499. Candle Hat - Billy Collins

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew
we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like
to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read
any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him
lighting the candles one by one, then placing
the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,
the laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house
with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door
one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
"Come in, " he would say, "I was just painting myself,"
as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

498. The Starry Night - Anne Sexton

"That does not keep me from having a terrible
need of––shall I say the word––religion. Then I
go out at night to paint the stars."
Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into the rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

497. A "Thank You" Note (1) - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Maria Trzeciak

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.

Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

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

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

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

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

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

496. The Eye, The Pulse - Harvey Shapiro

.
The air extends beyond this sill
And, whether I will or not, performs
Its various delights. So children
Race upon the sand and cry
Their colorful syllables, gulls
In rocky congregations cry.
All one mesh and all one dance
Upon the inner ear and eye.

The air extends, and through its light
The mind in intellection moves,
Conning the landscape to a line
Of liquid spars and sanded flats.

The body in projection moves
Into the threaded air and sky.
And now begins the true delight.
The sympathy of life for life
Leaps past formal excellence,
Eros, bringer of delight,
Quickens the landscape to a pulse.
Sand, and child, and formal bird
Stand at the center of our love,
As at the center of this globe
The jewel-spun open and shut
Of an insect's breathing.

495. I Am - John Clare (1793-1864)

I am––yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes––
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live––like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange––nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below––above, the vaulted sky.

494. Thesaurus - Billy Collins

.
It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

493. National Cold Storage Company - Harvey Shapiro

.
The National Cold Storage Company contains
More things than you can dream of.
Hard by the Brooklyn Bridge it stands
In a litter of freight cars,
Tugs to one side; the other, the traffic
Of the Long Island Expressway.
I myself have dropped into it in seven years
Midnight tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.
Add this to the national total––
Grant's tomb, the Civil War, Arlington,
The young President dead.
Above the warehouse and beneath the stars
The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge.
But see,
They fall into the National Cold Storage Company
One by one. The wind off the river is too cold,
Or the times too rough, or the Bridge
Is not a harp at all.Or maybe
A monstrous birth inside the warehouse
Must be fed by everything––ships, poems,
Stars, all the years of our lives.

492. The God Forsakes Antony (2,3,4) - C. P. Cavafy

Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven

When suddenly at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts––
do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
your works that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was only a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared for this , as if courageous,
as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;
approach the window with firm step,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

C. P. Cavafy - The God Forsakes Antony
Translated from the Greek by Theoharis C. Theoharis

Suddenly, at midnight, when an invisible troupe
is heard passing,
with exquisite players, with voices—
do not lament your luck, now utterly exhausted,
yours acts that failed, your life's projects,
all ended in delusion.
Like a man who's all along been ready, like a man made bold by it,
say your last farewell to her, to Alexandria, who is leaving.
First, foremost, do not fool yourself,
and say it was a dream, or that your ears were tricked;
do not stoop to such vacant hopes.
Like a man who's all along been ready, like a man made bold by it,
in a way fitting the dignity that made you worthy of such a city,
approach the window steadily,
and listen, moved, but not needy
and disgruntled, like a coward,
listen, taking your final pleasure,
to the sounds, to that mystic troupe's rare playing,
and say your last farewell to her, to that Alexandria you are losing.

C. P. Cavafy - The God Abandons Antony
Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn

When suddenly at midnight, there comes the sound
of an invisible procession passing by
with exquisite music playing, with voices raised—
your good fortune, which now gives way; all your efforts'
ill-starred outcome; the plans you made for life,
which turned out wrong: don't mourn them uselessly.
Like one who's long prepared, like someone brave,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, who is leaving.
Above all do not fool yourself, don't say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
don't stoop to futile hopes like these.
Like one who's long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who's been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.

491. Robert Hass - Heroic Simile

.
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

490. The Great Figure - William Carlos Williams

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

489. No Title Required - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

It's come to this: I'm sitting under a tree,
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It's an insignificant event
and won't go down in history.
It's not battles and pacts,
whose motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I'm sitting by this river, that's a fact.
And since I'm here,
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those a marshal's fieldglasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that's been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn't spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn't beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world's no poorer in details for that,
it's just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren't the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don't trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other, no one else's, but its own.

When I see such things I'm no longer sure
that what's important
is more important than what's not.

488. When They Are Found - C. P. Cavafty

.
Try to guard them, poet,
however few there are that can be kept.
The visions of your loving.
Set them, half hidden, in your phrases.
Try to sustain them, poet,
when they are roused in your brain
at night, or in the glare of noon.

487. The First Dream - Billy Collins

.
The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

486. This Is A Wonderful Poem - David Wagoner

.
Come at it carefully, don't trust it, that isn't its right name,
It's wearing stolen rags, it's never been washed, its breath
Would look moss-green if it were really breathing,
It won't get out of the way, it stares at you
Out of eyes burnt gray as the sidewalk,
Its skin is overcast with colorless dirt,
It has no distinguishing marks, no I.D. cards,
It wants something of yours but hasn't decided
Whether to ask for it or just take it,
There are no policemen, no friendly neighbors,
No peacekeeping busybodies to yell for, only this
Thing standing between you and the place you were headed,
You have about thirty seconds to get past it, around it,
Or simply to back away and try to forget it,
It won't take no for an answer: try hitting it first
And you'll learn what's trembling in its torn pocket.
Now, what do you want to do about it?

485. Finalities - C. P. Cavafy

Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven

Plunged in fear and suspicions,
with agitated mind and frightened eyes,
we melt, and plan how to act
in order to avoid the certain
danger so frightfully menacing us.
And yet we err, it is not in our paths;
the messages were false alarms,
(or else we did not hear, or fully understand them).
Another catastrophe, that we never imagined,
suddenly, torrentially falls upon us,
and unprepared––there is no more time––carries us off.

484. Voices - C. P. Cavafy

Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven

Ideal and dearly beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

And for a moment with their echo other echoes
return from the first poetry of our lives––
like music that extinguishes the far-off night.

483. N. V. N. - Anna Akhmatova

(1915)
Translated from the Russian by Jane Kenyon and Vera Sandomirsky Dunham

There is a sacred, secret line in loving
which attraction and even passion cannot cross,––
even if lips draw near in awful silence
and love tears at the heart.

Friendship is weak and useless here,
and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,
because the soul is free and does not know
the slow luxuries of sensual life.

Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief.
So now your know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand.

482. In Favor Of One's Time - Frank O'Hara

.
The spent purpose of a perfectly marvellous
life suddenly glimmers and leaps into flame
it's more difficult than you think to make charcoal
it's also pretty hard to remember life's marvellous
but there it is guttering choking then soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it's practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least somethings going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat

an angel flying slowly, curiously singes its wings
and you diminish for a moment out of respect
for beauty then flare up after all that's the angel
that wrestled with Jacob and loves conflict
as an athlete loves the tape, and we're off into
an immortal contest of actuality and pride
which is love assuming the consciousness of itself
as sky over all, medium of finding and founding
not just resemblance but the magnetic otherness
that that that stands erect in the the spirit's glare
and waits for the joining of an opposite force's breath

so come the winds into our lives and last
longer than despair's sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvellous is not just a poet's greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights

481. Litany - Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine . . .
––Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and––somehow––
the wine.

480. The Ball - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

As long as nothing can be known for sure

(no signals have been picked up yet),

as long as Earth is still unlike
the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there’s neither hide nor hair
of other grasses graced by other winds,
of other treetops bearing other crowns,
other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo
has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven’t heard the word
of better or worse mozarts,
platos, edisons, elsewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes
are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness
is still incomparable,
peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions
still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone
still raise voices to high heavens –

let’s act like very special guests of honour
at the district firemen’s ball,
dance to the beat of the local oompah band
and pretend that it’s the ball
to end all balls.

I can’t speak for other –
for me this is misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater
where even the stars have time to burn
while winking at us
unintentionally.

479. An Offer Received In This Morning's Mail - Amy Gerstler

(On misreading an ad for a set of CDs entitled
"Beethoven's Complete Symphonies.")

The Musical Heritage Society
invites you to accept
Beethoven's Complete Sympathies.
A full $80.00 value, yours for $49.95.
The brooding composer
of "Ode to Joy" now delighting
audiences in paradise nightly
knows your sorrows. Just look
at his furrowed brow, his thin
lipped grimace. Your sweaty
2 am writhings have touched
his great Teutonic heart. Peering
invisibly over your shoulder
he reads those poems you scribble
on memo pads at the office,
containing lines like oh lethal blossom,
I am your marionette forever,
and a compassionate smile trembles
at the corners of his formerly stern
mouth. (He'd be thrilled to set
your poems to music.) This immortal
master, gathered to the bosom
of his ancestors over a century ago,
has not forgotten those left behind
to endure gridlock and mind-ache,
wearily crosshatching the earth's surface
with our miseries, or belching complaints
into grimy skies, further besmirching
the firmament. But just how relevant
is Beethoven these days, you may ask.
Wouldn't the sympathies of a modern
composer provide a more up-to-date
form of solace? Well, process this info-byte,
21st century skeptic. A single lock
of Beethoven's hair fetched over $7,000
last week at auction. The hairs were then
divided into lots of two or three and resold
at astronomical prices. That's how significant
he remains today. Beethoven the great-hearted,
who used to sign letters ever thine,
the unhappiest of men, wants you
to know how deeply sorry he is
that you're having such a rough time.
Prone to illness, self-criticism
and squandered affections––
Ludwig (he'd like you to call him that,
if you'd do him the honor),
son of a drunk and a depressive,
was beaten, cheated, and eventually
went stone deaf. He too had to content
himself with clutching his beloved's
toothmarked yellow pencils
(as the tortured scrawls in his notebooks
show) to sketch out symphonies, concerti,
chamber music, etcetera –– works
that still brim, as does your disconsolate
soul, with unquenched fire and brilliance.
Give Beethoven a chance to show
how much he cares. Easy financing
available. And remember:
a century in heaven has not calmed
the maestro's celebrated temper, so act now.
For god's sake don't make him wait.

478. Time - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Translated from the Portuguese by Laila Chris

Who had this brilliant idea
of cutting the time in slices
Slices which were named YEARS
He was a genius individual who
got to industrialize hope
by making it work to the limit
of the exhaustion.

Twelve months are enough to make any human being
get tired and have a breakdown.

Then, it comes the miracle of renovation
Everything starts all over again, with another number
and another wish to believe
that from now on it is going to be different.

477. Keeping Things Whole - Mark Strand

.
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

476. Consciousness - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Consciousness does not vanish
as dreams do.
No noise, no bell
scares her off,
nor does any shout or clatter
issue from her.

Hazy and ambiguous
are images in dreams,
which can be explained
in many various ways.
Consciousness denotes consciousness,
and that's the greater enigma.

There are keys to dreams.
Consciousness opens of her own accord
and does not let herself be shut.
From her
school report cards and stars issue,
and butterflies,
and the souls of old irons,
caps without heads
and pieces of clouds.
It becomes a riddle
without a solution.

Without us there would be no dreams.
He, without whom there would be no
consciousness is unknown,
while the product of his insomnia
is imparted to everyone
who awakes. It is not the dreams that are crazy,
Consciousness is crazy,
not unlike the tenacity
with which it clings to
the course of events.

In our dreams our recently
deceased lives on,
and even enjoys good health and
recaptured youth.
Consciousness places before us
his dead body.
Consciousness does not yield as much as one step.

The airiness of dreams causes
their memory to be shaken off easily.
Consciousness need not fear being forgotten.
She is a difficult trick.
She sits on our shoulders,
weighs down on our heart,
and tumbles beneath our feet.

There's no escape from her
for she accompanies each flight.
And there's no station
along the course of our journey
where she is not waiting for us.

475. An Offer Received In This Morning's Mail - Amy Gerstler

(On misreading an ad for a set of CDs entitled
"Beethoven's Complete Symphonies.")

The Musical Heritage Society
invites you to accept
Beethoven's Complete Sympathies.
A full $80.00 value, yours for $49.95.
The brooding composer
of "Ode to Joy" now delighting
audiences in paradise nightly
knows your sorrows. Just look
at his furrowed brow, his thin
lipped grimace. Your sweaty
2 am writhings have touched
his great Teutonic heart. Peering
invisibly over your shoulder
he reads those poems you scribble
on memo pads at the office,
containing lines like oh lethal blossom,
I am your marionette forever,
and a compassionate smile trembles
at the corners of his formerly stern
mouth. (He'd be thrilled to set
your poems to music.) This immortal
master, gathered to the bosom
of his ancestors over a century ago,
has not forgotten those left behind
to endure gridlock and mind-ache,
wearily crosshatching the earth's surface
with our miseries, or belching complaints
into grimy skies, further besmirching
the firmament. But just how relevant
is Beethoven these days, you may ask.
Wouldn't the sympathies of a modern
composer provide a more up-to-date
form of solace? Well, process this info-byte,
21st century skeptic. A single lock
of Beethoven's hair fetched over $7,000
last week at auction. The hairs were then
divided into lots of two or three and resold
at astronomical prices. That's how significant
he remains today. Beethoven the great-hearted,
who used to sign letters ever thine,
the unhappiest of men, wants you
to know how deeply sorry he is
that you're having such a rough time.
Prone to illness, self-criticism
and squandered affections––
Ludwig (he'd like you to call him that,
if you'd do him the honor),
son of a drunk and a depressive,
was beaten, cheated, and eventually
went stone deaf. He too had to content
himself with clutching his beloved's
toothmarked yellow pencils
(as the tortured scrawls in his notebooks
show) to sketch out symphonies, concerti,
chamber music, etcetera –– works
that still brim, as does your disconsolate
soul, with unquenched fire and brilliance.
Give Beethoven a chance to show
how much he cares. Easy financing
available. And remember:
a century in heaven has not calmed
the maestro's celebrated temper, so act now.
For god's sake don't make him wait.

474. Looking For Poetry - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Translated from the Portuguese by Mark Strand

Don't write poems about what's happening.
Nothing is born or dies in poetry's presence.
Next to it, life is a static sun
without warmth or light.
Friendships, birthdays, personal matters don't count.
Don't write poems with the body,
that excellent, whole, and comfortable body objects to lyrical outpouring.
Your anger, your grimace of pleasure or pain in the dark
means nothing.
Don't show off your feelings
that are slow in coming around and take advantage of doubt.
What you think and feel are not poetry yet.

Don't sing about your city, leave it in peace.
Song is not the movement of machines or the secret of houses.
It is not music heard in passing, noise of the sea in streets that skirt the borders of foam.
Song is not nature
or men in society.
Rain and night, fatigue and hope, mean nothing to it.
Poetry (you don't get it from things)
leaves out subject and object.

Don't dramatize, don't invoke,
don't question, don't waste time lying.
Don't get upset.
Your ivory yacht, your diamond shoe,
your mazurkas and tirades, your family skeletons,
all of them worthless, disappear in the curve of time.

Don't bring up
your sad and buried childhood.
Don't waver between the mirror
and a fading memory.
What faded was not poetry.
What broke was not crystal.

Enter the kingdom of words as if you were deaf.
Poems are there that want to be written.
They are dormant, but don't be let down,
their virginal surfaces are fresh and serene.
They are alone and mute, in dictionary condition.
Live with your poems before you write them.
If they're vague, be patient. If they offend, be calm.
Wait until each one comes into its own and demolishes
with its command of words
and its command of silence.
Don't force poems to let go of limbo.
Don't pick up lost poems from the ground.
Don't fawn over poems. Accept them
as you would their final and definitive form,
distilled in space.

Come close and consider the words.
With a plain face hiding thousands of other faces
and with no interest in your response,
whether weak or strong,
each word asks:
Did you bring the key?

Take note:
words hide in the night
in caves of music and image.
Still humid and pregnant with sleep
they turn in a winding river and by neglect are transformed.

)

473. Kyrielle - John Payne

[EB: Kyrielle - French verse form in short, usually octosyllabic, rhyming couplets. The couplets are often paired in quatrains and are characterized by a refrain that is sometimes a single word and sometimes the full second line of the couplet or the full fourth line of the quatrain.]

A lark in the mesh of the tangled vine,
A bee that drowns in the flower-cup's wine,
A fly in sunshine,--such is the man.
All things must end, as all began.

A little pain, a little pleasure,
A little heaping up of treasure;
Then no more gazing upon the sun.
All things must end that have begun.

Where is the time for hope or doubt?
A puff of the wind, and life is out;
A turn of the wheel, and rest is won.
All things must end that have begun.

Golden morning and purple night,
Life that fails with the failing light;
Death is the only deathless one.
All things must end that have begun.

Ending waits on the brief beginning;
Is the prize worth the stress of winning?
E'en in the dawning day is done.
All things must end that have begun.

Weary waiting and weary striving,
Glad outsetting and sad arriving;
What is it worth when the goal is won?
All things must end that have begun.

Speedily fades the morning glitter;
Love grows irksome and wine grows bitter.
Two are parted from what was one.
All things must end that have begun.

Toil and pain and the evening rest;
Joy is weary and sleep is best;
Fair and softly the day is done.
All things must end that have begun.

472. Thursday - William Carlos Williams

.
I have had my dream––like others––
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky––
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose - and decide to dream no more.

471. Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant - Billy Collins

.
I am glad I resisted the temptation,
if it was a temptation when I was young,
to write a poem about an old man
eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

I would have gotten it all wrong
thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world
and with only book for a companion.
He'll probably pay for the bill out of a change purse.

So glad I waited all these decades
to record how hot and sour the hot and sour
soup is here at Chang's this afternoon
and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

And my book––José Saramago's Blindness
as it turns out––is so absorbing that I look up
from its escalating horrors only
when I am stunned by one of his gleaming sentences.

And I should mention the light
that falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches––
the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,

as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress
in the white blouse and short black skirt,
the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice
and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

470. Relport On Human Beings - Michael Goldman

.
You know about desks and noses,
proteins, mortgages, orchestras,
nationalities, contraceptives;
you have our ruins and records,
but they won't tell you
what we were like.

We were distinguished
by our interest in scenery;
we could look at things for hours
without using or breaking them––
and there was a touch of desperation, not to be found
in any other animal,
in the looks of love we directed
at our children.

We were treacherous of course.
Like anything here––
winds, dogs, the sun––
we could turn on you unexpectedly,
we could let you down.
But what was remarkable about us
and which you will not believe
is that we alone,
with the exception of a few pets
who probably learned it from us,
when betrayed
were frequently surprised.

We were one of a million species
who continually cried out
or silently wept with pain.
I am proud that we alone resented
taking part in the chorus.

Yes, some of us
liked to cause pain.
Yes, most of us
sometimes
liked to cause pain,
but I am proud that most of us
were ashamed
afterward.

Our love of poetry would have amused you;
we were so proud of language
we thought we invented it
(and thus failed to notice
the speech of animals,
the birds' repeated warnings,
the whispered intelligence
of mutant cells).

We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say, "I'm bored."
A kind of clarity
came when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth in our lover's throat
and shake till things felt right again.

Out of the same pulsing world
you know,
out of gases, whorls,
fronds, feelers, jellies,
we devised hard edges,
strings of infinite tension stretched
to guide us.
The mind's pure snowflake
was our map.
Lines, angles, outlines
not to be found in rocks or seas
or living matter
or in the holes of space,
how strange these shapes must look to you,
at odds with everything,
uncanny, broken from the flow,
I think they must be for you
what we called art.

What was most wonderful about us
was our kindness,
but of this it is impossible to speak.
Only someone who knows our cruelty,
who knows the fears we always lived with,
fear of inside and outside, smooth and rough,
soft and hard, wet and dry, touch and no touch,
only someone who understands the great palace we built
on the axis of time
out of our fear and cruelty and called history,
only those who have lived in the anger
of a great modern city,
who saw the traffic in the morning
and the police at night
can know how heartbreaking
our kindness was.

Let me put it this way.
One of us said, "I think
our life is not as good
as the mind warrants,"
another, "It is hard
to be alone and alive at the same time."
To understand these statements
you would have to be human.

Our destruction as a species
was accidental.
Characteristically
we blamed it on ourselves,
which neither the eagle
not the dinosaur would do.

Look closely around you,
study your instruments,
scan the night sky.
We were alien.
Nothing in the universe
resembles us.

469. The Reckoning - Theodore Roethke

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keep us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.

468. Evaluation Of An Unwritten Poem - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own good."

In her depiction of the sky, one detects a certain helplessness,
the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,
she is startled by the planets' lifelessness,
and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)
a question soon arises:
whether we are, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone.

In spite of all the laws of probability!
And today's universally accepted assumptions!
In the face of the irrefutable evidence that may fall
into human hands any day now! That's poetry for you.

Meanwhile, our Lady Bard returns to Earth,
a planet, so she claims, which "makes its rounds without eyewitnesses,"
the only "science fiction that our cosmos can afford."
The despair of a Pascal (1623-1662, note mine)
is, the authoress implies, unrivalled
on any, say, Andromeda or Cassiopeia.
Our solitary existence exacerbates our sense of obligation,
and raises the inevitable question, How are we to live et cetera?,
since "we can't avoid the void."
"'My God,' man calls out to Himself,
'have mercy on me, I beseech thee, show me the way...'"

The authoress is distressed by the thought of life squandered so freely,
as if our supplies were boundless.
She is likewise worried by wars, which are, in her perverse opinion,
always lost on both sides,

and by the "authoritorture" (sic!) of some people by others.
Her moralistic intentions glimmer throughout the poem.
They might shine brighter beneath a less naive pen.

Not under this one, alas. Her fundamentally unpersuasive thesis
(that we may well be, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone)
combined with her lackadaisical style (a mixture
of loffy rhetoric and ordinary speech)
forces the question: Whom might this piece convince?
The answer can only be: No one. Q. E. D.

467. The Horses Of Achilles - C. P. Cavafy

Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven

When they saw that Patroclus was slain,
who had been so stalwart, and strong, and young,
the horses of Achilles started to weep;
their immortal nature was indignant
at the sight of this work of death.
They would shake their heads and toss their manes,
stamp the ground with their feet, and mourn
Patroclus who they realized was lifeless–– undone––
worthless flesh now––his spirit lost––
defenseless––without breath––
returned from life to the the great Nothing.

Zeus saw the tears of the immortal horses
and grew sad. "At the wedding of Peleus,"
he said, "I should not have acted so thoughtlessly;
it would have been better my hapless horses
if we had not given you! What are you doing down there,
among woebegone humanity, the plaything of fate?
You for whom neither death nor old age lie in wait,
you are harassed by transitory calamities.
Men have implicated you in their troubles."––Yet the two
noble animals went on shedding their tears
for the never-ending calamity of death.

466. 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 presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

465. Time - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Translated from the Portuguese by a. capeto

Who had the idea of slicing time into pieces,
which were given the name of year,
was a genious person.
Industrialized hope
pushing it to the limits of its exhaustiveness.

Twelve months are enough for any human being to get tired and give up.

Then comes the miracle of renovation and all stars once again
we pick up another number wishing that
from now on everything will be different..

For you,
I wish your dreams fulfilled.
The love you waited.
Hope renewed.

For you,
I wish all the colors of life.
All happiness you can smile to
All songs you can thrill.

For you in this new year,
Wish all friends to be better,
May your family be more united,
May your life be more lived.

I would like to wish you so many things.
But nothing would be enough...

So, I wish only that you have many wishes.
Big wishes and may they move you further every single minute,
on route to your happiness!

464. New Year's Recipe - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Translated from the Portuguese by Jodey Bateman

If you want to have a beautiful New Year
The color of the rainbow or the color of your peace,
A New Year beyond comparing to all the time you've already lived,
(lived badly perhaps or senselessly)
If you want to have a year
Not freshly painted with everything back on the right track,
But new in the feelings of coming to be;
New
Down to the heart of the things you are least aware of
(to begin with what's inside you)
New, spontaneous, you don't find it to be so perfect,
But with it you eat, you walk,
You love, you understand, you work.
You don't need to drink champagne or any other drink,
You don't need to go on visits or receive cards
(You plan to receive cards?
Send telegrams?)

You don't need
To make a list of good resolutions
To file in your bureau drawer.
You don't need to cry with regret
Over foolish things you've already done
Or to half believe
That by the decree of hope
From January onward things will change
And everything will be brightness, reward,
Justice among men and nations
Freedom with the fragrance and taste of morning bread,
Your rights being respected, beginning
With the sacred right to live.

To have a New Year
Which deserves that name
You, my friend, have to deserve it,
You have to make it new, I know that it's not easy,
But try, experiment, be conscious.
It's inside of you that the New Year
Has always been dormant and waiting.

463. An Ox Looks At Man - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Translated from the Portuguese by Mark Strand

They are more delicate even than shrubs and they run
and run from one side to the other, always forgetting
something. Surely they lack I don't know what
basic ingredient, though they present themselves
as noble or serious, at times. Oh, terribly serious,
even tragic. Poor things, one would say that they hear
neither the song of air nor the secrets of hay;
likewise they seem not to see what is visible
and common to each of us, in space. And they are sad,
and in the wake of sadness they come to cruelty.
All their expression lives in their eyes –– and loses itself
to a simple lowering of lids, to a shadow.
And since there is little of the mountain about them––
nothing in the hair or in the terribly fragile limbs
but coldness and secrecy––it is impossible for them
to settle themselves into forms that are calm, lasting,
and necessary. They have, perhaps, a kind
of melancholy grace (one minute) and with this they allow
themselves to forget the problems and translucent
inner emptiness that make them so poor and so lacking
when it comes to uttering silly and painful sounds: desire, love, jealousy
(what do we know?)––sounds that scatter and fall in the field
like troubled stones and burn the herbs and the water,
and after this it is hard to keep chewing away at our truth.

462. The Poem - Babette Deutsch

.
The painter of Dante's awful ferry-ride
Declared the world only a dictionary,
Words, words, whose separate meanings must go wide
Unless the visionary
Compose them, so his eyes are satisfied.

The saint from Africa called every thing
A word, the world being a poem by God,
Each evil tuned to make a splendor sing,
Ordered by God
With opposites that praise His fingering.

Was Delacroix a fool? Was Augustine?
The dictionary seems a poor appliance,
With venerable terms become obscene,
Too fertile science.
We try the poem, but what does it mean?

The rhymes are slant, of course, the rhythms free
Or sprung, the figures moving through the mind
Close as a caravan across country
Often unkind.
It is magnificent in its privacy

And yet the words are there: fire, earth, ocean,
Sound, silence, odor, shape and shadow, fear,
Delight, animal, mineral, time, space, motion,
Lovely and queer,
The crystal's patience, the baboon's devotion.

The words are there; according to his powers,
The saint, the painter, gave the work a gloss,
Loving it. Anguish, as it scours, devours,
Discovering loss.
The logic of the poem is not ours.

461. Villanelle - Mad Girl's Love Song - Sylvia Plath

.
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

(Thank you Jenny's Mom)

460. Villanelle - The Waking - Theodore Roethke

.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

459. Villanelle - Late Summer - Marilyn Hacker

.
I love you and it makes me rather dull
when everyone is voluble and gay.
The conversation hits a certain lull.

I moon, rattled as china in a bull
shop, wanting to go, wanting to stay.
I love you and it makes me rather dull.

You might think I had cotton in my skull.
And why is one in Staithes and not in Hay?
The conversation hits a certain lull.

You took a fretful, unoriginal
and unrelaxing friend on holiday.
I love you and it makes me rather dull.

A sheepish sky, with puffs of yellow wool,
watches the tide interrogate the day.
The conversation hits a certain lull.

And I am grimly silent, swollen full
of unsaid things. I certainly can't say
"I love you." And it makes me rather dull.
The conversation hits a certain lull.

458. Villanelle - Doomsday - Sylvia Plath

.
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Our painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been out in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

God's monkey wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

457. Villanelle - If I Could Tell You - W. H. Auden

.
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

456. Villanelle - The Right Thing - Theodore Roethke

.
Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will--
The right thing happens to the happy man.

The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.

God bless the roots!--Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,

And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.

454. Villanelle - The Story We Know - Martha Collins

.
The way to begin is always the same. Hello,
Hello. Your hand, your name. So glad, Just fine,
And Good-bye at the end. That's every story we know,

And why pretend? But lunch tomorrow? No?
Yes? An omelette, salad, chilled white wine?
The way to begin is simple, sane, Hello,

And then it's Sunday, coffee, the Times, a slow
Day by the fire, dinner at eight or nine
And Good-bye. In the end, this is a story we know

So well we don't turn the page, or look below
The picture, or follow the words to the next line:
The way to begin is always the same Hello.

But one night, through the latticed window, snow
Begins to whiten the air, and the tall white pine.
Good-bye is the end of every story we know

That night, and when we close the curtains, oh,
We hold each other against that cold white sign
Of the way we all begin and end. Hello,
Good-bye is the only story. We know, we know.

453. Villanelle - Two de Chiricos - Mark Strand

1. The Philosopher's Conquest

This melancholy moment will remain,
So, too, the oracle beyond the gate,
And always the tower, the boat, the distant train.

Somewhere to the south a Duke is slain,
A war is won. Here, it is too late.
This melancholy moment will remain.

Here, an autumn evening without rain,
Two artichokes abandoned on a crate,
And always the tower, the boat, the distant train.

Is this another scene of childhood pain?
Why do the clockhands say 1:28?
This melancholy moment will remain.

The green and yellow light of love's domain
Falls upon the joylessness of fate,
And always the tower, the boat, the distant train.

The things our vision wills us to contain,
The life of objects, their unbearable weight.
This melancholy moment will remain,
And always the tower, the boat, the distant train.


2. The Disquieting Muses

Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.

Something is wrong; something about the air,
Its color; about the light, the way it glows.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.

The muses in their fluted evening wear,
Their faces blank, might lead one to suppose
Something about the silence of the square,

Something about the buildings standing there.
But no, they have no purpose but to pose.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.

What happens after that, one doesn't care.
What brought one here--the desire to compose
Something about the silence of the square,

Or something else, of which one's not aware,
Life itself, perhaps--who really knows?
Boredom sets in first, and then despair...
Something about the silence of the square.

452. Villanelle for D.G.B. - Marilyn Hacker

.
Every day our bodies separate,
exploded torn and dazed.
Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate
and touch each other, speechless and amazed;
and every day our bodies separate

us farther from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,
not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.
Every day our bodies' separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.
In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise,
not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late
morning as the wind tears off the haze,
not understanding how we celebrate
our bodies. Every day we separate.

451. Villanelle - George Higgins

(Spielberg visited an inner city school in response to a class of black students who had laughed inappropriately at a showing his movie about the holocaust Schindler's List.)

When Steven Spielberg spoke at Oakland High
A custodian swept up the shattered glass,
replaced the broken clocks to satisfy

the Governor, who was preoccupied
with becoming President, with covering his ass.
When Steven Spielberg spoke at Oakland High

the District found diminishing supplies
of disinfectant and toilet paper stashed
away, so they replaced the clocks instead to satisfy

the cameras and the press that they had rectified
the deficiencies among the underclass.
When Steven Spielberg spoke at Oakland High

the students didn't seem dissatisfied
about the cover up, just happy to be out of class.
The custodian replaced the broken clocks to satisfy

this need we have to falsify
the truth in subservience to cash.
When Steven Spielberg came to Oakland High
the custodian replaced the broken clocks.

450. Colonel Mustard Between Games - Kathleen Flenniken

.
I find my bench in the conservatory,
nurse a scotch and this throbbing headache

and contemplate my id. I'd like to get my hands
on that wee revolver, the tiny gold wrench,

I can almost feel the knife between by fingertips.
When I'm idle I'm just a cartoon of a man,

a loser with a handlebar moustache.
I'm no smarter that Miss Scarlet in her

tawdry side-slit dress or Mr. Green,
the regrettable car salesman. These interludes

undo me. But roll the dice and everybody stares
when I enter a room––they write my name

on their detective pads. Motive, desire––
I've got it all in spades. But have I acted?

That's the hell and hardest part of this game––
the heart stays sealed, it capacities a mystery.

446. Apocalypse - Gerald Stern

.
Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went
to the four corners though I don't say it
out of pride but more like a type of regret,
and I did it because there was no one I truly believed
in though once when I climbed the hill in Skye
and arrived at the rough tables I saw the only other
elder who was a vegetarian--in Scotland--
and visited Orwell and rode a small motorcycle
to get from place to place; and I immediately
stopped eating fish and meat and lived on soups;
and we wrote each other in the middle and late fifties
though one day I got a letter from his daughter
that he had died in an accident; he was
I'm sure of it, an angel who flew in midair
with one eternal gospel to proclaim
to those inhabiting the earth and every nation;
and now that I go through my papers every day
I search and search for his letters but to my shame
I have even forgotten his name, that messenger
who came to me with tablespoons of blue lentils.

445. This Was A Wonderful Night - Gerald Stern

.
This was a wonderful night. I heard the Brahms
piano quintet, I read a poem by Schiller,
I read a story, I listened to Gloomy Sunday.
No one called me, I studied the birthday poem
of Alvaro de Campos. I thought, if there was time,
I'd think of my garden––all that lettuce, wasted,
all those huge tomatoes lying on the ground
rotting, and I'd think of the sticks I put there,
waving good-bye, those bearded sticks. De Campos,
he was the one who suffered most, his birthday
was like a knife to him; he sat in a chair
remembering his aunts; he thought of the flowers
and cakes, he thought of the sideboard crowded with gifts.
I look at the photo of Billie Holiday;
I turn the lightbulb on and off. I envy
those poets who loved their childhood, those who remember
the extra places laid out, the china and glasses.
They want to devour the past, they revel in pity,
they live like burnt-out matches, memory ruins them;
again and again they go back to the first place.

De Campos and I are sitting on a bench
in some American city. He hardly knows
how much I love his country. I have two things
to tell him about my childhood, one is the ice
on top of the milk, one is the sign in the window––
three things–– the smell of coal. There is some snow
left on the street, the wind is blowing. He trembles
and touches the buttons on his vest. His house
is gone, his aunts are dead, the tears run down
our cheeks and chin, we are like babies crying.
"Leave thinking to the head,"
he says. I sob
"I don't have birthdays any more" I say,
"I just go on," although I hardly feel
the sadness, there is such joy in being there
on that small bench, watching the sycamores,
looking for birds in the snow, listening for boots,
staring at the begonias, getting up
and down to rub the leaves and touch the buds––
endless pleasure, talking about New York,
comparing pain, writing the names down
of all the cities south of Lisbon, singing
one or two songs––a hundred years for him,
a little less for me, going east and west
in the new country, my heart forever pounding.

444. Unwise Purachases - George Bilgere

.
They sit around in the house
Not doing much of anything: the boxed set
Of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread.
The French cut silk shirts
Which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet,
And make me look exactly
Like the kind of middle-aged man
Who would wear a French cut silk shirt.

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
The mysteries of the heavens
But which I used only once or twice,
And which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
When it could be examining the Crab Nebula.

The 30-day course in Spanish,
Whose text I barely opened,
Whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,
Save for Tape One, where I never learned
Whether the suave American,
Conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
At a Spanish hotel about the possibility
Of obtaining a room,
Actually managed to check in. I like to think
That one thing led to another between them
And that by Tape Six or so
They're happily married
And raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terre Haute.

But I'll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
For a sexy, spanish-speaking astronomer
Who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,
And I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
There lives woman with, say,
A fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
Near her unused easel, a rainbow
Of oil paints drying in their tubes
On the table where the violin lies entombed
In the permanent darkness of its locked case
Next to the dusty chess set,

A women who has always dreamed of becoming
The kind of woman the man I've dreamed of becoming
Has always dreamed of meeting,

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
And Cézanne, while they fence delicately
In Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
Fixing up a little risotto,
Enjoying a modest cabernet
While talking over day a so ordinary
As to seem miraculous.

443. You Reading This, Be Ready - William Stafford

.
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life––

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

441. Tension - Billy Collins

"Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension." –– Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and, beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
Another drip from the faucet?
Another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of the bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone's guess.

The sun rose ever higher.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountain to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
suddenly fringed with little colorful, dangling balls.

440. Circus Animals - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Bears are tapping their paws to the beat,
a lion jumps through a flaming hoop,
a monkey in a yellow tunic rides a bicycle,
the whip cracks and the music sounds,
the whip cracks and animals roll their eyes,
an elephant carries around a pitcher on his head,
dogs are dancing with carefully measured steps.

I'm very much ashamed, I – a human.

A horrible time was had that day:
boisterous applause was not lacking,
though an arm longer by the length of a whip
cast a sharp shadow on the sand.
------------------------

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

Bears are stomping in perfect time.
A lion jumps through flaming hoops.
A whip cracks and the music grinds.
A monkey rides a bike in a yellow suit.
A whip cracks and the animals turn their glance.
Dogs dance in carefully measured movement.
An elephant walks with a pitcher in perfect balance.

Myself, I'm quite embarrassed, I, a human.

People didn't enjoy themselves that day.
You wouldn't know it from the clapping hands
though one hand elongated by a whip
cast a striking shadow on the sand.

439. The Face - Philip Levine

.
A strange wind off the night.
I have come here to talk
to you at last, here
in an empty hotel room
half the world away from home.
Our tracks have crossed
how many times—a dozen
at least—and yet it’s more
than forty years since I saw
you, solemn and hurt, gazing
from your favorite window
at the night that would
soon flood your eyes and darken
the living veins. Below,
the city is almost
asleep. An old man, no
taller than a boy, mumbles
drunkenly on his way,
and then only a sentry
passes from time to time,
his head sunk to his chest,
his eyes closed against
the strange summer cold.

We should all be asleep.
The hour is good for
nothing else, and yet
I cannot sleep because
suddenly today I caught
your presence beside me
on the street as I hadn’t
before in all these years
A tall man laid aside
his paper and stared at me,
a man no older, than I,
with the long sad face
that passed from you
to me. I kept walking,
feeling his eyes on me,
and when I turned at last
he was gone, and the bench
filled with dirty children.
I went back—but no—
he was gone, and wherever
I walked I felt those eyes
on me and felt somehow
a time had come when
we might speak at last.

And so I do. I say, Father,
the years have brought
me here, still your son;
they have brought me
to a life I cannot
understand. I’m silent.
A ship is mooring
in the great harbor,
and the only voice
that comes back is the faint
after-ringing of my own.
I say, Father, the dark
moon above this battered city
must once have guided you
across the twelve frontiers
you crossed to save
your life. It leads me
nowhere, for I’m a free man,
alone as you were,
but going nowhere. I, too,
have lost my three sons
to America, I, too, have climbed
the long hillsides
of Spain in early light
as our forefathers did,
and gazed down at the sea,
deep and silent. I prayed
for some small hope,
which never came. I know
the life you lost. I
have it here, Father,
where you left it, in
the long face of Spain,
in these hands, long
and broken like your own,
in the silence collecting
between each ringing
of my heart, the silence
you anoint me with each day.

Below, the sentry passes
once more in a new light,
for morning is graying
the streets of this quarter.
He wipes his nose on
the rough green wool
of his sleeve and stamps
his feet. Spain will waken
soon to street cries, to
the cries of children,
the cries of the lost men
and women of Barcelona
naming their despair.
I will walk among them,
tired and useless. Today
I will not talk, not
even to myself, for
it is time to listen,
as though some secret
message came blaring
over the megaphones,
or a voice mumbled below
the waves of traffic, as though
one word mattered more
than another in this world,
in this city, broken and stained,
which is the home of no one,
though it shouts out all
our names. I will listen
as though you spoke and told
me all you never knew
of why the earth takes
back all she gives and
even that comes to be enough.

438 Tree - Jane Hirshfield

.
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books––

already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly immensity taps at your life.

437. The Clouds III (Scherzo) - William Carlos Williams

.
I came upon a priest once at St. Andrew's
in Amalfi in crimson and gold brocade riding
the clouds of his belief.

It happened that we tourists had intervened
at some mid-moment of the ritual ––
tipped the sacristan or whatever it was.

No one else was there –– porphyry and alabaster,
the light flooding in scented
with sandalwood –– but this holy man

jiggling upon his buttocks to the litany
chanted, in response, by two kneeling altar boys!
I was amazed and stared in such manner

that he, caught half off the earth
in his ecstasy –– though without losing beat ––
turned and grinned at me from his cloud.

436. The Return - Jane Flanders

(in memory of Agnes Plummer Schroyer, 1883-1921)

This is not everything––

Cold moment under the sheet
And whispers by the door,
Flowers, this glassy fall.

Do not believe them.

How could I leave
You most of all, before breakfast,
With the smell of sun
Filling the kitchen

And the beds unmade?

Would I run barefoot downstairs,
Into the garden without my glasses?
Would I go without telling you everything,
Everything?

Your hair ribbons tremble.
Cries skim over the pool
Of the dream of my departure.

Hush. do not believe them.

You must wait by the new lettuce.
It will come up bearing
Love in my own hand.
You must listen to soup and light rain
For news of me.

On Christmas morning you will be gently
Slipping the bow from your father's gift
(Such a careful child)

You will glance out the window for only a moment
(The bow will be almost off)
And see my hair, my red, red hair,
Beautifully piled on top of my head.

You will see light through my muslin sleeves,
My gold heart ticking in the snow.

435. Any Case - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from Polish by Graźyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer. Father away.
It happened, but not to you.

You survived because you were the first.
You survived because you were the last.
Because alone. Because the others.
Because on the left. Because on the right.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.

Luckily there was a forest.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
a frame, a turn, an inch a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the water.

Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.
What would have happened if a hand, a leg,
one step, a hair away––

So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?
The net's mesh was tight, but you––through the mesh?
I can't stop wondering at it, can't be silent enough.
Listen,
how quickly your heart is beating in me.

434. Among The Multitudes - Wislawa Szymborska

.
I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.

I could have different
ancestors, after all.
I could have fluttered
from another nest
or crawled bescaled
from another tree.

Nature's wardrobe
holds a fair supply of costumes:
spider, seagull, fieldmouse.
Each fits perfectly right off
and is dutifully worn
into shreds.

I didn't get a choice either,
but I can't complain.
I could have been someone
much less separate.
Someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,
bred for my fur
or Christmas dinner,
something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground
as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede
of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness
dazzled some.

What if I'd prompted only fear,
loathing,
or pity?

If I'd been born
in the wrong tribe
with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind
to me thus far.

I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments.

My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is,
someone completely different.

433. Boats In Fog - Robinson Jeffers

Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music.
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone's throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
Following the cliff for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me.
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and cautious,
Coasting all around the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.

432. Community - Sally Roberts Jones

(Mr. Rogers, buried April 26, 1972)

There has been a death in the street.
Drawn curtains, collection for wreaths ––
The historians call it Cymortha,
Assume that it vanished
In the stream of industrial birth.

We're the size of a village: forty houses,
A shop. Over fences the women gossip,
Watch weddings and growings –– observe
The proper and ritual tact
Of those who must live with their kin.

No blood ties, it's true; our bonds
Are accent and place –– and desire
For much the same ends. We are not
Political animals; held
An Investiture feast for the children,

And praised all that pomp. On Sundays
Expediency pegs out the washing:
If God is not mocked–– well, He knows us ––
I suppose it was like this before
When Piety lay in the clouds, and oncoming thunder.

There has been a death in the street;
We are less by that much. Statistics
Cannot say what we lose, what we give:
Questionnaires for the Welfare Department
Tell industrious lies.

We adapt. To the chimneys, the concrete,
The furnace, the smoke, the dead trees.
Our fields are the names of roadways,
Our flocks and our language are gone:
But we hold our diminished city in the face of the sun.

431. The Buddha's Last Instruction - Mary Oliver

.
“Make of yourself a light “
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal - a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I’m not needed
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

430. Cavalry Crossing A Ford - Walt Whitman

.
A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun––
hark to the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering
stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a
picture, the negligent rest on the saddles.
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering
the ford––while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.

429. Theatrical Impressions - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski

In tragedy I find the sixth act most important:
when they arise from stage battlefields,
adjust their wigs and robes,
pull out the knife from the breast,
remove the noose from the neck,
stand in line amongst the living
facing the audience.

Bows individual and collective:
a white hand on a wounded heart,
a suicide curtseying,
a beheaded nodding.

Bows in pairs:
fury offering an arm to gentleness,
the victim gazing blissfully into the torturer's eyes,
the revolutionary ungrudgingly marching with the tyrant.

Eternity squashed with the toe of a golden slipper.
Morals dispersed with the brim of a hat.
An incorrigible readiness to repeat it all tomorrow.

A file of those who died much earlier
in acts three and four and between the acts.
The miraculous return of those vanished without trace.
The thought that in the wings they patiently waited
not shedding their costumes
not taking off their make-up
moves me more than tragic tirades.

But truly uplifting is the falling curtain
and what can still be glimpsed beneath it:
here a hand hastily grabs a flower,
there another snatches a dropped sword.
Only then a third, unseen,
accomplishes its task:
grips me by the throat.

428. The Sun - Mary Oliver

.
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–––
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–––
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love–––
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–––
or have you too
turned from this world–––

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

427. Cloisonné - Jane Flanders

for Steve Fisher

Near Kyoto, around 1900,
Perfection was finally achieved
In the shape of a small vase,
Owing something to art nouveau
And much to the Chinese.
Three birds crossing the water –
You might have expected more.

Something like music begins and overtakes you.
Birds embedded in sky
Carry the though glass doors
And over the chained, enamel spume.
You would forget to breathe,
Without the wires
Spreading your ribs like wings.

A phosphorescent stranger
(Whose retinae, like yours,
Must once have recorded depth,
Change, roiling water)
Surfaces from beneath the blue glaze
And calls, "There were never such birds.
There is no place like this,
Even beyond Kyoto.

It is chance that these shapes
Resemble your life.
Follow me. You will learn to unsay
Bird, water, sky, love, solitude."
And you begin the flawless descent.

426. Places To Return - Dana Gioia

.
There are landscapes one can own,
bright rooms which look out to the sea,
tall houses where beyond the window
day after day the same dark river
turns slowly through the hills, and there
are homesteads perched on mountaintops
whose cool white caps outlast the spring.

And there are other places which
although we did not stay for long,
stick in the mind and call us back–
a valley visited one spring
where walking through an apple orchard
we breathed its blossoms with the air.
Return seems like a sacrament.

Then there are landscapes one has lost–
the brown hills circling a wide bay
I watched each afternoon one summer
talking to friends who now are dead.
I like to think I could go back again
and stand out on the balcony,
dizzy with a sense of déjà vu.

But coming up these steps to you
at just that moment when the moon,
magnificently full and bright
behind the lattice-work of clouds,
seems almost set upon the rooftops
it illuminates, how shall I
ever summon it again?

425. Green Frog At Roadstead, Wisconsin - James Schevill

.
It is the way of a pleasant path
To walk through white birch, fir,
And spruce on a limestone trail
Through the quiet, complacent time
Of summer when, suddenly, the frog jumps
And you jump after him, laughing,
Hopping, frog and woman, to show
The stationary world its flat ways.
Love is a Frog, I grin that greenly
To your green eyes and they leap
At me. Up, I will enter the Frog World
With you and try the leaping ways
Of the heart that we do not fail to find
The sunlit air full of leaping chances.

424. Late Ripeness - Czeslaw Milosz

.
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

423. Passing The Unworked Field - Mary Oliver

.
Queen Anne's lace
is hardly prized but
neither is it idle, look how it
stands fiercely on its
thin stem, how it
nurtures its white budlets with the
gift of the sun, how it
makes for this world all the
loveliness it can.

422. The Joy Of Writing - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.