[Untitled] from the collection Stray Birds

by Andrew Robin 

 

In the autumn

before she died

 

she planted them

 

so that one

morning

 

in March

he would wake

 

from the winter

of his grief

 

to six

hundred

crocuses

 

pale

lavender

 

her

color 

November

 by Maggie Dietz

  

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do

A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries

Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.

Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,

While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage

And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.

Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster

Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,

Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

Even the swarms of kids have given in

To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:

TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.

The hapless customer who'd wanted something

Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

 

The Wild Under the Wilderness

 by Ansley Clark

 

 

Touching the dune grasses and their tall glow

an easy way to locate oneself

 

I have a pile of something here     elemental nouns

which disperse     like seasonal insects

 

quinces poach in pink cinnamon syrup

plant cuttings on the windowsill embroider

 

water with soft roots    and suddenly I am more

committed to everything than I realized 

 

isn't this just

so consistently my weakness    that I want to stay 

 

stay here I mean    on earth

accumulating these little houses

 

and I tie this old     childhood love around my waist

while I wade out farther and I wade out farther 

Beggar's Song

 by Gregory Orr

 

Here’s a seed. Food

for a week. Cow skull

in the pasture; back room

where the brain was:

spacious hut for me.

Small then, and smaller.

My desire’s to stay alive

and be no larger

than a sliver

lodged in my own heart.

And if the heart’s a rock

I’ll whack it with this tin

cup and eat the sparks,

always screaming, always

screaming for more.

 

To Be Alive

 by Gregory Orr 

To be alive: not just the carcass 

But the spark. That's crudely put, but… 

 

If we're not supposed to dance, 

Why all this music?

Wild Pear Tree

by Kaveh Akbar

 

it’s been January for months in both directions      frost
over grass like pale fungus like
mothdust     the branches of the pear tree are pickling
in ice white as the long white line running from me
to the smooth whales frozen in chunks of ocean
from their vast bobbing to the blackwhite
stars flowering into heaven     the hungry cat gnaws
on a sliver of mirror and I have been chewing
out my stitches wondering which
warm names we should try singing
wild thyme cowslip blacksnake      all the days
in a year line up at the door and I deflect each saying no
you will not be needed one by one they skulk off
into the cold      the cat hates this place more than he loves
me he cannot remember the spring when I fed him
warm duck fat daily nor the kitchen vase filled with musky blue
roses nor the pear tree which was so eager to toss its fruit so sweet
it made us sleepy     I stacked the pears on the mantle
until I ran out of room and began filling them into
the bathtub     one evening I slid in as if into a mound
of jewels      now ghost finches leave footprints
on our snowy windowsills     the cat paces
through the night listening for their chirps
have frosted over      ages ago we guzzled
all the rosewater in the vase still we check for it
nightly     I have forgotten even
the easy prayer I was supposed to use          our memories
in emergencies     something something I was not
born here I was not born here I was not

Anything Can Happen

 by Seamus Heaney

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

 by Antonio Machado

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

"Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"

corydon & alexis, redux

by D. A. Powell 

and yet we think that song outlasts us all:  wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs



what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau.   for don't birds covet the seeds of the honey locust
and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare:  how this longing grabs me by the nape



guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue



silly poet, silly man:  thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix.   as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes

 

From the Long, Sad Party

by Mark Strand 

 

Someone was saying 

something about shadows covering the field, about 

how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning 

and the morning goes. 

 

Someone was saying 

how the wind dies down but comes back, 

how shells are the coffins of wind 

but the weather continues. 

 

It was a long night 

and someone said something about the moon shedding its

    white 

on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead 

but more of the same. 

 

Someone mentioned 

a city she had been in before the war, a room with two

    candles 

against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching. 

We began to believe 

 

the night would not end. 

Someone was saying the music was over and no one had

    noticed. 

Then someone said something about the planets, about the

    stars, 

how small they were, how far away.

Snow at the End of the Year

 by Lex Runciman

Tired and achy, Now wants to slump into an overstuffed chair,

there to read a thick book, for the eighth time, on a day

 

the window discloses snow's white all shapes and contours

and a maildrop's blue on stilts. Now does not want to think

about what is most needed to be thought about, wants to withdraw

 

into some gauzy comfort that corrects injustice, feeds the hungry,

warms the freezing, unshackles doors, wide-opens borders, comforts

the worried, calms the angry, and heals the ill. Now wants to dream

 

whale calls, coyote yips, all communications among the roots of trees,

even the arpeggios of coal happy to stay in the ground forever…

 

First sleep, then the waking.

Now rises, looks out, makes its plans, its hopeful step-by-step

for thaw in the gutter, clean water on its way to the sea.

 

Lethargy no more, Now says, again begin again.

God speaks to each of us

 by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

— from The Book of a Monastic Life (I, 59)