April 2011
4 posts
The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry
The Wild Geese Wendell Berry Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky...
2 tags
Trying to Have Something Left Over, Jack Gilbert
Trying to Have Something Left Over Jack Gilbert There was a great tenderness to the sadness when I would go there. She knew how much I loved my wife and that we had no future. We were like casualties helping each other as we waited for the end. Now I wonder if we understood how happy those Danish afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk. Often I took care of the baby...
5 tags
Narrative: Ali, Elizabeth Alexander
Narrative: Ali a poem in twelve rounds Elizabeth Alexander 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the bold...
February 2011
1 post
1 tag
For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy...
For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy Poem Richard Jackson Between two worlds life hovers like a star. —Byron for Tomaz It is not so easy to live on the earth as an angel, to imitate the insects that dance around the moon, to return what air we borrow every few seconds. I am going to enter the hour when wind dreamt of a light dress to stroke, when water dreamt of the lips it...
April 2009
4 posts
Switching to deer time, Bob Hicok
Switching to deer time
Bob Hicok
Three deer on the nearby hill and maybe more
on the farby hill and probably every hill
in this place of hills had deer on it
eating the gray-green grass of December
in the early light. How I decide
to get out of bed these days is deer.
If I look out my window and see them
I know it’s time to feed my feet
to the mouths of my jeans
and when I told...
Names of Horses, Donald Hall
Names of Horses Donald Hall
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range. In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats. All...
Before the Sky Darkens, Stephen Dunn
Before the Sky Darkens Stephen Dunn Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus of melancholy-maybe these are the Saturday night-events to take your best girl to. At least then there might be moments of vanishing beauty before the sky darkens, and the expectation of happiness would hardly exist and therefore might be possible. More and more you learn to live with the unacceptable. You sense the...
Dog Weather, Stephen Dunn
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....
March 2009
2 posts
Goodnight, Li-Young Lee
Goodnight Li-Young Lee
You’ve stopped whispering and are asleep. I go on listening to apples drop in the grass beyond the window. Earlier we tried to guess each fall’s moment, but neither kept up that little game of hope or fear for long. Now your weight against me is like … I was about to say like no other, unmistakably human, my son’s. But, truth is, you’re simply heft. Burden like,...
Sorrow, Marie Howe
Sorrow Marie Howe
So now it has our complete attention, and we are made whole. We take it into our hands like a rope, grateful and tethered, freed from waiting for it to happen. It is here, precisely as we imagined.
If the man has died, if the childís illness has taken a sudden turn, if the house has burned in the middle of the night and in winter, there is at least a kind of stopping that...
September 2008
1 post
the mockingbird, Charles Bukowski
the mockingbird Charles Bukowski
the mockingbird had been following the cat all summer mocking mocking mocking teasing and cocksure; the cat crawled under rockers on porches tail flashing and said something angry to the mockingbird which I didn’t understand. yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway with the mockingbird alive in its mouth, wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and...