1100. Dog Weather - Stephen Dunn

Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.

The paper boy’s papers came apart

in the wind.

Now, nothing human moving.

Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart

in The Caine Mutiny 

My breath chalks the window,

gives me away to myself.

I like the intelligibility of old songs.

I prefer yesterday.

Cars pass, the asphalt’s on its back

smudged with skid. It’s potholed

and cracked; it’s no damn good.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog

should be handcuffed

and searched for loneliness.

My hair is thinning.

I feel like tossing the wind a stick.

The promised snow has arrived,

heavy wet.

I remember the blizzard of…

People I don’t want to be

speak like that

I close my eyes and one

of my many unborn sons

makes a snowball

and lofts it at an unborn friend.

They’ve sent me an AAHP card.

I’m on their list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

1099. Why - Wendell Berry

.

Why all the embarrassment

about being happy?

Sometimes I’m as happy 

as a sleeping dog,

and for the same reasons,

and for others.

1098. In Praise Of Dreams - Wislawa Szymborska

.

In my dreams

I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek

and not just with the living.

I drive a car

that does what I want it to.

I am gifted

and write mighty epics.

I hear voces

as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist

would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,

i.e., on my own.

falling from the roof,

I tumble gently to the grass.

I’ve got no problem

breathing under water.

I can’t complain:

I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.

It’s gratifying that I can always

wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,

I roll over on my other side.

I’m a child of my age,

but I don’t have to be.

A few years ago

I saw two suns

And the night before last a penguin,

clear as day.

1097. Sorrow Home - Margaret Walker

.

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown

or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned

in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf,

mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know

me.

Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong

with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and

the spring growth of wild onion.

I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam heated flats

with music of El and subway in my ears, walled on

by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.

I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to

walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground.

Restless music in my heart and I am eager to be gone.

O southland sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and

blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and

the chain gangs keep me from my own?