1091. I Go From The Woods - Wendell Berry

.

I go from the woods into the cleared fields:

A place no human made, a place unmade

By human greed, and to be made again.

Where centuries of leaves once built by dying

A deathless potency of light and stone

And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless

Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain.

The growth of fifty thousand years undone

In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock

And clay - a ‘new land’ , truly, that no race

Was ever native to, but hungry mice

And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns

And thistles sent by generosity

Of new beginning. No Eden, this was

A garden once, a good and perfect gift;

Its possible abundance stood in it

As it then stood. But now what it might be

Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives -

Thousands of years to make it what it was,

Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

1090. Landscape With Figures - Frank Ormsby

.

What haunts me is a farmhouse among trees

Seen from a bus window, a girl

With a a suitcase climbing a long hill

And a woman waiting.

The time the bus took to reach and pass

The lane’s entrance nothing was settled,

The girl still climbing and the woman still

On the long hill’s summit.

Men were not present. Neither in the fields

That sloped from hedges, nor beyond the wall

That marked the yard’s limits

Was there sign of hens, or hands working.

No sight that might have softened

On the eye the scene’s

Relentlessness.

Nothing had happened, yet the minute spoke

And the scene spoke and the silence,

And oppressed as air does, Loading

For a storm’s release.

All lanes and houses

Secretive in trees and gaunt hills’ jawlines

Turn my thoughts again

To that day’s journey and the thing I saw

And could not fathom. Struck with the same dread

I seem to share in sense, not detail,

What was heavy there:

Sadness of dim places, obscure lives,

Ends and beginnings,

Such extremities.

1089. Gorgon - Tony Hoagland

.

Now that you need your prescription glasses to see the stars

and now that the telemarketers know your preference to sexual positions

Now that corporations run the government

and move over land like giant cloud formations

Now that the human family has turned out to be a conspiracy against the planet

Now that it’s hard to cast stones

without hitting a cell phone tower that will show up later on your bill

Now that you know you are neither innocent, nor powerful,

not a character in a book;

You have arrived at the edge of the world

where the information wind howls incessantly

and you stand in your armor made of irony

with your sword of good intentions raised—

The world is a Gorgon.

It holds up its thousand ugly heads with their thousand writhing visages

Death or madness to look at too long

but your job is not to conquer it;

not to provide entertaining repartee,

not to revile yourself in shame.

Your job is to stay calm

Your job is to watch and take notes

To go on looking

Your job is to not be turned into stone.

1088. Spring-Watching - Hô Xuân Hong (1775- 1820)

.

Translated by John Balaban

A gentle spring evening arrives

airily, unclouded by worldly dust. 

Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.

We see heaven upside down in sad puddles.

Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.

And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is Nirvana?

Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.

1087. Capriccio Italian - Stephen Dunn

.

From the mountain drifts down the finest mist

so fine you walk in it, letting it glaze

your hair, while boats on the lake bob and blur.

This is not your country, everything you see—

cobblestoned ancient streets, umbrella’d tables,

laundry hanging from the balconies of the poor—

appears meaningful.

Just off the piazza, a window display

of squib and rabbit and roasted pig.

No outsized dream sullen the friendly clerks.

If they’re unhappy you’re happy

a tradition helps them not to let it show.

You buy the most expensive tie you’re eyer bought,

silk and wide, blue with subtle, well-spaced dots.

You try on a flamboyant scarf. In the mirror

someone foolish stares back at you.

You take it anyhow.

You’re a woman’s man, and you’re womanless.

How absurd to think anyone can escape

being judged for what he doesn’t have.

Oh the chosen gloomy beauty of a tourist town—

you’ve always known

what lifts you up can get you down.

You’ve come far to feel this keenly low.

The pigeons coo their greedy songs.

You break off bits of bread and leave no trail.

At dusk, if the mist is gone, you plan to sit

with some grappa in a slender glass.

You’re sure the swallows won’t disappoint—

swoop and dive as they did the night before,

mindless, wit, wholly in control.

1086. Country Scene - Hô Xuân Hong (1775- 1820)

Translated by John Balaban

The waterfall plunges in mist.

Who can describe this desolate scene:

the long white river sliding through

the emerald shadows of the ancient canopy

…a shepherd’s horn echoing in the valley,

fishnets stretched to dry on sandy flats.

A bell is tolling, fading, fading

just like love. Only poetry lasts.

1085. A Message to Po Chu-I - W. S. Merwin

In that tenth winter of your exile

the cold never letting go of you

and your hunger aching inside you

day and night while you heard the voices

out of the starving mouths around you

old ones and infants and animals

those curtains of bones swaying on stilts

and you heard the faint cries of the birds

searching in the frozen mud for something

to swallow and you watched the migrants

trapped in the cold the great geese growing

weaker by the day until their wings

could barely lift them above the ground

so that a gang of boys could catch one

in a net and drag him to market

to be cooked and it was then that you

saw him in his own exile and you

paid for him and kept him until he

could fly again and you let him go

but then where could he go in the world

of your time with its wars everywhere

and the soldiers hungry the fires lit

the knives out twelve hundred years ago

I have been wanting to let you know

the goose is well he is here with me

you would recognize that old migrant

he has been with me for a long time

and is in no hurry to leave here

the wars are bigger now than ever

greed has reached numbers that you would not

believe and I will not tell you what

in done to geese before they kill them

now we are melting the very poles

of the earth but I have never known

where he would go after he leaves me

1084 - On Setting A Migrant Goose Free - Po Chu-I (Bay Juyl) (772-846)

Translated by David Hinton

Snows heavy at Hsan-yang this tenth-year winter,

river water spawns ice, tree branches break and fall,

and hungry birds flock east and west by the hundred,

a migrant goose crying starvation loudest among them.

Pecking through snow for grass, sleeping nights on ice,

its cold wings lumber slower and slower up into flight,

and soon it’s tangled in a river boy’s net, carried away

snug in his arms, and put for sale alive in the market.

Once a man of the north, I’m accused and exiled here.

Man and bird, though different, we’re both visitors,

and it hurts a visiting man to see a visiting bird’s pain,

so I pay the ransom and set you free. Goose, o soaring

goose, rising into clouds—where will you fly now?

Don’t fly northwest, that’s the last place you should go.

There in Huai-hsi, rebels still loose, there’s no peace,

just a million armored soldiers long massed for battle:

imperial and rebel armies grown old facing each other.

Starved and exhausted, they’d love to get hold of you,

those soldiers, The’d shoot you down and have a feast

then pluck your wings clean to feather their arrows.

1083. Frederick Douglass - Robert Hayden

.

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth, when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians;

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with loves grown out of his life, the loves

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

1082. What Kind of Times Are These - Adrienne Rich

.

There’s a place between two stands of trees whee the grass grows

  uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled,

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light —

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

1081. Vegetarian Physics - David Clewell

.

The tofu that’s shown up overnight in this house is frightening.

proof of the Law of Conservation: matter that simply cannot be

created or destroyed. Matter older than Newton,

who knew better than to taste it. Older than Lao-tzu,

who thought about it but finally chose harmonious non-interference.

I’d like to be philosophical too, see it as one kind of pale

inscrutable wisdom among the hot dogs, the cold chicken,

the leftover deviled eggs, but I’m talking curled

soybean milk. And I don’t have that kind of energy.

I’d rather not be part of the precariously metaphorical

wedding of modern physics and the ancient Eastern mysteries.

But still: whoever stashed the tofu in my Frigidaire

had better come back for it soon, I’m not Einstein

but I’m smart enough to know a bad idea when I see it

taking up space, biding its time.

Like so much that demands our imperfect attention

amid the particle roar of the world, going nowhere, fast.

1080. Back From Market - Eavan Boland

Jean Siméon Chardin, The Provider (LaPourvoyeuse)

Dressed in the colors of a country day -

Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies -

Chardin’s peasant woman

Is to be found at all times in her short delay

Of dreams, her eyes mixed

Between love and market, empty flagons of wine

At her feet, bread under her arm. he has fixed

Her limbs in colour, and her heart in line.

In her right hand, the hind legs of a hare

Peep from a cloth sack; through the door

Another woman moves

In painted daylight, nothing in this bare

Closet has been lost

Or changed. I think of what great art removes:

Hazard and death, the future and the past,

This woman’s secret history and her loves -

And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining

She has just come back, where men and women

Congregate and go

Among the produce, learning to live from morning

To next day, linked

By a common impulse to survive, although

In surging light they are single and distinct,

Like birds in the accumulating snow,

1079. The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away From the Curb - Sharon Olds

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t have by now.

Whatever the world is going to do to him

it has started to do. With a pencil and two

Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and

grapes he is on his way, there is nothing

more we can do for him. Whatever is

stored in his heart, he can use, now.

Whatever he has laid up in his mind

he can call on. What he does not have

he can lack, The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one

folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,

onto itself, and onto itself, until

only a heavy wedge remains.

Whatever his exuberant soul

can do for him, it is doing right now.

Whatever his arrogance can do

it is doing to him. Everything

that’s been done to him, he will now do.

Everything that’s been placed in him

will come out, now, the contents of a trunk

unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine

    light.

  

1078. The Storm - Mary Oliver

Now through the white orchard my little dog

romps, breaking the new snow

with wild feet.

Running here running there, excited,

hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins

until the white snow is written upon

in large, exuberant letters,

a long sentence, expressing

the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better

myself.

1077. From the book: Moments of Rising Mist

(Sung Landscape Poetry [CE 960-1127] translated by Amitendranath Tagore))

Mei Yao-ch’en - A Walk on Lu-shan Mountain

My longing for wilderness is satisfied.

Mountains all around, high and low.

There is variety in these wonderful peaks:

I walk alone and lose myself in the dark path.

Hoar frost falls and bears climb the trees.

An empty wood; deer drink from the stream.

Where do the people dwell?

A cock crows once from beyond the clouds. 

Ou-yang Hsiu - Climbing the Center Peak of T’ai-shih Mountain

I tether my horse in the shadow of green pines:

In my straw sandals I walk along the green cliff.

Startled birds stir the forest flowers;

Empty hills echo the human voice.

Glow of clouds penetrating the dark mist

Is beyond my power to capture.

Su Shih - Climbing Yum-lung Mountain

Drunk, I walk along the Huang-mao cliff;

The whole cliff is strewn with boulders like flocks of sheep.

I scramble to the edge of the cliff by the stone seat;

Looking up I see white clouds filling the sky.

The sound of songs fall into the ravine, the autumn wind blows sharply.

The men on the path lift their heads and look towards the southeast;

Boisterous Shih-chun claps his hands and laughs loudly.

Su Ch’e - Huo-jan Pavilion

The city is in the south, the mountains in the north;

Every time I come here my spirit expands.

Blue tiles on a thousand houses freshly washed in rain;

Green pines in myriad gullies, fog just rising.

Throughout autumn I was ill in bed,

Listening to the sound of axes.

Today we ascend to the pavilion carrying our wine;

I request all of you to compose beautiful verses.

Allow me first to write this poem on the pavilion wall.

1076. Dream Song 14 - John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

People bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes

as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

and somehow a dog

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving

behind: me: wag.

1075. Incantation - Czeslaw Milosz

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

It puts what should be above things as they are,

Is an enemy of despair and friend of hope.

It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master.

Giving us the estate of the world to manage.

It says that everything is new under the sun,

Opens the congealed fist of the past.

Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.

As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,

The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.

Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

1074. Singing Everything - Joy Harjo

Once there were songs for everything,

Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,

For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep,

For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.

For death (those are the heaviest songs and they

Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief)

Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and 

Falling apart after falling in love songs.

The earth is leaning sideways

And a song is emerging from the floods

And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun.

You must be friends with silence to hear.

The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful----

They are the most rare.

1073. Famous - Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish. 

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

1072. Theme For English B - Langston Hughes

The instructor said,  

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.

I went to school there, then Durham, then here

to this college on the hill above Harlem,

I am the only colored student in my class.

The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,

through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas

Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,

the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator

up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to now what is true for you or me

at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what

I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:

Hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.

(I hear New York, too.) Me—Who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like

the same things other folks like who are other races.

so will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

But will be 

a part of you, instructor.

You are white—

yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

That’s American.

Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to a part of me.

Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that’s true!

I guess you learn from me—

although you’re older—and white—

and somewhat more free.  

This is my page for English B.

1071. Morning Birds - Tomas Tranströmer

 Translated from the Swedish by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will

I wake my car.

Its windshield is covered with pollen.

I put on my sunglasses

and the song of the birds darkens.

While another man buys a newspaper

in the railroad station

near a large goods wagon

which is entirely red with rust

and stands flickering in the sun.

No emptiness anywhere here.

Straight across the spring warmth a cold corridor

where someone comes hurrying

to say that they are slandering him

all the way up to the Director.

Through a backdoor in the landscape

comes the magpie

black and white, Hel’s bird.

And the blackbird moving crisscross

until everything becomes a charcoal drawing,

except for the white sheets on the clothesline:

a Palestrina choir.

No emptiness anywhere here.

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows

while I myself shrink.

It is growing, it takes my place.

It pushes me out of its way.

It throws me out of the nest.

The poem is ready.

1070. From The Journals Of The Frog Prince - Susan Mitchell

 In March I dreamed of mud,

sheets of mud over the ballroom chairs and table.

rainbow slicks of mud under the throne.

In April I saw mud of clouds and mud of sun.

Now in May I find excuses to linger in the kitchen

for wafts of silt and ale,

cinnamon and river bottom,

tender scallion and sour underlog.

At night I cannot sleep.

I am listening for the dribble of mud

climbing the stairs to our bedroom

as if a child in a wet bathing suit ran

up them in the dark.

Last night I said, “Face it, you’re bored.

How many times can you live over

with the same excitement

that moment when the princess leans

into the well, her face a petal

falling to the surface of the water

as you rise like a bubble to her lips,

the golden ball bursting from your mouth?”

Remember how she hurled you against the wall,

your body cracking open,

skin shriveling to the bone,

the green pod of your heart splitting in two,

and her face imprinted with every moment

of your transformation?

I no longer tremble.

Night after night I lie beside her.

“Why is your forehead so cool and damp?” she asks.

Her breasts are soft and dry as flour.

The hand that brushes my head is feverish.

At her touch I long for wet leaves,

the slap of water against rocks.

“What are you thinking of” she asks.

How can I tell her

I am thinking the green skin

shoved like wet pants behind the Directoire desk?

Or tell her I am mortgaged to the hilt

of my sword, io the leek-green tip of my soul?

Someday I will drag her by her hair

to the river—and what? Drown her?

Show her the green flame of my self rising at her feet?

But here’s no more violence in her

than in a fence or a gate.

“What are you thinking of?” she whispers.

I am staring into the garden.

I am watching the moon

wind its trail of golden slime around the oak,

over the stone basin of the fountain.

How can I tell her

I am thinking that transformations are not forever?

1069. Bring Me The Sunflower - Eugenio Montale

Translated from the Italian by George Kay

Bring me the sunflower for me to transplant

to my own ground burnt by the spray of sea,

and show all day to the imaging blues

of sky that golden-faced anxiety.

Things hid in darkness lean towards the clear,

bodies consume themselves in a flowing

of shades: and they in varied music—showing

the chance of chances is to disappear.

So bring me the plant that takes you right

where the blond hazes shimmering rise

and life fumes to air as spirit does;

bring me the sunflower crazy with the light.

1068. The Promise We Live By - Simon J. Ortiz

On the West Coast, days of rainstorm wrestle
the Coast Range, their wet fury driven landward.
We never quite know what the sky promises,
and there is certain assurance in that fate.
It is for that we wait. We’ve already weathered
more than promises. They’ve passed us by.
So I’m not sure this morning when I step outside,
and suddenly it’s not winter anymore but some
warm mask that molds the contours of my face
with unbidden warmth. It’s almost unnatural
but I hope not, having already found reliable
the promise of loss. My expectation is unfulfilled.



Somewhere within the universe of the prairie hills
is a climate that is yet unnoticed, and from it
is welling a warm rupture of another sure season.
Believe it is not unusual, I urge myself
whose myths are always changing in the light.
So it’s this we arrive into daily, always
another season, warm or frigid, and it’s we
who wage weather within our furious spirits.



Tomorrow’s dawn is a promise that will fulfill.
Never mind if the sky does not quite agre

1067. Autobiographia Literaria - Frank O'Hara

 When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone.

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away.

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out “I am

an Orphan.”

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

1066. Ode To Thaliarchus - Horace

Translated from the Latin by David Ferry

See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.

See how the laboring overladen trees

Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.

See how the streams are frozen in the cold.

Bring in the wood and light the fire and open

The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars,

O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,

Forget tomorrow. Leave it up to the gods.

Once the gods have decided, the winds at sea

Will quiet down, and the sea will quiet down,

And these cypresses and old ash trees will shake

In the storm no longer. Take everything as it comes.

Put down your books for profit every new day

That Fortune allows you to have. While you’re still young,

And while morose old age is far away,

There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing and there’s music,

There are young people out in the city squares together

As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.

1065. Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam - Dan Vera

I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.
It happened like this:

One day she took the train to Boston,
made her way to the darkened room,
put her name down in cursive script
and waited her turn.

When they read her name aloud
she made her way to the stage
straightened the papers in her hands —
pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills,
she closed her eyes for a minute,
took a breath,
and began.

From her mouth perfect words exploded,
intact formulas of light and darkness.
She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal
and described the skies like diadem.
Obscurely worded incantations filled the room
with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.

The solitary words she handled
in her upstairs room with keen precision
came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.

40 members of the audience
were treated for hypertension.
20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads
had turned a Moses White.

Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone
in the nightclub,
and by the fourth line of the sixth verse
the grandmother in the upstairs apartment
had been cured of her rheumatism.

The papers reported the power outages.

The area howpitals tazed their emergency generators

and sirens were heard to wail through the night.

Quietly she made her way to the exit,

walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst

She naver left her room again

and never read such syllables aloud.