1926

by Weldon Kees

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

Hermits

by James Galvin


The more I see of people, the more I like my dog.
And this would be good country if a man could eat scenery.

The lake’s ice gives light back to the air,
Shadows back to water.

In wet years the land breathes out,
And a crop of limber pines jumps into the open
Like green pioneers.
In dry years
Beetles kill them with roadmaps
Under the skin.

The land breathes in.
The sun goes down,
And the whole sky cracks like rivermud in drought.

A few trees make it each time,
As if some tide carried them out, away from the others.

They say a tree that falls in timber
Goes down in good company:
Snow drifts in and it all goes soft.

They say a ghost is a ghost
That doesn’t know it’s dead yet.

Those limber pines die standing, lightning-struck, wind broke,
And enough good pitch
For a hermit’s winter.

The cabin stood; the man was long dead.
Packrats nested in the firewood,
And a crowd of medicine bottles held forth on the shelf.

When hermits die
They close their eyes. They never hear
The parson sermonize how somewhere
There is hope where no hope was.

Tanglefoot,
Dead-On-Your-Feet,
A chance to be alone for a chance to be abandoned,
Everything is lost or given.

Hermits never know they’re dead till the roof falls in.

Optimism

by Stephen Dunn

My friend the pessimist thinks I'm optimistic
because I seem to believe in the next good thing.
But I see rueful shadows almost everywhere.
When the sun rises I think of collisions and AK-47s.
It's my mother's fault, who praised and loved me,
sent me into the dreadful world as if
it would tell me a story I'd understand. The fact is
optimism is the enemy of happiness.
I've learned to live for the next good thing
because lifelong friends write good-bye letters,
because regret follows every timidity.
I'm glad I know that all great romances are fleshed
with failure. I'll take a day of bitterness and rain
to placate the gods, to get it over with.
My mother told me I could be a great pianist
because I had long fingers. My fingers are small.
It's my mother's fault, every undeserved sweetness.

Piano Lesson

by Faith Shearin

My eyes open before the sun drops its yolk into the sky
and a girl upstairs is practicing scales. I imagine the arch
of her hand, the way her skirt might pause above the knee.

In the street I hear a victim, a paper cup, a man who talks
physics with a pigeon; a pair of girls blow bubblegum bubbles
at the sky. Perhaps an old woman dreams of her childhood

on a park bench while the man beside her decides to leave
his wife. The world is complicated: an open window,
my head pressed to a pillow where I find a tidal action:

so many bodies rolling onto the planet, so many others
turning back. In a cafe I may someday light a cigarette,
remember the last person who did not love me, open my

mouth to see if it speaks smoke or words. But these days
I wake up wondering: how will I fit all this life in one life?
I need a map, a vocabulary list; I can't learn the world

fast enough. I want to be like the girl upstairs who has braced
herself before a grand piano and taught her own blind fingers to sing.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Mother of Nothing

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Sister, the stars have no children.
The stars pecking at each night's darkness
above your trailer would shine back at themselves
in its metal, but they are too far away.
The stones lining your path to the goats
know themselves only as speechless, flat,
gray-in-the-sun.
What begins and ends in the self
without continuance in any other.

You who stand at preschool fences
watching the endless tumble and slide,
who answer the mothers' Which one is yours?
with blotted murmur and turning away,
listen. Any lack carried
too close to the heart
grows teeth, nibbles off
corners. I heard one say
she had no talent,
another, no time, and there were many
without beauty all those years,
and all of them shrinking.
What sinks to the bottom of the pond
comes up with new colors, or not at all.

We sank, and there was purple,
voluptuous merging of purple and blue,
a new silence living
in the houses of our bodies.
Those who wanted and never received;
who were born without hands,
who had and then lost; the Turkish mother
after the earthquake
with five silent children lined before her,
the women of Beirut
bearing water to their bombed out rooms,
the fathers in offices
with framed photographs of children on their desks,
and their own private knowledge
of all the hard words.

And we held trees differently
then, and dried plates differently,
because waiting dulls the senses
and when you are no longer waiting,
something wakes up. My cousin said
It's not children, it's a matter of making
life. And I saw the streets opening into the future,
cars passing, mothers with car seats,
children waving out the rear window,
keeping count of all who waved back,
and would we life our hearts and answer them,
and when we did, what would we say?
And the old preposterous stories of nothing
and everything finally equalling one another
returned in the night. And like relatives,
knew where the secret key was hidden
and let themselves in.

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking
warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

-----

I often think that poetry is as much about speaking as it is about writing. Poetry is about using language in unexpected ways, and that includes the way language sounds, in the ear and on the tongue. It's for that reason that I've lately been trying to read more poetry aloud to myself, so I can hear it as well as enjoy it on the page.

In that spirit, I've recorded myself reading this poem. This may or may not be something I continue to do in future posts; but I would like to practice reading aloud, and here is the fruit of my first practice session:


(I emphasize the word practice, because I know I need it.)

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

by e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

The Obligation to Be Happy

by Linda Pastan

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

Going There

by Jack Gilbert

Of course it was a disaster.
That unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

1972

by Lex Runciman

The chaplain sat at his desk. Have we met?
No. But you want me to support your conscientious
Objection -- you want me to write a letter. Yes.
Let me ask some questions. Could you kill someone --
An intruder to save yourself? No. What about
To save your mother or wife from rape? Yes.
Save a sister or daughter? Yes.

Where are you from? Oregon.
Do you love your country? Yes.
Would you serve the United States? Yes.
Would you kill its sworn enemies? No.
You would kill an intruder to save your family? Yes.
But not an enemy of the United States? No.

Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Quaker --
Do you practice any religion? No.
Believe in God? I don't understand the question.
You're afraid. Yes. You're afraid of battle. Yes.
Of letting others down? Yes. And these
Are your conscientious objections? Yes, no.
When ordered by a superior officer, would you kill?
I don't know, no, I would have to decide.
Wouldn't it be too late for that? Yes,
It would be too late.

You're a coward: you're a coward
And you want me to help get you off the hook.
I looked at him. Are you afraid? Yes.
You say you love your country? Yes.
You could kill to save your family? Yes, yes.
Then why are you here -- what are you afraid of?
Loyalties and confusions, I should have said.
Infinities, the worth of a day.

For Hunter

by Ansley Clark

Hunter is back home, alone, in that house,
in the middle of the black murmur,
           black woods.
On those arctic autumn evenings he listens
to the dishwasher hum, smoky creakings
of the wood stove, strange rustlings of the creek,
to the steady ceaseless drip of rootless northern rain
asking him to take its hand and follow.
           He listens to silence.
The last of us home, he will be last of us to leave,
to scatter, to throw himself outward,
as we have already done.

On nights like these I roam,
wayward, against the town's distant lights,
and the country is huge--lengthy sky ablaze--
broad, burning ocean of wandering earth under unfamiliar
trees,
             and on nights like these,
the world's immensity is coppery, too bright,
prods a dull, familiar ache.

I don't know how anyone lives
in this world of light and dark, of leaving,
          of the human heart,
which is not a whole entity but scattered
in a thousand flaming pieces across the cracking earth.
I only know the memory of rain and woods
           and silence,
constantly knotting me
to you.