725. The Old Writers' Welcome to the New - William Stafford

.
Somewhere out there new light
is crossing a field. Our time, long
preparing for this, carefully comes near.
Without our knowing, our lives
have bent steadily toward this field,
and now we approach and bow down.

All that we welcomed and then forsook,
or lost by weakness, or by cruel time—
friends grown cold, family turned away,
Katherine whose face reflects even yet
when a train goes by, and old Lief
looking at us toward the end from his kennel—
these were needed so that this future could arrive.

Glad for this field, welcoming new light,
we embrace the loss and regret we must pay
all through our years, that Now may arrive,
that our story come true and be what it is,
again and again.

But oh our loves, happy goodbyes.

724. Welcome - Stephen Dunn

.
if you believe nothing is always what's left
after a while, as I did,
If you believe you have this collection
of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here
behind the silence and the averted eyes)
If you believe an afternoon can collapse
into strange privacies—
how in your backyard, for example,
the shyness of flowers can be suddenly
overwhelming, and in the distance
the clear goddamn of thunder
personal, like a voice,
If you believe there's no correct response
to death, as I do; that even in grief
(where I've sat making plans)
there are small corners of joy
If your body sometimes is a light switch
in a house of insomniacs
If you can feel yourself straining
to be yourself every waking minute
If, as I am, you are almost smiling . . .

723. I Laugh And Cry With The Same Eyes - James Kavanaugh

.
I laugh and cry with the same eyes,
Love and hate with the same heart.
I feel my rage and my gentleness,
My sanity and suicide.
When I hide my anger, my joy doesn't seem real.
When I hide my fear, my strength is a fraud.
If I only laugh, I leave no place for your pain.
If I only shout, I leave no place for your tenderness.
I want to be all of myself,
So you can be all of yourself,
And together we can be whole.

721. We Knew The World Backwards And Forwards - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

We knew the world backwards and forwards
So small it fit in a handshake
So easy it could be described in a smile
As plain as the echoes of old truths and a prayer

History did not greet us with triumphant fanfare
It flung dirty sand in our eyes
Ahead of us were distant roads leading nowhere
Poisoned wells, bitter bread

The spoils of war is our knowledge of the world
So large it fits in a handshake
So hard it could be described in a smile
As strange as the echoes of old truths and a prayer.

720. The Printer's Error - Aaron Fogel

.
Fellow compositors
and pressworkers!

I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer's Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers' errors.

First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer's trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.
Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers' protest,
and errors by
God's touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.

719. Waking At 3 a.m. - William Stafford

.
Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn't matter—even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.

718. Essy On The Personal - Stephen Dunn

.
Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses--
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.

717. Wait - Galway Kinnell

(to someone contemplating suicide)

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

716. Scouting - Philip Levine

.
I'm the man who gets off the bus
at the bare junction of nothing
with nothing, and then heads back
to where we've been as though
the future were stashed somewhere
in that tangle of events we call
"Where I come from." Where I
came from the fences ran right
down to the road, and the lone woman
leaning back on her front porch as she
quietly smoked asked me what did
I want. Confused as always, I
answered, "Water," and she came to me
with a frosted bottle and a cup,
shook my hand, and said, "Good lick."
That was forty years ago, you say,
when anything was possible. No,
it was yesterday, the gray icebox
sat on the front porch, the crop
was tobacco and not yet in, you
could hear it sighing out back.
The rocker gradually slowed as
she came toward me but never
stopped and the two of us went on
living in time. One of her eyes
had a pale cast and looked nowhere
or into the future where without
regrets she would give up the power
to grant life, and I would darken
like wood left in the rain and then
fade into only a hint of the grain.
I went higher up the mountain
until my breath came in gasps,
my sight darkened, and I slept
to the side of the road to waken
chilled in the sudden July cold,
alone and well. What is it like
to come to, nowhere, in darkness,
not knowing who you are, not
caring if the wind calms, the stars
stall in their sudden orbits,
the cities below go on without
you screaming and singing?
I don't have the answer. I'm
scouting, getting the feel
of the land, the way the fields
step down the mountainsides
hugging their battered, sagging
wire fences to themselves as though
both day and night they needed
to know their limits. Almost still
the silent dogs wound into sleep,
the gray cabins breathing steadily
in moonlight, tomorrow wakening
slowly in the clumps of mountain oak
and pine where streams once ran
down the little white rock gullies.
You can feel the whole country
wanting to waken into a child's dream,
you can feel the moment reaching
back to contain your life and forward
to whatever the dawn brings you to.
In the dark you can love this place.

715. Myrtle - John Ashbery

.
How funny your name would be
if you could follow if back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at longlast to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.

714. Yusef Komunyakaa - Facing It

.
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

713. Epic - Patrick Kavanagh

.
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

712. One Empty Island - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh


Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

711. "Are You Mr. William Stafford?" - William Stafford

.
"Are you Mr. William Stafford?"
"Yes, but...."

Well, it was yesterday.
Sunlight used to follow my hand.
And that's when the strange siren-like sound flooded
over the horizon and rushed through the streets of our town.
That's when sunlight came from behind
a rock and began to follow my hand.

"It's for the best," my mother said—"Nothing can
ever be wrong for anyone truly good."
So later the sun settled back and the sound
faded and was gone. All along the streets every
house waited, white, blue, gray: trees
were still trying to arch as far as they could.

You can't tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends." I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,
Why
It came.

710. Epithalamion For A Second Marriage - Stephen Dunn

.
If you, X, take this woman, Y,
and if you, Y, take this man, X,
you two who have taken each other
many times before, then this
is something to be trusted,

two separate folks not becoming halves,
as younger people do, but becoming
neither more nor less than yourselves,
separate and together, and if
this means a different kind of love,

as it must, if it means different
conveniences and inconveniences, as it must,
then let this good luck
from a friend act like grease
for what may bet be difficult, undefined,

and when the ordinary days of marriage
stretch out like prairie,
here's to the wisdom which understands
that if the heart's right
and the mind at ease with it

the prairie is a liveable place, a place
for withstanding all kinds of weather,
and here's to the little hills
the ones that take you by surprise,
and the ones you'll need to invent.

709. The Hospital - Patrick Kavanagh

.
A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins - an art lover's woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love's mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

708. It Is Marvellous to Wake Up Together - Eliazbeth Bishop

.
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening:

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise

The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking.
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

707. Patrick Kavanagh: An Annotated Exequy - L. E. Sissman

.
Well, Kavanagh, you've gone and done it, died
The way you said you would, propped up with pride
And penury in a dim nursing home
In Dublin, not in Monaghan. The morn-
Ing newspapers1 said what you said they would,2
Not mourning, so it's nice and tidy. Good.
But wait. I'm here to say a thing or two
About a lovely man I never knew
Who lived in lodgings next door to despair,
And caught the winter light in Gibson Square,3
and walked alone in crumbling Islington,
And saw the setting of the Irish sun
On the potato fields of Monaghan
Across the ocean wild and wide, a home
To be escaped from the returned to, where
Calves called for his deft hands, and up the stair
The mother lay in her bare, crucified
Chamber, as old and constant as the tide
In rising and receding to and from
The complicated presence of a son,
Or else his absence. Absent in a slum
Of Dublin or of London, he conveyed
His country to the city, which he made
New with his patient peasant heart and hand
And urbane horn-rimmed head. Of course he'd stand––
And be stood ––– too much drink in darkling bars
And wake up to the anthem of the cars
And lorries of the morning. But he got
On with the serious business of what
An artist is to do with his rucksack
Of gift, the deadweight that deforms his back
And drives him on to prodigies of thought
And anguishes of execution, bought
At all cost of respectability
And all expense of nice society,
Until, alone, he faces homely him,
The only other tenant of his room,
And finds the world well lost.4 Well Kavanagh,
Possession being nine points of the law,
I find you guilty of possession of
The mortal spirit of unstinted love
For all things animate and otherwise,
And of the fatal talent to devise
Live poems expressing it, transcending all
Obituaries which record your fall.5

–––––––––––––––––––––––
1 The morning newspapers and the radio
Announced his death in a few horrid words:
–– a man of talent who lacked the little more
That makes the difference
Between success and failure
–– "Portrait of the Artist"

2 Reputation for Eccentricity
Said to Have Overshadowed
Talents as a Writer
–– Obituary in the Times

3 I'll show you a holier aisle ––
The length of Gibson Square
Caught in November's stare
That would set you to prayer
–– "News Item"

4 And I also found some crucial
Documents of sad evil that may yet
For all their ugliness and vacuous leers
Fuel the fires of comedy. The main thing is to continue,
To walk Parnassus right into the sunset
Detached in love where pygmies cannot pin you
To the ground like Gulliver. So good luck and cheers.
–– "Dear Folks"

5 He's finished and that's definitely.
–– "The Same Again"

706. The Seance - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Chance shows her tricks.
She pulls a glass of cognac from her sleeve
and seats Henry on it.
I enter the bar and stand dumbfounded.
It's Henry and no one else
than the brother of Agnes' husband,
and Agnes is a relative
of Sophie's aunt's brother-in-law.
It turned out that we have a great grandfather in common.

Space in the fingers of fortune
expands and contracts,
lengthens and shortens.
It was just a tablecloth
and now it's like a handkerchief.
Guess whom I met,
and where, in Canada,
and after how many years!
I thought he was no longer living,
and he's in a Mercedes.
Or on a plane to Athens.
Or in a stadium in Tokyo.

Chance turns a kaleidoscope in her hands.
Billions of colored glass particles flash.
Suddenly Hansel's piece of glass
crashes with Gretel's.
Imagine, in the same hotel.
Face to face in the elevator.
In the toy shop.
At the corner of Szewska and Jagiellonska Streets.

Chance is wrapped in the cape.
Things are lost and found again.
I came across something involuntarily.
I bent down and picked it up.
I look, and it's that spoon
from a stolen set.
If it weren't for the bracelet
I would not have recognized Ola,
and I happened on that clock in Plock.

Chance gazes deeply into our eyes.
Our heads begin to get heavy.
Our eyelids droop.
We feel like laughing and weeping,
for it's incredible --
from the fourth B on this ship,
there must be something to it.
We feel like screaming
how small the world is,
how easy to grasp
with open arms.
For a short while yet we are filled with joy,
both illuminating and deceiving.

705. Because We Are Not Taken Seriously - Stephen Dunn

.
Some night I wish they'd knock,
on my door, the government men,
looking for the poem of simple truths
recited and whispered among the people.
And when all I give them is silence
and my children are exiled
to the mountains, my wife forced
to renounce me in public,
I'll be the American poet
whose loneliness, finally, is relevant,
whose slightest movement
ripples cross-country.

And when the revolution frees me,
its leaders wanting me to become
"Poet of the Revolution," I'll refuse
and keep a list of their terrible reprisals
and all the dark things I love
which they will abolish.
With the ghost of Mandelstam
on one shoulder, Lorca on the other,
I'll write the next poem, the one
that will ask only to be believed
once it's in the air, singing.