973. The Laboratory - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Did it all
happen in the laboratory?
Beneath one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Are we a trial generation?
Poured from one beaker to another,
shaken in retorts,
observed by something more than an eye,
each one individually
taken by forceps?

Or maybe otherwise:
no interventions.
The transformations occur on their own
in accordance with a plan.
The needle draws
the expected zigzags.

Maybe until now there was nothing interesting in us.
The control monitors are seldom switched on,
except when there's a war, and a rather big one at that,
several flights over the lump of clay called Earth,
or significant movements from point A to point B.

Or perhaps thus:
they only have a taste for episodes.
Look! a little girl on a big screen
is sewing a button to her sleeve.

The monitors begin to shriek,
personnel come running in.
Oh, what sort of tiny creature
with a little heart beating on the inside!
What graceful dignity
in the way she draws the thread!
Someone calls out in rapture:
Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

972. Some Advice from a Mother to Her Married Son - Judith Viorst

.

The answer to do you love me isn't, I married you, didn't I?

Or, Can't we discuss this after the ballgame is through?
It isn't, Well that all depends on what you mean by 'love'.
Or even, Come to bed and I'll prove that I do.
The answer isn't, How can I talk about love when
the bacon is burned and the house is an absolute mess and
the children are screaming their heads off and
I'm going to miss my bus?
The answer is yes.
The answer is yes.
The answer is yes. 

971. I Live My Life In Widening Circles - Rilke

Translated by Edward Snow

I live my life in widening circles

that drift out over the things.

I may not achieve the very last,

but it will be my aim.

I circle around God, around the age-old tower;

I’ve been circling for millennia

and still I don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm,

or a sovereign song?

970. Before We Leave - Stephen Dunn

.

Just so it’s clear—

no whining on the journey.

If you whine, you’ll get stuck

somewhere with people

like yourself. It’s an unwritten law.

Wear hiking boots. Pack food

and a change of clothes.

We go slowly. Endurance won’t

be enough, though without it

you can’t get to the place

where more of you is asked.

Expect there will be times

when you’ll be afraid.

Hold hands and tremble together

if you must but remember

each of you is alone.

Where are we going?

It’s not an issue of here or there.

And if you ever feel you can’t

take another step imagine 

how you might feel to arrive,

if not wiser, a little more aware

how to inhabit the middle ground

between misery and joy.

Trudge on. In the higher regions,

where the footing is unsure,

to trudge is to survive.

Happiness is another journey,

almost over before it starts,

guaranteed to disappoint.

If you’ve come for it, say so,

you’ll get your money back.

I hope you all realize that anytime

is a fine time to laugh. Fake it,

however, and false laughter

will accompany you like a cowbell

for the rest of your days.

You’ll forever lack the seriousness

of a clown. At some point

the rocks will be jagged,

the precipice sheer. That won’t be

the abyss you’ll see looking down.

The abyss, you’ll discover

(if you’ve made it this far),

is usually nearer than that—

at the bottom of something

you’ve yet to resolve,

or posing as your confidante.

Follow me. Don’t follow me. I will

say such things, and mean both.

969. A Story That Could Be True - William Stafford

.

If you were exchanged in the cradle and

your real mother died

without ever telling the story

then no one knows your name,

and somewhere in the world

your father is lost and needs you

but you are far away.

He can never find

how true you are, how ready.

When the great wind comes

and the robberies of the rain

you stand on the corner shivering.

The people who go by—

you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs

any day in your mind,

“Who are you really, wanderer?”—

and the answer you have to give

no matter how dark and cold

the world around you is:

“Maybe I’m a king.”

968. Memory - Rilke

Translated by Edward Snow

And you wait, you wait for that one thing
that will infinitely enlarge your life;
that gigantic, the stupendous,
the awakening of stones,
depths turned round toward you.

The volumes bound in rust and gold
flicker dimly on the shelves;
and you think of lands traveled across,
of paintings, of the clothes of
women found and lost.

And then suddenly you know: it was then.
You rise, and before you
stands the fear and prayer and shape
of a vanished year.

967. "I Love You" - Billy Collins

.
Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.

It’s all new to this only child
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day

would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I’m looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.

O course, I always like hearing it from you.
That is never a cause for concern,
The problem is I now find myself saying it back
if only because just saying good-bye
then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.

But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to
say it so often, would prefer instead to save it
for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped
into the red mouth of the volcano
with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,

or while we are desperately clasping hands
before our plane plunges in the Gulf of Mexico,
which are only two of the examples I had in mind,
But enough, as it turns out, to make me
want to say it to you right now.

and what better place than in the final couplet
of a poem where, as every student know, it really counts.

966. Sharks' Teeth - Kay Ryan

.
Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

965. Request - Lawrence Raab

.
For a long time I was sure
it should be "Jumping Jack Flash," then
the adagio from Schubert's C major Quintet,
but right now I want Oscar Peterson's

"You Look Good to Me." That's my request.
Play it at the end of the service,
after my friends have spoken.
I don't believe I'll be listening in,

but sitting here I'm imaging
you could be feeling what I'd like to feel––
defiance from the Stones, grief
and resignation with Schubert, but now

Peterson and Ray Brown are making
the moment sound like some kind
of release. Sad enough
at first, but doesn't it slide into

tapping you feet, then clapping
your hands, maybe standing up
in that shadowy hall in Paris
in the late sixties when this was recorded,

getting up and dancing
as I would not have done,
and being dead, cannot, but might
wish for you, who would then

understand what a poem––or perhaps only
the making of a poem, just that moment
when it starts, when so much
is still possible––

has allowed me to feel.
Happy to be there. Carried away.

964. You can rely on him - Yehuda Amichi

.
Happiness has no father. No happiness ever
Learns from the one before, and it dies, without heirs.
But sadness has a long tradition,
Passes from eye to eye, from heart to heart.

And what did I learn from my father: to weep full and to laugh loud
And to pray three times a day.
And what did I learn from my mother: to close my lips, collar,
Cupboard, dream and suitcase, and to put everything back
In its place and to pray three times a day.

Now I have recovered from the lesson. The hair of my head
Is cropped like a solder from the Second World War,
Round and round, and my ears not only hold up by skull but the whole sky

Now they say about me: "You can rely on him."
I've come to this! I've sunk this low!
Only those who really love me
Know you cannot.

963. When I Wrote A Little - Hayden Carruth

When I Wrote A Little

poem in the ancient mode for you

that was musical and had old words



in it such as would never do in

the academies you loved it and you



said you did not know how to thank

me and in truth this is a problem



for who can ever be grateful enough 

for poetry but i said you thank me



every day and every night wordlessly

which you really do although again



in truth it is a problem for how can

life ever be consonant with spirit



yet we are human and are naturally

hungry for gratitude yes we need it



and never have enough oh my dear i

think these problems are always with



us and in reality have no solutions

except when we wash them away on



salty tides of loving as we rock in

the dark sure sea of our existence

962. A Thank-You Note - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

I owe a lot
to those I do not love.

Relief in accepting
others care for them more.

Joy that I am not
wolf to their sheep.

Peace be with them
for with them I am free
––love neither gives
nor knows how to take these things.

I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love never could.
I forgive
what love never would.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

Our trips always turn out well:
concerts are enjoyed,
cathedrals toured,
landscapes in focus.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are the rivers and mountains
found on any map.

The credit's theirs
if I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a real, ever-shifting horizon.

They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I owe them nothing,"
love would have said
on this open topic.

961. In The White Sky - William Stafford

.
Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.

But many things in the world
haven’t yet happened. You help
them by thinking and writing and acting.
Where they begin, you greet them
or stop them. You come along
and sustain the new things.

Once, in the white sky there was
a beginning, and I happened to notice
and almost glimpsed what to do,
But now I have come far
to here, and it is away back there.
Some days, I think about it.

960. Yes! No! - Mary Oliver

.
How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.

959. The Other Tiger - Jorge Luis Borges

 Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid     
   "And the craft createth a semblance."
            —Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876)

I think of a tiger. The fading light enhances
the vast complexities of the Library
and seems to set the bookshelves at a distance;
powerful, innocent, bloodstained, and new-made,
it will prowl through its jungle and its morning
and leave its footprint on the muddy edge
of a river with a name unknown to it
(in its world, there are no names, nor past, nor future,
only the sureness of the present moment)
and it will cross the wilderness of distance
and sniff out in the woven labyrinth
of smells the smell peculiar to morning
and the scent on the air of deer, delectable.
Behind the lattice of bamboo, I notice
its stripes, and I sense its skeleton
under the magnificence of the quivering skin.
In vain the convex oceans and the deserts
spread themselves across the earth between us;
from this one house in a far-off seaport
in South America, I dream you, follow you,
oh tiger on the fringes of the Ganges.

Evening spreads in my spirit and I keep thinking
that the tiger I am calling up in my poem
is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows,
a set of literary images,
scraps remembered from encyclopedias,
and not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
that in the sun or the deceptive moonlight
follows its paths, in Bengal or Sumatra,
of love, of indolence, of dying.
Against the tiger of symbols I have set
the real one, the hot-blooded one
that savages a herd of buffalo,
and today the third of August, ’59,
its patient shadow moves across the plain,
but yet, the act of naming it, of guessing
what is its nature and its circumstance
creates a fiction, not a living creature,
not one of those that prowl on the earth.

Let us look for a third tiger. This one
will be a form in my dream like all the others,
a system, an arrangement of human language
and not the flesh-and-bone tiger
that, out of reach of all mythologies,
paces the earth. I know all this; yet something
drives me to this ancient, perverse adventure,
foolish and vague, yet still I keep on looking
throughout the evening for the other tiger,
the other tiger, the one not in this poem.

958. Lying in wait for happiness - Yehuda Amichai

.
On the broad steps leading down to the Western Wall
A beautiful woman came up to me: You don't remember me,
I'm Shoshana in Hebrew. Something else in other languages
All is vanity.

Thus she spoke at twilight standing between the destroyed
And the built, between the light and the dark.
Black birds and white birds changed places
With the great rhythm of breathing.
The flash of tourists' cameras lit my memory too:
What are you doing here between the promised and the forgotten,
Between the hoped for and the imagined?
What are you doing here lying in wait for happiness
With your lovely face a tourist advertisement from God
And your soul rent and torn like mine?

She answered me: My soul is rent and torn like yours
But it is beautiful because of that
Like fine lace.

957. The Makers - Howard Nemerov

. Who can remember back to the first poets, The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? No one has remembered that far back Or now considers, among the artifacts And bones and cantilevered inference The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, So lofty and disdainful of renown They left us not a name to know them by. They were the ones that in whatever tongue Worded the world, that were the first to say Star, water, stone, that said the visible And made it bring invisibles to view In wind and time and change, and in the mind Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers Of the city into the astonished sky. They were the first great listeners, attuned To interval, relationship, and scale, The first to say above, beneath, beyond, Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, Who having uttered vanished from the world Leaving no memory but the marvelous Magical elements, the breathing shapes And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

956. Words In A Certain Appropriate Mode - Hayden Carruth

.
It is not music, though one has tried music.

It is not nature, though one has tried

The rose, the bluebird, and the bear.

It is not death, though one has often died.



None of these things is there.



In the everywhere that is nowhere

Neither the inside nor the outside

Neither east nor west nor down nor up

Where the loving smile vanishes, vanishes

In the evanescence from a coffee cup

Where the song crumbles in monotone

Neither harmonious nor inharmonious

Where one is neither alone

Nor not alone, where cognition seeps

Jactatively away like the falling tide

If there were a tide, and what is left

Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps

Its undifferentiated unreality, all

Being neither given nor bereft

Where there is neither breath nor air

The place without locality, the locality

With neither extension nor intention

But there in the weightless fall

Between all opposites to the ground

That is not a ground, surrounding

All unities, without grief, without care

Without leaf or star or water or stone

Without light, without sound

anywhere, anywhere. . .

955. Going To Horse Flats (excerpt) - Robinson Jeffers

.
Amazingly active a toothless old man
Hobbled beside me up the canyon, going to Horse Flats, he said,
To see to some hives of bees. It was clear that he lived alone
    and craved companionship, yet he talked little
Until we came to a place where the gorge widened, and
    deer-hunters had camped on a slip of sand
Beside the stream. They had left the usual rectangle of fired
    stones and ashes, also some crumpled
Sheets of a recent newspaper with loud headlines. The old man
    rushed at them
And spread them flat, held them his arm's length, squinting
    through narrowed eyelids—poor trick old eyes learn, to make
Lids act for lens. He read "Spain Battle. Rebels kill captives
    City bombed Reds kill hostages. Prepare
For war Stalin warns troops." He trembled and said, "Please
    read me the little printing I hardly ever
Get to hear news." He wrung his withered hands while I read;
    It was strange in that nearly inhuman wilderness
To see and old hollow-checked hermit dancing to the world's
    echoes. After I had read he said "That's enough.
They were proud and oppressed the poor and are punished
    for it; but those that punish them are full of envy and hatred
And are punished for it; and again the others; and again the
    others. It is so forever, there is no way out."

954. The Fix-Up - Judith Viorst

.
I have this friend Muriel who is attractive and intelligent and
    terribly understanding and loyal and
My husband has this friend Ralph who is handsome and witty and
Since they weren't engaged or even tacitly commented
The least we could do, I said, is fix them up.
So I cooked this very nice boned chicken breasts with lemon-cream
    sauce and
Put on a little Herb Alpert in the background and
Before Muriel came I told Ralph how she was attractive and intelligent
    and terribly understanding and loyal and
After Muriel came I drew out Ralph to show how he was witty and
    very sincere and
When dinner was over my husband and I did the dishes
Leaving Ralph and Muriel to get acquainted
With a little Petula Clark in the background and
We listened while they discovered that they both loved Mel Brooks
    and hated Los Angeles and agreed that the Supremes had lost
    their touch and
He insisted on taking her home even through she loved in the opposite
    direction and
The next day he phoned to ask is that what I call attractive, after which
She phoned to ask is that what I call sincere
And from now on
I cook lemon-cream sauce
For young marrieds.