The Solstice

by W. S. Merwin

They say the sun will come back

at midnight

after all

my one love

but we know how the minutes

fly out into

the dark trees

and vanish

like the great 'ōhi'as and honey creepers

and we know how the weeks

walk into the

shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your hand

it is not something

one is supposed 

to say

we watch the bright birds in the morning

we hope for the quiet

daytime together

the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night

with the sun still going away

and the year

coming back

Surprised by Evening

by Robert Bly

There is unknown dust that is near us,

Waves breaking on shores just over the hill,

Trees full of birds that we have never seen,

Nets drawn down with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there,

It has come through the nets of the stars, 

Through the tissues of the grass,

Walking quietly over the asylums of the water.

The day shall never end, we think, 

We have hair that seems born for the daylight.

But, at last, the quiet waters of the night will rise,

And our skin shall see far off, as it does under water.

The Armadillo

For Robert Lowell


This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars -
planets, that is - the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter,, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! - a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!


- Elizabeth Bishop

The Heron

Whenever we noticed her

standing in the stream, still
as a branch in dead air, we
would grab our binoculars,
watch her watching,
her eye fixed on the water
slowly making its own way
around stumps, over a boulder,
under some leaves matted against
a fallen log. She seemed
to appear, stand, peer, then
lift one leg, stretch it, let
a foot quietly settle into the mud
then pull up her other foot, settle
it, and stare again, each step
tendered, an ideogram at the end
of a calligrapher's brush.
Every time she arrived, we watched
until, as if she had suddenly heard
a call in the sky, she would bend
her knees, raise her wide wings,
and lift into the welcome grace
of the air, her legs extending
back behind her, wings rising
and falling elegant under the clouds:
For more than a week now
we have not seen her. We watch
the sky, hoping to catch her great
feathered cross moving above the trees.

by Jack Ridl

The Big Bang

When the morning comes that you don't wake up,
what remains of your life goes on as some kind of
electromagnetic energy. There's a slight chance you
might appear on someone's screen as a dot. Face it.
You are a blip or a ping, part of the background noise,
the residue of the Big Bang. You remember the Big
Bang, don't you? You were about 26 years old, driving
a brand new red and white Chevy convertible, with
that beautiful blond girl at your side. Charlene, was
her name. You had a case of beer on ice in the back,
cruising down Highway number 7 on a summer
afternoon and then you parked near Loon Lake just
as the moon began to rise. Way back then you said to
yourself, "Boy, it doesn't get any better than this," and
you were right.

--Louis Jenkins

Pleasure

I remembered what it was like,
knowing what you want to eat and then making it,
forgetting about the ending in the middle,
looking at the ocean for
a long time without restlessness,
or with restlessness not inhabiting the joints,
sitting Indian style on a porch
overlooking that water, smooth like good cake frosting.
And then I experienced it, falling so deeply
into the storyline, I laughed as soon as my character entered
the picture, humming the theme music even when I'd told myself
I wanted to be quiet by some freezing river
and never talk to anyone again.
And I thought, now is the right time to cut up your shirt.

~Katie Peterson

Sandy

I want to tell you a story. There is a dog and sunlight in it. My sister is driving the car. My tall taciturn kid brother is sitting next to me. Our grand-aunt just called,sobbing. Her huge ancient dog has collapsed. We are driving along the beach road toward her house. You wouldn't believe the light this morning. Our grand-aunt is a bigot. It is tense whenever she comes to family dinners, because she will say things like The Yankees went to hell when they hired niggers to play the outfield. There are men on the jetties fishing for striped bass. Our grand-aunt is blind. Her dog shepherds her expertly from couch to kitchen and back, her hand on his shoulder. Our grand-aunt keened at the wedding when her brother, our grandfather, married our grandmother. Keening is wailing for the dead in the ancient Irish tradition. Our grandmother never spoke to our grand-aunt for the rest of her life. How stupid Irish is that, as our dad likes to say. The dog's name is Sandy. He is a great dog. We think he does the laundry. Our sister drives slowly and cranes her neck to see the street signs. My kid brother isn't saying much. The men on the jetties are also hoping for bluefish. Our grand-aunt always says she can tell if people on the radio are Negroes or not. She says there are more Negroes on the radio at night. When we get to the house, we can hear her weeping inside. The front door is locked, so we go around back and let ourselves in and ask for her in the dark. There are piles of newspapers like you wouldn't believe. Why exactly a blind woman would continue to get the paper is a mystery to me, our dad likes to say. When our grand-aunt come to family dinners, she sits at one end of the table, and our dad sits at the other and grinds his teeth. You can hear him do it if you sit close enough. The dog is sprawled on our grand-aunt's kitchen floor. There are dirty dishes piled so high in the sink that if you sneezed there would be a calamity. Our sister knows animals the best, and she kneels down and asks Sandy how he's doing, and he pants and stares at us in a friendly fashion. He has the thickest whitest eyebrows you have ever seen. Our grand-aunt is sobbing on the couch. She tries to explain, but she is not using any words that we know. Sandy is such a huge dog that he takes up most of the kitchen floor. One time at dinner our grand-aunt said that the Negroes were taking over the government, and I bet people in Peru heard our dad grinding his teeth. Our sister stands up and says Sandy is dying and we have to get him to the vet. Our grand-aunt cries even harder. The dog stares at us.
I remember there was a long pause while Sandy panted and our grand-aunt cried and we tried to calculate how we were going to get this dog out of the house and into the car. And then my tall kid brother bent down and picked Sandy up as if the dog weighed no more than an ounce, and he straightened up, with his arms full of dying dog, and there was this look on his face that I just cannot find the words for. That's the story I want to tell you. There was love and pain and fury on his face, but then the words run out of gas, and all I can say is: See his face all twisted and shining in the shadowy kitchen? See? This is the biggest, heaviest, oldest dog you can imagine, and it would have been a miracle if all three of us had managed to hoist him up and haul him to the car, but somehow my kid brother has lifted him like a feather, and now the tears are sliding silver down his face, like water over a rock, and I open the door, and the light comes pouring in all wind and careless and impatient.


~ Brian Doyle

A New Law

Let there be a ban on every holiday.
     No ringing in the new year.
No fireworks doodling the warm night air.
     No holly on the door. I say
let there be no more.
     For many are not here who were here before.

Greg Delanty

Dear Miss Emily (by James Galvin)

I knew the end would be gone before I got there.
After all, all rainbows lie for a living.
And as you have insisted, repeatedly,
The difference between death and the Eternal 
Present is about as far as one
Eyelash from the next, not wished upon.
Rainbows are not forms or stories, are they?
They are not doors ajar so much as far-
Flung situations without true beginnings
Or any ends--why bother--unless, as you
Suggest--repeatedly---there's nothing wrong
With this life, and we should all stop whining.
So I shift my focus now on how to end
A letter. In XOXOXO,
For example, Miss, which are the hugs
And which the kisses? Does anybody know?
I could argue either way: the O's
Are circles of embrace, the X is someone
Else's star burning inside your mouth;
Unless the O is a mouth that cannot speak,
Because, you know, it's busy.
X is the crucifixion all embraces
Are, here at the nowhere of the rainbow's end,
Where even light has failed its situation,
Slant the only life it ever had,
Where even the most gallant sunset can't
Hold back for more than a nonce the rain-laden
Eastern sky of night. It's clear. It's clear.
X's are both hugs and kisses, O's
Where stars that died gave out, gave up, gave in--
Where no one meant the promises they made.
Oh, and one more thing. I send my love
However long and far it takes--through light,
Through time, thorough all the faithlessness of men,
James Augustin Galvin,

X,

His mark.

He Foretells His Passing

I can imagine, years from now, your coming back
to this high, old, white house. "Home" I shouldn't say
because we can't predict who'll live here with a different
     name.
How tall the birches will be then. Will you look up
from the road past the ash for light in the study windows
upstairs and down? Go climb the black maple as first
in new sneakers you walked forty feet in air
and saw the life to come. Don't forget the cats. 

Because you grow away from a house, no matter how much you
     come back,
if the people you love are elsewhere, or if the reason is,
     say,
nostalgia, don't worry about small changes or lost names.
Sit down for a minute under the tallest birch. Look up
at the clouds reflected in the red barn's twisted window.
Lean on the wall. Hear our voices as at first
they shook the plaster, laughed, then burned in the dry air
like a wooden house. I imagine you won't forget the cats.

by F. D. Reeve

My Grandmother's Love Letters

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

~Hart Crane

When Ecstasy Is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows—
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

--Lorine Niedecker

on the beach

so let’s say i ride this giant seahorse into the ocean…
i will cross paths with a red balloon which reminds me
of the city where i was born and it will lilt and bob
over the waves so whimsically that there will be
no way for me to develop my gills. and, after that --

the waters’ wills cannot do much to convince me
of my being seaworthy and this giant seahorse will
sense something amiss and throw me as soon
as i loose my grip. not much for bridles, not much for
sympathy, this giant seahorse whinnies and grimaces.
he says, “i wanted to have your children.”

i will be able to catch the sun, in a fraction of a second,
glowing on the other side of that red balloon, so i will
curse myself for ever having laid eyes on the mirror-ball
ocean, for being so easily tempted by gigantic curlicue
hippocampus, for screaming jubilant into each crest
however many hundreds of thousands of fathoms
it took me from land:

there are no red balloons, under there and no cities
to be born in. there is no sun and no waves upon which
it could dance. were i to climb aback and ride this giant seahorse
into the ocean, i would not be able to say goodbye.



-Iris Appelquist

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

Another Feeling

Once you saw a drove of young pigs
crossing the highway. One of them
pulling his body by the front feet,
the hind legs dragging flat.
Without thinking,
you called the Humane Society.
They came with a net and went for him.
They were matter of fact, uniformed;
there were two of them,
their truck ominous, with a cage.
He was hiding in the weeds. It was then
you saw his eyes. He understood.
He was trembling.
After they took him, you began to suffer regret.
Years later, you remember his misfit body
scrambling to reach the others.
Even at this moment, your heart
is going too fast; your hands sweat.

Ruth Stone

Eve, After

Did she know
there was more to life
than lions licking the furred
ears of lambs,
fruit trees dropping
their fat bounty,
the years droning on
without argument?

Too much quiet
is never a good sign.
Isn't there always
something itching
beneath the surface?

But what could she say?
The larder was full,
and they were beautiful,
their bodies new
as the day they were made.

Each morning the same
flowers broke through
the rich soil, the birds sang,
again, in perfect pitch.

It was only at night,
when they lay together in the dark,
that it was almost palpable -
the vague sadness, unnamed.

Foolishness, betrayal,
- call it what you will. What a relief
to feel the weight
fall into her palm. And after,
not to pretend anymore
that the terrible calm
was Paradise.

- Danusha Lameris

Complaint of Achilles' Heel

Everyone's so quick to blame my
tenderness. My wound opening like a mouth
to kiss an arrow's steel beak.

A beautiful man, now, plants his face
in Trojan sand while I tell
the secrets of his body--

make the ground red with truth.
Red with the death of Achilles, felled
by an arrow's bite when nothing--

nothing--could puncture his Kevlar skin.
Everyone skips ahead to the moral: don't
be a heel. For just one day I felt

sun where the chafing bonds of sandal
should have been. Without me, he'd be
just more fodder for the cannon.

I made him a hero, Troy's poster
boy. Everyone forgets I was part of him,
I needed him--that even as he died,

I tasted each pulse--
that I could not hold back its rush of red
birds or the season to which they flew.


~ Charles Jensen

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

--Pablo Neruda

The Flight

Look back with longing eyes and know that I will follow,

Lift me up in your love as a light wind lifts a swallow,
Let our flight be far in sun or blowing rain--
But what if I heard my first love calling me again?

Hold me on your heart as the brave sea holds the foam,
Take me far away to the hills that hide your home;
Peace shall thatch the roof and love shall latch the door--
But what if I heard my first love calling me once more?

~Sara Teasdale

Inland

People that build their houses inland,
  People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
  Far from the sea-board, far from the sound

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
  Tons of water striking the shore,--
What do they long for, as I long for
  One salt smell of the sea once more?

People the waves have not awakened,
  Spanking the boats at the harbour's head,
What do they long for, as I long for,--
  Starting up in my inland bed,

Beating the narrow walls, and finding
  Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning,--
  One salt taste of the sea once more?


~Edna St. Vincent Millay