. Now I take the smallest delicate steps and now I look about me and about me without end.
“In Paris in a Loud Dark Winter”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In Paris in a loud dark winter
when the sun was something in Provence
when I came upon the poetry
of Rene Char
I saw Vaucluse again
in a summer of sauterelles
its fountains full of petals
and its river thrown down
through all the burnt places
of that almond world
and the fields full of silence
though the...
From “The Heart of the Family,” by Elizabeth Goudge
Returning to the sensitives, if you just endure it simply because you must, like a boil on the neck, or fret yourself to pieces trying to get rid of it, or cadge sympathy for it, then it can break you. But if you accept it as a secret burden borne secretly for the love of Christ, it can become your hidden treasure. For it is your...
So, only "mostly" poetry then
From “Magic Flutes,” by Eva Ibbotson
‘In Sweden,’ she said, rising to stand beside him and speaking very seriously, ‘they have a word for a place like this. It’s called a “smultronstalle.” A “wild strawberry place.” A place like that is special, it’s the most special place there is.’
Guy looked down at the berries she had...
“Slattern”
Kate Clanchy
I leave myself about, slatternly,
bits of me, and times I liked:
I let them go on lying where
they fall, crumple, if they will,
I know fine how to make them walk
and breathe again. Sometimes at night,
or on the train, I dream I’m dancing,
or lying in someone’s arms who says
he loves my eyes in French, and again
and again I am walking up your road,
that first...
“Dominoes”
Stephanie Marlis
He works for a courier service evenings and nights, picking up envelopes from people county-wide and delivering them to the city. It was not what he’d expected to do this late in life, yet one thing had led to another. Golden State Courier Service. He had not always lived in California, but it was so long ago, the truck farms and dairy farms, the four seasons,...
“Cinderella”
Sylvia Plath
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels, Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall Where guests slide gliding into light like wine; Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall Reflecting in a million flagons’ shine,
And glided couples all in...
“Stargazer’s Death” Vasko Popa He had to die they say Stars were closer to him Even than people The ants ate him they say He fancied stars give birth to ants And ants to stars So he filled his house with ants His celestial debauches Cost him his head they say And that silly rumor about a dagger With human fingerprints He found himself out of this world They say he went to find a...
“Offering and Rebuff” Carl Sandburg I could love you as dry roots love rain. I could hold you as branches in the wind brandish petals. Forgive me for speaking so soon. Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely. Love is a fool star. You and a ring of stars may mention my name and then forget me. Love is a fool star.
“The Tips of Your Fingers” Andy Weaver A slackening rain offers its small rhythm to the rooftop, a soft shudder runs through the house. On the radio, Roethke is reading of a woman he knew. You are wearing one of my shirts. Now, I know it’s no more possible to own a moment than a person, but sometimes we can settle into one, like a tide returning from the shore, a soft...
“Change”
Charlotte Zolotow
The summer still hangs heavy and sweet with sunlight as it did last year. The autumn still comes showering gold and crimson as it did last year. The winter still comes clean and cold and white as it did last year. The spring still comes like a whisper in the dark night. It is only I who have changed.
“Celestial Music” Louise Glück I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God. She thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth she’s unusually competent. Brave too, able to face unpleasantness. We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it. I’m always moved by disaster,...
“Antilamentation”
Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the...
“Hide-and-Seek 1933” Galway Kinnell Once when we were playing hide-and-seek and it was time to go home, the rest gave up on the game before it was done and forgot I was still hiding. I remained hidden as a matter of honor until the moon rose.