On Discovering A bUTTERFLY -- Vladimir Nabokov

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer - and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

The Mystery - Molly Fisk

What I love most
is the way you turn your head
toward what you hear,
cocking it slightly down,
looking up under your lashes.
That quality of attention
is what I love, the moment
when you forget yourself,
place your own thoughts
aside, deliberately
and immediately, and let in
the other, the mystery,
whatever it is: a goldfinch
in early morning, singing;
somebody's single engine plane
sounding its notes unseen
behind a windbreak of cedars;
the soft plush of air that lifts
a pair of dragonflies
wheeling past your tea cup,
quivering bluer than water or sky.
Your ear is tuned to the world
and its tenuous frequencies,
nothing is too fragile for you,
nothing too worn. Even my lips,
chapped with winter: when they open
you dip your head to listen.

DEFENDING WALT WHITMAN - Sherman Alexie

Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.
God, there is nothing as beautiful as a jumpshot
on a reservation summer basketball court
where the ball is moist with sweat,
and makes a sound when it swishes through the net
that causes Walt Whitman to weep because it is so perfect.
There are veterans of foreign wars here
although their bodies are still dominated
by collarbones and knees, although their bodies still respond
in the ways that bodies are supposed to respond when we are young.
Every body is brown! Look there, that boy can run
up and down this court forever. He can leap for a rebound
with his back arched like a salmon, all meat and bone
synchronized, magnetic, as if the court were a river,
as if the rim were a dam, as if the air were a ladder
leading the Indian boy toward home.
Some of the Indian boys still wear their military hair cuts
while a few have let their hair grow back.
It will never be the same as it was before!
One Indian boy has never cut his hair, not once, and he braids it
into wild patterns that do not measure anything.
He is just a boy with too much time on his hands.
Look at him. He wants to play this game in bare feet.
God, the sun is so bright! There is no place like this.
Walt Whitman stretches his calf muscles
on the sidelines. He has the next game.
His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation.
Some body throws a crazy pass and Walt Whitman catches it
with quick hands. He brings the ball close to his nose
and breathes in all of its smells: leather, brown skin, sweat,
black hair, burning oil, twisted ankle, long drink of warm water,
gunpowder, pine tree. Walt Whitman squeezes the ball tightly.
He wants to run. He hardly has the patience to wait for his turn.
"What's the score?" he asks. He asks, "What's the score?"
Basketball is like this for Walt Whitman. He watches these Indian boys
as if they were the last bodies on earth. Every body is brown!
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman dreams of the Indian boy who will defend him,
trapping him in the corner, all flailing arms and legs
and legendary stomach muscles. Walt Whitman shakes
because he believes in God. Walt Whitman dreams
of the first jumpshot he will take, the ball arcing clumsily
from his fingers, striking the rim so hard that it sparks.
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman closes his eyes. He is a small man and his beard
is ludicrous on the reservation, absolutely insane.
His beard makes the Indian boys righteously laugh. His beard
frightens the smallest Indian boys. His beard tickles the skin
of the Indian boys who dribble past him. His beard, his beard!
God, there is beauty in every body. Walt Whitman stands
at center court while the Indian boys run from basket to basket.
Walt Whitman cannot tell the difference between
offense and defense. He does not care if he touches the ball.
Half of the Indian boys wear t-shirts damp with sweat
and the other half are bareback, skin slick and shiny.
There is no place like this. Walt Whitman smiles.
Walt Whitman shakes. This game belongs to him.

Nostalgia -- Billy Collins

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.
The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
where there is injury, pardon,
where there is doubt, faith,
where there is despair, hope,
where there is darkness, light,
where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled, as to console,
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving , that we receive,
in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
in dying, that we are born into eternal life.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House - Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Some Things The World Gave -- Mary Oliver

1
Times in the morning early
when it rained and the long gray
buildings came forward from darkness
offering their windows for light.

2
Evenings out there on the plains
when sunset donated farms
that yearned so far to the west that the world
centered there and bowed down.

3
A teacher at a country school
walking home past a great marsh
where ducks came gliding in --
she saw the boy out hunting and waved.

4
Silence on a hill where the path ended
and then the forest below
moving in one long whisper
as evening touched the leaves.

5
Shelter in winter that day --
a storm coming, but in the lee
of an island in a cover with friends --
oh, little bright cup of sun.

We Are Made One with What We Touch and See -- Oscar Wilde

We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each springimpassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill

One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
Than we do, when in some freshblossoming wood
We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good

Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
Or is this daedalfashioned earth less fair,
That we are nature's heritors, and one
With every pulse of life that beats the air?
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.

And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!.

We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

The 1001st Kiss (How Men Love) -- Greg Kimura

Tonight I wish to kiss your lips a thousand times
so that the thousand and first is as melodic and sweet

as the first time I saw your swing and felt your
sweep.
Your beauty fits my eyes as a key to an ancient lock
smoothly swirling to unclasp the hasp of the heart.
The soul weeps for such beauty,
worshiping its presence,
and most men live for its pursuit
until age or death slowly
tear them away.
But other men kill such beauty,
first in themselves, and then in the world,
the fear of their exposed soul too much for them to
bear.
Still others seek to own such beauty
like another key at the end of a chinking ring
used to open a tight-fisted heart.
But some men will
open the lock to their heart and throw away the key,
and anything--a tulip sky,
an orange leaf, the sound of a daughter’s grieving
cry--is beauty to bring them tears.
Such is the way I wish to touch your beauty
tonight on the 1001st kiss.

XXXI/Question Book | Pablo Neruda

Whom can I ask
what I meant to achieve in this world?

Why do I move without wanting to,
Why Can't I stand still?

Why do I roll aound without wheels
and fly without feathers or wings?

And how can I talk transmigration
if my bones live in Chile?

--- Robert Hass

crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

Cyberspace Theology -- Glen A. Mazis

Aphrodite lurks somewhere in the sites of the internet. If
we seek the root directory, all the goddesses can be found,

dancing around the labyrinthine algorithm that generates
perfect bodies and transparent minds. The gods are there,

too, riding search engines on heroic quests. We want our
will translated into binary values. All the ones, we will add

up, but delete the zeroes. Some build fortunes through post-
modern pixel castles in the air, money made truly from

nothing. We no longer believe in heaven above earthly space
or in infinite mercy, so we seek salvation in more megabytes,

from e-mails from the furthest reaches, and maybe beyond,
counting files instead of sins, and cleanse not our souls, but

our hard drives. Cyberspace exists nowhere within real time
or space--the same location where the old heaven was supposed

to be. Its revelation is no burning bush or walking on water,
since these feats are only beginner's level on our kids' video

games. We no longer want a higher reality. We'd rather gossip
in Plato's cave of moving shadows and winking virtuality.

The Second Voyage -- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Odysseus rested on his oar and saw
The ruffled foreheads of the waves
Crocodiling and mincing past: he rammed
The oar between their jaws and looked down
In the simmering sea where scribbles of weed defined
Uncertain depth, and the slim fishes progressed
In fatal formation, and thought
                                            If there was a single
Streak of decency in these waves now, they'd be ridged
Pocked and dented with the battering they've had,
And we could name them as Adam named the beasts,
Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one
With admiration; they'd notice us passing
And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these
Have less character than sheep and need more patience. I know what I'll do he said;
I'll park my ship in the crook of a long pier
(And I'll take you with me he said to the oar)
I'll face the rising ground and walk away
From tidal waters, up riverbeds
Where herons parcel out the miles of stream,
Over gaps in the hills, through warm
Silent valleys, and when I meet a farmer
Bold enough to look me in the eye
With 'where are you off to with that long
Winnowing fan over your shoulder?'
There I will stand still
And I'll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post
And leave you as a tidemark. I can go back
And organise my house then.
                                          But the profound
Unfenced valleys of the ocean still held him;
He had only the oar to make them keep their distance;
The sea was still frying under the ship's side. He considered the water-lilies, and thought about fountains
Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares,
The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,
The flat lakes bisecting the rushes. He remembered spiders and frogs
Housekeeping at the roadside in brown trickles floored with mud,
Horsetroughs, the black canal, pale swans at dark:
His face grew damp with tears that tasted
Like his own sweat or the insults of the sea.

Persephone Again -- Dorothy Walters

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth--nine months
of fertility and sun,
three of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

People Like Us Are Dangerous -- Martin Espada

In Brooklyn days, I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz, lightweight champion
of the world from Ponce, Puerto Rico. I gazed at the radiance
of the black and white television till it spoke to me in tongues,
a boy spellbound by the grainy spirits who stalked each other in the ring.
I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz when twenty thousand people
at Shea Stadium chanted his name. For fifteen rounds the jazz
percussion of his punches beat the sweat from Ismael Laguna,
El Tigre de Santa Isabel, who lurched off the ropes,
backpedaled and swallowed blood till the last bell.
I wanted to crouch and dip into the arc of my uppercut
like Carlos Ortiz on the cover of The Ring magazine,
where they called him a pugilist with clever hands.
I wanted to be a pugilist with clever hands. My father
bought me boxing gloves and I reddened my brother’s face.
I shadowboxed all the way down the hall.
I wanted something from the clever hand of Carlos Ortiz.
My mother and my father’s sister, dressed for the dance floor
at the Club Tropicoro, tracked the champ to the men’s room
and offered him a cocktail napkin to sign for me.
He grinned like the general of a people’s army
greeting the crowd from a balcony at the presidential palace.
I told everyone in the streets of Brooklyn I wanted to be
a Puerto Rican fighter like Carlos Ortiz. Every day I sparred
in the schoolyard until a boy I did not know waved his hands
in a circle, mesmerizing as a hypnotist, then kicked me
with his hard-soled shoe in a place I could not bring myself to name.
The blood crusted between my legs. I threw away my underwear.
Years later, I met Carlos Ortiz stirring milk into his coffee
at a McDonald’s off the New York Thruway.
The black curls on his forehead had disappeared, along
with the Club Tropicoro and the eighty thousand dollars
he counted out in cash to build his palace of trumpets in the Bronx.
Year by year, the whiskey and the beer wore away the levees
of his brain till he walked like a man underwater. One night
at Madison Square Garden, unable to move his arms or legs,
he stared at the canvas and quit on his stool. Carlos Ortiz drove
a cab on graveyard shift to keep away from all the bars on the avenue,
far from the backslappers who wanted to buy the champ a drink.
Carlos Ortiz is sober now. He thinks of Ismael Laguna, who cannot
pry open his hands, selling souvenir newspapers with headlines about
El Tigre de Santa Isabel. Carlos Ortiz says: People like us are dangerous.

A Dream of Burning -- Francis Weller

To lift this wanting up out of dead wood.

 Something, someone reaches up to stop this rising

as though the movement up is treasonous.

This wanting has been frozen, caught in the grain

of the fallen log for ten thousand years: Memories

of ice ages and mastodons.

But in the wood is the dream of burning--of flames,

heat and tongues of orange/red/leaping up into

the night, warming those who come close by.

This wanting breaks open the wood. The sow bugs,

spiders, beetles and the invisible captains of decay

are relieved of duty.

This wood is for fire and it is time to burn.

The Curator -- Miller Williams

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come, 
were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,
the youngest assistant curator in the country.
I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes 
precisely built to every size of canvas.
We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in, 
we got each painting put in the proper box
and out of Leningrad in less than a week.
They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes 
waiting in the basement, which was fine,
a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—
but what we did was leave the frames hanging, 
so after the war it would be a simple thing 
to put the paintings back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again 
compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble
after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—
You know it lasted nine hundred days.
Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie 
sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,
but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you. 
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside, 
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold. 
They told us this: in three homes far from here 
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad 
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed 
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing. 
Now they had been sent to defend the city, 
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger 
than all of us being here in the first place, 
inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms, 
what they could take the time for, wall by wall. 
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings. 
I told them how those colors would come together, 
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there, 
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout 
and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waited for us,
then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes. 
Each of us took a group in a different direction: 
Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse, 
Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,
Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper. 
We pointed to more details about the paintings, 
I venture to say, than if we had had them there, 
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces 
the same way we’d done it every morning 
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact 
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned 
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention 
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to forget the war
a little while. Maybe more than that.
Whatever it was, the people continued to come. 
It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.

Slowly, blind people began to come.
A few at first then more of them every morning, 
some led and some alone, some swaying a little.
They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces, 
they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them, 
to see better what was being said.
And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left
and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places, 
the blind never came again. Not like before.
This seems strange, but what I think it was,
they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.
They could still have listened, but the lectures became 
a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?
Confluences come when they will and they go away.

Having It Out With Melancholy -- Jane Kenyon

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.

A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard

1  FROM THE NURSERY


When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.


And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad -- even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along a spindle on my crib.


You taught me to exist without gratitude. 
You ruined my manners toward God:
"We're here simply to wait for death; 
the pleasures of earth are overrated."


I only appeared to belong to my mother, 
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts 
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. 
I was already yours -- the anti-urge, 
the mutilator of souls.



           2  BOTTLES


Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 
The coated ones smell sweet or have 
no smell; the powdery ones smell 
like the chemistry lab at school 
that made me hold my breath.



3  SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND


You wouldn't be so depressed
if you really believed in God.



           4  OFTEN


Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep's 
frail wicker coracle.



5  ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT


Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.


I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors -- those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few


moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.


Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear 
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.



       6  IN AND OUT


The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter 
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing 
saves my life -- in and out, in 
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 



           7  PARDON


A piece of burned meat 
wears my clothes, speaks 
in my voice, dispatches obligations 
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying 
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.


We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night 
I feel as if I had drunk six cups 
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder 
and bitterness of someone pardoned 
for a crime she did not commit 
I come back to marriage and friends, 
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back 
to my desk, books, and chair.



           8  CREDO


Pharmaceutical wonders are at work 
but I believe only in this moment 
of well-being. Unholy ghost, 
you are certain to come again.


Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet 
on the coffee table, lean back, 
and turn me into someone who can't 
take the trouble to speak; someone 
who can't sleep, or who does nothing 
but sleep; can't read, or call 
for an appointment for help.


There is nothing I can do 
against your coming. 
When I awake, I am still with thee.



  9  WOOD THRUSH


High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome


by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

Just Enough - Nanao Sakaki

Soil for legs

Axe for hands

Flower for eyes

Bird for ears

Mushrooms for nose

Smile for mouth

Songs for lungs

Sweat for skin

Wind for mind

Yesterday -- W. S. Merwin

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

Matt's Guitar -- Doug von Koss

Sometimes when I hear
The sad single strings of a Spanish guitar
Played by a man alone
In an old rhythm that wandered from Madrid
My heart fills to bursting
With a sweet pain
A glorious sadness
A grief so immense
I could not eat it all
If I had a thousand
lonely Sunday mornings.

Crows Calling -- Bill Krumbein

One-by-one

each crow calls out to the next

and so it continues

to otherwise be known as 

caw forwarding.

Names of the Ancestors -- Thomas R. Smith

We are moving backward in the granary of our ancestors' names.
When we speak them, wheat fields harvested three thousand years ago
sway again in winds gone on to other galaxies.
Somewhere on that track are all the hands that met mine in the night
and the spoken love word hovering like a hummingbird at the lip of the abundant flower.
The wisdom of sleepers forms a tradition along the arc of generations,
anointing the slippery head of the newborn rising from the sea
and the yellow skull of the corpse set out to dry in the desert.
Now we are touching his twenty layers of embroidered robes.

Losing Our Minds - Kay Crista

Watching you

I notice

the way a life

narrows down

to such a few

simple things

 

Sunlight streaming in your window

to wrap you in a veil of warmth

a view of our pond

and the distant wooded hills

once apples, now grapes

your fingers roaming the pages

of fading photographs

the comfort of familiar food

and a newspaper from your hometown

 

This morning

I found your purse

hidden at the bottom of your laundry basket

and felt

your fear of things

slipping away

 

Sometimes, you tell me

you don't mind

that you're losing your mind

"I'm not in any pain" you say

and all the while

I, in another room,

sit in silence, every morning

hoping to lose my mind

 

In the way Guatama Buddha

lost his

Hymn To The Sacred Body of the Universe -- Drew Dellinger

Let's meet

at the confluence

where you flow into me

and one breath

swirls between our lungs

Let's meet

at the confluence

where you flow into me

and one breath

swirls between our lungs

for one instant

to dwell in the presence of the galaxies

for one instant to live in the truth of the heart

the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is

"the secret One slowly growing a body"

two eagles are mating--

clasping each other's claws

and turning cartwheels in the sky

grasses are blooming

grandfathers dying

consciousness blinking on and off

all of this is happening at once

all of this, vibrating into existence

out of nothingness

every particle

foaming into existence

transcribing the ineffable

arising and passing away

arising and passing away

23 trillion times per second--

when Buddha saw that

he smiled

16 millions tons of rain are falling every second

on the planet

an ocean

perpetually falling

and every drop

is your body

every motion, every feather, every thought

is your body

time

is your body,

and the infinite 

curled inside like

invisible rainbows folded into light

every word 

of every tongue

is love

telling a story to her own ears

let our lives be incense

burning

like a

hymn to the sacred body of the universe

my religion is rain

my religion is stone

my religion reveals itself to me in sweaty epiphanies

every leaf, every river, every animal,

your body

every creature

trapped in the gears of corporate nightmares,

every species made extinct

was once your body

ten million people are dreaming that they're flying

junipers and violets are blossoming

stars exploding and being born

god is having deja vu

I am one elaborate crush

we cry petals as the void is singing

you are the dark that holds the stars

in intimate distance

that spun the whirling, whirling world into existence

let's meet at the confluence

where you flow into me

and one breath swirls between our lungs.

On Discovering A bUTTERFLY -- Vladimir Nabokov

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer - and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

Snow Talk - Doug von Koss

So I said, “I don’t have a poem about snow
but maybe Snow, you got a poem about me?”
So Snow said, “You? You who hide out from me
in your always green, never freeze, home by the bay?”
So I said, “Hey, lighten up! You’re the first snow I’ve
seen in a long, long time. You caught me by surprise.
Suddenly everything white over night you know? ”
With an attitude that shocked me, Snow said,
“What’s wrong with white,
great overwhelming vistas of white?
White upon white ‘till you pray
for a touch of brown or blue!
But not today buddy, no not today.
Today you are mine, all mine
At fifty-five hundred feet.
Look at me.
Am I not beautiful?
Do I not take your breath away
doing what I do?
I am snow.
Perfectly impartial to all who know me
Yes, even to you who avoid me.
I am snow you fool
And I am beautiful."

There Will Come Soft Rains - Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Grief Calls Us To Things Of This World - Sherman Alexie

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,

I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness

Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.

Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us

And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

How To Create An Agnostic -- Sherman Alexie

Singing with my son, I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.
It was dumb luck,
But my son, in awe, thought
That I’d created the electricity.
He asked, “Dad, how’d you do that?”
Before I could answer, thunder shook the house
And set off neighborhood car alarms.
I thought that my son, always in love with me,
Might fall to his knees with adoration.
“Dad,” he said. “Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?
The one that looks like a giant owl?”
O, my little disciple, my one-boy choir,
I can’t do that because your father,
Your half-assed messiah, is afraid of fire.

Loving Humans -- Alice Walker

Loving humans 

Is tricky 

Sometimes 

A slap 

In the face 

Is all you get 

For doing it 

Just right. 

Loving humans is a job 

Like any other 

Only 

More 

Bumps 

On the way 

To work 

Which is full on 

All the time. 

Loving humans 

Makes us 

Want 

To invite 

Ourselves to tea 

With rancid 

Dictators 

We think we 

Can convince 

Of our 

Story’s side 

While all 

They think 

About 

While 

We sit & dream 

Is how 

They can 

Get away 

With 

Poisoning 

Our tea. 

And how 

If only they 

Had 

Enough tea 

Already 

Brewed 

They could 

Waterboard us 

To death 

With it. 

Loving humans 

Means 

Writing poems & songs 

Novels & plays, slogans, chants 

& protest signs 

Our critics 

Want 

To stone 

Us for 

While 

We think of 

Them 

As people 

Under different 

Circumstances 

We might 

Be able 

To help. 

There is 

Indeed 

A Buddha 

In 

Every one 

Of us 

Loving humans 

With all 

Our clear & 

Unmistakable 

Reluctance 

To evolve 

Makes this hard 

For most humans 

To see. 

But not you.

An African Elegy -- Ben Okri

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of the earth.
There are things that burn me now
Which turn golden when I am happy.
Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things
And that we never curse the air when it is warm
Or the fruit when it tastes so good
Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters?
We bless things even in our pain.
We bless them in silence.
That is why our music is so sweet.
It makes the air remember.
There are secret miracles at work
That only Time will bring forth.
I too have heard the dead singing.
And they tell me that
This life is good
They tell me to live it gently
With fire, and always with hope.
There is wonder here
And there is surprise
In everything the unseen moves.
The ocean is full of songs.
The sky is not an enemy.
Destiny is our friend.

by Minamoto No Sanetomo

If only the world
Would remain this way,
Some fishermen
Drawing a little rowboat
Up the riverbank.

In Paris With You -- James Fenton

Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two.
I’m one of your talking wounded.
I’m a hostage. I’m maroonded.
But I’m in Paris with you.

Yes I’m angry at the way I’ve been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess I’ve been through.
I admit I’m on the rebound
And I don’t care where are we bound.
I’m in Paris with you.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysées
And remain here in this sleazy

Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There’s that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I’m in Paris with you.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris.
I’m in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I’m in Paris with… all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I’m in Paris with you.

by Chine-Jo

The fireflies' light
How easily it goes on
How easily it goes out again.

by Akazome Emon

I can no longer tell dream from reality.
Into what world shall I awake
from this bewildering dream?

The Laughing Heart -- Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

why this is necessary

i need to archive poetry i get from larry robinson somewhere so i don't have to dig through a thousand emails to find the ones i really love.

also the occasional jewel i find on the internet poetry warehouses as i hate their layouts, generally.

also if i ever pick up a poetry book god forbid and need to a poem on hand to copy and paste.