1104. The Sabbath - W. H. Auden

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Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation,

They cautiously sniffed the air:

The most fastidious nostril among them admitted

That fellow was no longer there.

Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted,

Migrants flew fast and far-

Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth,

Beaches covered with tar,

Ruins and metallic rubbish in plenty

Were all that was left of him

Whose birth on the sixth had made of that day

 An unnecessary interim.

Well, that fellow had never really smelled

Like a creature who would survive:

No grace, address of faculty like those

Born on the First Five.

Back, then, at last on a natural economy,

Now His Impudence was gone,

Looking exactly like what it was,

The Seventh Day went on,

Beautiful, happy, perfectly pointless….

A rifles’s ringing crack

Split their Arcadia wide open, cut

Their Sabbath nonsense short.

For whom did they think they had been created?

That fellow was back,

More bloody-minded than they remembered,

More godlike than they thought.

1103. And With March A Decade In Bolinas - Joanne Kyger

  Selected from: A Book Of Luminous Things, 

  Edited by Czeslaw Milosz

Just sitting around smoking, drinking and telling stories,

the news, making plans, analyzing, approaching the cessation

of personality, the single personality understands it demise.

Experience of the simultaneity of all human beings on this planet,

alive when you are alive. This seemingly inexhaustible

sophistication of awareness becomes relentless and horrible, 

trapped. How am I ever going to learn enough to get out.

The beautiful soft and lingering props of the Pacific here.

The back door bangs

So we’ve made a place to live

  here in the greened out 70’s

Trying to talk in the Tremulous

morality of the present

Great Breath. I give you, Great Breath!

1102. For Angela - Margaret Menges

 Selected from: A Book Of Luminous Things, 

  Edited by Czeslaw Milosz

Angela’s coming for dinner, he said and

he bought the card with flowers and red hearts

flashing in circles.

He set the card under the rose light

on the dining room table,

next to the bills and the junk mail

piled there in the daily hubbub

which we promptly cleared away 

             because

Angela, Angela’s coming, he said

and it made me laugh to remember

and I thought it’d be swell to have a theme,

like a national holiday for young love, so

we had Angel-hair pasta and Angel food cake,

white and full of air, whipped cream

and strawberries redder than roses and

blood and fairy-tale apples

Angela, Angela. . . she arrived like the

Fourth of July and sat at the 

end of the table, staring into

the blue eyes of the boy I’ve known forever.

1101. The Widening Sky - Edward Hirsch

I am so small walking on the beach

at night under the widening sky.

The wet sand quickens beneath my feet

and the waves thunder against the shore.

I am moving away from the boardwalk

with its colorful streamers of people

and the hotels with their blinking lights.

The wind sighs for hundreds of miles.

I am disappearing so far into the dark

I have vanished from sight.

I am a tiny seashell

that has secretly drifted ashore

and carries the sound of the ocean

surging through its body.

I am so small now no one can see me.

How can I be filled with such a vast love?