Rupert Brooke, "Libido"

How should I know? The enormous wheels of will  
  Drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet.  
Night was void arms and you a phantom still,  
  And day your far light swaying down the street.  
As never fool for love, I starved for you;
  My throat was dry and my eyes hot to see.  
Your mouth so lying was most heaven in view,  
  And your remembered smell most agony.  
   
Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver  
  And suddenly the mad victory I planned
  Flashed real, in your burning bending head...
My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river  
  In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand  
  Quieter than a dead man on a bed. 

Louise Glück, "Vespers"

In your extended absence, you permit me 
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report 
failure in my assignment, principally 
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow 
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold 
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come 
so often here, while other regions get 
twelve weeks of summer. All this 
belongs to you: on the other hand, 
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots 
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart 
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly 
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of 
that term. You who do not discriminate 
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, 
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know 
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible 
for these vines.

Mark Strand, "From the Long Sad Party"

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

C. P. Cavafy, "Days of 1908"

He was out of work that year,

so he had to live off card games,

backgammon, and borrowed money.

He was offered a job at three pounds a month

in a small stationery store,

but he turned it down without the slightest hesitation.

It wasn’t suitable. It wasn’t the right pay for him,

a reasonably educated young man, twenty-five years old.

He won two, maybe three shillings a day—sometimes.

How much could he expect to make out of cards and backgammon

in the cafés of his social level, working-class places,

however cleverly he played, however stupid the opponents he chose?

His borrowing—that was even worse.

He rarely picked up a crown, usually no more than half,

and sometimes he had to come down to a shilling.

For a week or so, sometimes longer,

when he managed to escape those horrible late nights,

he’d cool himself at the baths with a morning swim.

His clothes were a terrible mess.

He always wore the same suit,

a very faded cinnamon-brown suit.

O summer days of nineteen hundred and eight,

from your view

the cinnamon-brown suit was tastefully excluded.

Your view has preserved him

as he was when he took off those unworthy clothes,

that mended underwear, threw it all aside,

and stood stark naked, impeccably handsome, a miracle—

his hair uncombed, swept back,

his limbs a little tanned

from his morning nakedness at the baths and on the beach.

Sinead Morrissey, "A Performance"

This garden is so empty of time it holds me still, unable to go on.
I blame the leaves: they fell from the sky in such a wild, golden rain
They pulled me in, to see them thigh-deep over flowers and graves
That had been stamped with names and dates, faith and pain,
Like flags on sinking ships. No more years to go by, all whos
And wheres washed out in nature’s fire, the only death here
Is Autumn’s, and she does it too well. The trees’ bold undoing
Is no serious grief, but an accomplishment of practice.
I wonder what faces the graves will have
When Winter is here, and her show is over. 

Thomas Kinsella, "Mirror in February"

 The day dawns with scent of must and rain,
 Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
 Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
 Idling on some compulsive fantasy-
 I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
 Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
 A dry downturning mouth.

 It seems again that it is time to learn,
 In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
 To which, for the time being, I return.
 Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
 I read that I have looked my last on youth
 And little more; for they are not made whole
 That reach the age of Christ.

 Below my window the awakening trees,
 Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
 Suffering their brute necessities,
 And how should the flesh not quail that span for span
 Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
 I fold my towel with what grace I can,
 Not young and not renewable, but man.

Patrick Kavanagh, "Kerr's Ass"

We borrowed the loan of Kerr's ass
To go to Dundalk with butter,
Brought him home the evening before the market
And exile that night in Mucker.


We heeled up the cart before the door,
We took the harness inside --
The straw-stuffed straddle, the broken breeching
With bits of bull-wire tied;


The winkers that had no choke-band,
The collar and the reins . . .
In Ealing Broadway, London Town
I name their several names


Until a world comes to life --
Morning, the silent bog,
And the God of imagination waking
In a Mucker fog.

Seamus Heaney, "Follower"

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

Michael Longley, "The Leveret"

for my grandson, Benjamin

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison’s tractor,
A bumpy approach in your father’s arms
To the cottage where, all of one year ago,
You were conceived, a fire-seed in the hearth.
Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?
Do you hear the wind tonight, and the rain
And a shore bird calling from the mussel reefs?
Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the sea,
Little hoplite. Have you been missing it?
I’ll park your chariot by the otters’ rock
And carry you over seaweed to the sea.
There’s a tufted duck on David’s lake
With her sootfall of hatchlings, pompoms
A day old and already learning to dive.
We may meet the stoat near the erratic
Boulder, a shrew in his mouth, or the merlin
Meadow-pipit-hunting. But don’t be afraid.
The leveret breakfasts under the fuchsia
Every morning, and we shall be watching.
I have picked wild flowers for you, scabious
And centaury in a jam-jar of water
That will bend and magnify the daylight.
This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.

Eamon Grennan, "White Water"

Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be   

indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata   

for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock   

shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes   

and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all   

is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets.

There is a port-hole of light at the end of the hemlock tunnel:   

birds cross it, flashing their voices at you, and you feel—

from the way they tilt their heads and their throats swell—

the beat of their brief song, another sign the world is what it is:   

a shade-tree heavy with households, its fruit for meat, its leaf   

for medicine. But that business of the first kiss is hard to fathom:

knees quaking, white water over broken rock, and the coracle   

you trusted your life to in a bit of a spin, head swimming

with the smell of flesh so close you feel it breathing, spilling secrets—

its inmost name, for one, and what the near future feels like, time   

wobbling to a tribal thing without tenses, and that tenacious "I"   

a thing of the past, only a particle of the action now, nothing

separate, a luminous tumult, an affair of air and palate, air

and larynx, tongue, throat, teeth, whatever brings the words out   

in their summer dresses—and you can hear the crow's black   

scavenger guffawing, egg- and offal-scoffer, comedian of windspin,   

so all of a sudden you rush your kingdom-come, the two of you,   

insects shedding your dry, chitinous skins. And although what's left

is raw for a while, the slightest breath burns it, in time it comes

to become you, you can live into it, intoning the Sebastian koan—

whose who in pain, who's who?— and know, or close-to-know,   

the here it is: two clean rooms in the next parish to wholeness.

William Butler Yeats, "A Drinking Song"

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That’s all we know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

Sharon Olds, "Photograph of the Girl"

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are
taking her together. She leans on a sack, 
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat, 
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones 
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter 
with millions of others. Deep in her body 
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

Billy Collins, "Litany"

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
—Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

John Koethe, "Chester"

Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose...

—Marianne Moore to William Carlos Williams

Another day, which is usually how they come:

A cat at the foot of the bed, noncommittal

In its blankness of mind, with the morning light

Slowly filling the room, and fragmentary

Memories of last night's video and phone calls.

It is a feeling of sufficiency, one menaced

By the fear of some vague lack, of a simplicity

Of self, a self without a soul, the nagging fear

Of being someone to whom nothing ever happens.

Thus the fantasy of the narrative behind the story,

Of the half-concealed life that lies beneath

The ordinary one, made up of ordinary mornings

More alike in how they feel than what they say.

They seem like luxuries of consciousness,

Like second thoughts that complicate the time

One simply wastes. And why not? Mere being

Is supposed to be enough, without the intricate

Evasions of a mystery or offstage tragedy.

Evenings follow on the afternoons, lingering in

The living room and listening to the stereo

While Peggy Lee sings "Is That All There Is?"

Amid the morning papers and the usual

Ghosts keeping you company, but just for a while.

The true soul is the one that flickers in the eyes

Of an animal, like a cat that lifts its head and yawns

And looks at you, and then goes back to sleep.

Trumbull Stickney, "Mnemosyne"

It's autumn in the country I remember. How warm a wind blew here about the ways! And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber During the long sun-sweetened summer-days. It's cold abroad the country I remember. The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain At midday with a wing aslant and limber; And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain It's empty down the country I remember. I had a sister lovely in my sight: Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre; We sang together in the woods at night. It's lonely in the country I remember. The babble of our children fills my ears, And on our hearth I stare the perished ember To flames that show all starry thro' my tears. It's dark about the country I remember. There are the mountains where I lived. The path Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber, The stumps are twisted by the tempests' wrath. But that I knew these places are my own, I'd ask how came such wretchedness to cumber The earth, and I to people it alone. It rains across the country I remember.

Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour"

For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop.  Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue.  His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy 
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,
I watched for love-cars.  Lights turned down, 
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Anne Sexton, "The Truth the Dead Know"

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,   

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,   

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.   

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,   

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch   

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes   

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse   

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Cathedral"

In those small towns where, clustered round about,
old houses squat and jostle like a fair,
that's just caught sight of it, and then and there
shut up the stalls, and, silenced every shout,

the criers still, the drum-sticks all suspended,
stands gazing up at it with straining ears:
while it, as calm as ever, in the splendid
wrinkled buttress-mantle rears
itself above the homes it never knew:

in those small towns you come to realise
how the cathedrals utterly outgrew
their whole environment. Their birth and rise,
as our own life's too great proximity
will mount beyond our vision and our sense
of other happenings, took precedence
of all things; as though that were history,
piled up in their immeasurable masses
in petrification safe from circumstance,
not that, which down among the dark streets passes
and takes whatever name is given by chance
and goes in that, as children green or red,
or what the dealer has, wear in rotation.
For birth was here, within this deep foundation,
and strength and purpose in this aspiration,
and love, like bread and wine, was all around,
and porches full of lover's lamentation.
In the tolled hours was heard life's hesitation,
and in those towers that, full of resignation,
ceased all at once from climbing, death was found.

Claude McKay, "The Tropics in New York"

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Old-Marrieds"

But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.
Though the pretty-coated birds had piped so lightly all the day.
And he had seen the lovers in the little side streets.
And she had heard the morning stories clogged with sweets.
It was quite a time for loving. It was midnight. It was May.
But in the crowding darknesss not a word did they say.

Elizabeth Bishop, "Insomnia"

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.


By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well


into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Sylvia Plath, "Sheep in Fog"

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.


The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,


Hooves, dolorous bells -
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,


A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.


They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Frank O'Hara, "Why I Am Not a Painter"

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Adrienne Rich, "Twenty-One Love Poems" (IV)

IV.
I come home from you through the early light of spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe store…I’m lugging my sack
of groceries, I dash for the elevator
where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me. —For god’s sake hold it!
I croak at him. —Hysterical,—he breathes my way.
I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here comes the sun….I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain...
Do whatever you can to survive.
You know, I think that men love wars…
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

Wilfred Owen, "Futility"

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?