Mirrors at 4 a.m.
Charles Simic


You must come to them sideways
In rooms webbed in shadow,
Sneak a view of their emptiness
Without them catching
A glimpse of you in return.

The secret is,
Even the empty bed is a burden to them,
A pretense.
They are more themselves keeping
The company of a blank wall,
The company of time and eternity

Which, begging your pardon,
Cast no image
As they admire themselves in the mirror,
While you stand to the side
Pulling a hanky out
To wipe your brow surreptitiously.

Considering the Accordion
Al Zolynas


The idea of it is distasteful at best. Awkward box of wind, diminutive,
misplaced piano on one side, raised Braille buttons on the other. The
bellows, like some parody of breathing, like some medical apparatus from a
Victorian sick-ward. A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo
thing-a-me-bob. I once strapped an accordion on my chest and right away I
had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my back arched like a
bullfighter or flamenco dancer. I became an unheard of contradiction: a
gypsy in graduate school. Ah, but for all that, we find evidence of the
soul in the most unlikely places. Once in a Czech restaurant in Long
Beach, an ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old
favorites: "Lady of Spain," "The Saber Dance," "Dark Eyes," and through
all the clichés his spirit sang clearly. It seemed like the accordion
floated in the air, and he swayed weightlessly behind it, eyes closed, back in
Prague or some lost village of his childhood. For a moment we all
floated—the whole restaurant: the patrons, the knives and forks, the
wine, the sacrificed fish on plates. Everything was pure and eternal,
fragilely suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall of
a bombed out church.

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.