69. LEARNING - William Stafford

A piccolo played then a drum.
Feet began to come-a part
of the music. Here came a horse,
clippety clop, away.

My mother said, "Don't run––
the army is after someone
other than us. If you stay
you'll learn our enemy."

Then he came, the speaker. He stood
in the square. He told us who
to hate. I watched my mother's face,
its quiet. "That's him," she said.

68. YOU AND ART - William Stafford

.
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face––
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

And you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

67. AT LEAST - Raymond Carver

.
I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the strait from every
seafaring country in the world–––
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy–––I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what's going to happen.

66. FAMILY REUNION - Judith Viorst

The first full-fledged family reunion
Was held at the seashore
With 9 pounds of sturgeon
7 pounds of corned beef
1 nephew who got the highest mark on an intelligence test
ever recorded in Hillside, New Jersey
4 aunts in pain taking pills
1 cousin in analysis taking notes
1 sister-in-law who makes a cherry cheesecake a person
would be happy to pay to eat
5 uncles to whom what happened in the stock market
shouldn't happen to their worst enemy
1 niece who is running away from home the minute the
orthodontist removes her braces
1 cousin you wouldn't believe it to look at him only likes
fellows
1 nephew involved with a person of a different racial
persuasion which his parents are taking very well
1 brother-in-law with a house so big you could get lost and
carpeting so thick you could suffocate and a mortgage so
high you could go bankrupt
1 uncle whose wife is a saint to put up with him
1 cousin who has made such a name for himself he was
almost Barbra Streisand's obstetrician
1 cousin who has made such a name for himself he was
almost Jacob Javits' CPA
1 niece it wouldn't surprise anyone if next year she's playing
at Carnegie Hall
1 nephew it wouldn't surprise anyone if next year he's
sentenced to Leavenworth
2 aunts who go to the same butcher as Philip Roth's mother
And me wanting approval from all of them

65. EASTER MORNING - William Stafford

.
Maybe someone comes to the door and says,
"Repent," and you say, "Come on in," and it's
Jesus. That's when all you ever did, or said,
or even thought, suddenly wakes up again and
sings out, "I'm still here," and you know it's true.
You just shiver alive and are left standing
there suddenly brought to account: saved.

Except, maybe that someone says, "I've got a deal
for you." And you listen because that's how
you're trained––they told you, "Always hear both sides."
So then the slick voice can sell you anything, even
Hell, which is what you're getting by listening.
Well, what should you do? I'd say always go to
the door; yes, but keep the screen locked. Then,
while you hold the Bible in one hand, lean forward
and say carefully, "Jesus?"

64. BY A SWIMMING POOL OUTSIDE SYRACUSA - Billy Collins

.
All afternoon I have been struggling
to communicate in Italian
with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun
to resemble the two male characters
in my Italian for Beginners,
the ones who are always shopping
or inquiring about the times of trains,
and now I can hardly speak or write English.

I have made important pronouncements
in this remote limestone valley
with its trickle of a river,
stating that it seems hotter
today even than it was yesterday
and that swimming is very good for you,
very beneficial, you might say.
I also posed burning questions
about the hours of the archaeological museum
and the location of the local necropolis.

But now I am alone in the evening light
which has softened the white cliffs,
and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice
which has softened my mood or—
how would you say in English—
has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain
with greater gentleness, shall we say,

or, to put it less literally,
this drink has extended permission
to my mind to feel—what's the word?—
a friendship with the vast sky
which is very—give me a minute—very blue
but with much great paleness
at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

63. Excerpt from Preludes to Attitude, LVI - Conrad Aiken

.
Let us describe the evening as it is:—
The stars disposed in heaven as they are:
Verlaine and Shakspere rotting, where they rot,
Rimbaud remembered, and too soon forgot;

Order in all things, logic in the dark;
Arrangement in the atom and the spark;
Time in the heart and sequence in the brain—

Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
And let us then take godhead by the neck—

And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

62. XXXIX IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS - W. H. Auden

February 1939

1

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By morning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom;
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

2

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

3

Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

61. 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.

60. STONE VILLAGES - Joseph Brodsky

.
The stone-built villages of England.
A cathedral bottled in a pub window.
Cows dispersed across fields.

A man in a moth-eaten suit
sees a train off, heading, like everything there, for the sea,
smiles at his daughter, leaving for the East.
A whistle blows.

And the endless sky over the tiles
grows bluer as swelling birdsong fills.
And the clearer the song is heard,
the smaller the bird.

59. IT COMES DOWN TO THIS

.
Said Gandhi:
What you do
is of no importance,
but it is very important
you do it well.
The report will only be read
by your illiterate supervisor;
but oh what clarity!
Said Pieper:
Leisure
is the basis
of culture.
After work,
the poem!
Said Augustine:
Love, and do
as you will.
Listen to me!
I am not ready!
Said Grenell:
I have only
one life to lead
and
I'm going
to enjoy it
in spite of
all you bastards.
Let me help you,
as soon as I finish this beer.

58. The Way It Is - William Stafford

.
There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

57. AN APOLOGY - F. J. Bergmann

.
Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.

I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

56. A LETTER - Yehuda Amichai

To sit on a hotel balcony in Jerusalem
and to write: “Sweetly pass the days
from desert to sea.” And to write: “Tears
dry quickly here. This blot is a tear that
made the ink run.” That’s how they used to write
in the last century. “I have drawn
a little circle around it.”

Time passes, as when someone’s on the phone
laughing or crying far away from me:
whatever I hear, I can’t see;
what I see, I don’t hear.

We weren’t careful when we said “Next year”
or “A month ago.” Those words
are like broken glass: you can hurt yourself with them,
even slash an artery, if
that’s what you’re like.

But you were beautiful as the commentary
on an ancient text.
The surplus of women in you distant country
brought you to me, but
another law of probability
has taken you away again.

To live is to build a ship and a harbor
at the same time. And to finish the harbor
long after the ship has gone down.

And to conclude: I remember only
that it was foggy. And if that’s the way you remember¬——
what do you remember?

55. A HUNDRED YEARS - Shirley Daniels

A HUNDRED YEARS - Shirley Daniels

A hundred years have passed
Yet I hear the distant beat of my father's drums.
I hear his drums throughout the land.
His Beat I feel within my heart.

The drum shall beat
so my heart shall beat,
And I shall live a hundred thousand years.

54. THE AMERICAN LIVING-ROOM: A TRACT - William Meredith

Embruted every faculty divine:
Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world
-Young, NIGHT THOUGHTS

i

Ideally, you should be in your own
when you read this. Think of it as an oddity–––
the one indoor space where living
is deliberately pursued, as in others
we transact dining, sleeping, bathing,
perhaps TV or children. Wherever there are two
one should be kitchen. For the rich,
rooms can be spun out indefinitely:
drawing-, dressing-, morning-, and special
chambers called library, pantry, nursery
Many still house their cars.

ii

Most people inhabit shelters too small
to partition off with words, and always
some people have none. Is it better
to feel at fault for this, or not
to feel at fault? The meagerest American house
is a gross Hilton compared to where most people
take shelter on the inclement world.
To start with, feel fortunate.

iii

You have made the effort to dress yourself
in character, probably well beyond the requirement
of mere covering---you have already risked
that much misunderstanding. Then comes
this second habiliment, no matter how
reluctant or minimal a statement,
a room which gives you away: with the things
you've acquired at cost, the things you've been given
and kept, the things you choose to exhibit.
The accumulation seems to have been only partly voluntary.
Yet no one you'd want to know could stay
for a month, in a rented room in Asia, without
this tell-tale silt beginning to settle.
When people die, their children have to come dig
for them like Winckelmanns, among many false Troys.

iv

Prisons recognize the need to arrest
this form of identity. Cells
are deliberately ill-fitted uniforms
which you are issued to wear over
the deliberately ill-fitted cloth ones. You
are put there to forego living.

Military quarters may appear more permissive,
yet the space for personal effects is limited
and subject to unscheduled inspection. Nobody
is encouraged to bring along a two-volume dictionary,
a Hopi mask, a valuable paperweight, to a war
or to the interminable rehearsals of camp and shipboard.

v

The room we're in now is like something you've said,
whether off-hand or considered. It's in a dialect
that marks you for a twentieth-century person,
(enthusiastic about this? dragging your feet?)
rich or poor or––more commonly––a little of both;
belonging to a nation and an eclectic culture.
The room risks absurdity, as you risked that again
when you put your clothes on this morning,
but because it is capable of being judged
apart from you, in your absence, the risk is greater.
Why has he got and kept this, and only this?
anyone can ask. Why so much? To others
this room is what your scent is to a dog.
You can’t know it or help it.

vi

With us in America, a person who has a printed poem
is likely to have a living-room (though not always–––
there will always be some to whom poetry is not an amenity).
For reasons of its own, poetry has come to this,
with us. It has somehow gone along
with the privileges of the nation
it intends to change, to dispossess of material demons.
Admittedly, this is part of its present difficulty.

For the moment, though, you are holding this poem
Its aim is that of any artifact: to ingratiate.
It would like nothing better
than to be added to the dear clutter here.

53. THE ESCAPE - William Stafford

Now as we cross this white page together
people begin to notice us, and we
cut back and pretend indifference,
but all the time we pick up and lay
down our tracks cunningly, farther
and farther down the page. If we zig-
zagged or jumped a few times we could
make it, but even better would be
to take hands and perform a dance, our eyes
locked onto understanding, while our shadows
tell us which way to go. Those others
glare on our trail; they know what
is happening, and they certainly do not
approve. Remember, we are each other's: do not
look away. Every life is like this,
carried on while some inane plot
tries to intrude. How lucky we were
to find each other and make our escape
down the page and on out like this over the edge.

52. Thermoplyae - C. P. Cavafy (1,2,3,4)

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard (1)

Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they're rich, and when they're poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.

Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven (2)

Honor to those who in their lives
are committed and guard their Thermopylae.
Never stirring from duty;
just and upright in all their deeds,
but with pity and compassion too;
generous whenever they are rich, and when
they are poor, again a little generous,
again helping as much as they are able;
always speaking the truth,
but without rancor for those who lie.

And they merit greater honor
when they foresee (and many do foresee)
that Ephialtes will finally appear,
and in the end the Medes will go through.

Translated from the Greek by Theoharis C. Theoharis (3)

Honor to those who in their life
name and defend Thermopylae.
Never leaving what obliges them to stay;
just and direct in all of their actions,
but showing pity as well, and compassion;
generous whenever they are rich, and when
they are poor, generous again in small things,
once again contributing whatever they can manage;
at all times speaking the truth,
but without hatred for those who have made themselves liars.

And greater honor is dude to them
when they foresee (and many foresee),
and that the Medes at last will come crashing in.

Translated from the Greed by Daniel Mendelsohn (4)

Honor to all of those who in their lives
have settled on, and guard, a Thermopylae.
Never stirring from their obligations;
just and equitable in all of their affairs,
but full of pity, nonetheless, and of compassion;
generous whenever they're rich, and again
when they're poor, generous in small things,
and helping out, again, as much as they are able;
always speaking nothing but the truth,
yet without any hatred for those who lie.

And more honor still is due to them
when they foresee (and many do foresee)
that Ephialtes will make his appearance in the end,
and that the Medes will eventually break through.

51. THE LITTLE WAYS THAT ENCOURAGE GOOD FORTUNE - William Stafford

.
Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life
you will be overwhelmed:
you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you have things right in your life
but do not know why,
you are just lucky, and you will not move
in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives
who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self--
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

50. TWO MASKS UNEARTHED IN BULGARIA - William Meredith

for Kolyo Sevov

When God was learning to draw the human face
I think he may have made a few like these
that now look up at us through museum glass
a few miles north of where they slept
for six thousand years, a necropolis near Varna.
With golden staves and ornaments around them
they lay among human bodies but had none.
Gods themselves, or soldiers lost abroad---
we don’t know who they are.

The gold buttons which are their curious eyes,
the old clay which is their wrinkled skin,
seem to have been worked by the same free hand
that drew Adam for the Jews about that time.
It is moving, that the eyes are still questioning
and no sadder than they are, time being what it is---
as though they saw nothing tragic in the faces
looking down through glass into theirs.
Only clay and gold, they seem to say,
passing through one condition on its way to the next.