The Ponds
Mary Oliver


Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them —

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight —
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away —
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Monologue at Nine A.M.
Louise Glück


"It's no small thing, this coming
To this cantabile. Living
With him's been fever from outset
Sixteen years ago. For sixteen years I've sat
And waited for things to get better. I have to laugh.
You know, I used to dream that I might ebb to death
Or else he fall in love again and turn the hose
On someone else. Well, I suppose he has.
I thought I sensed an absence, and today he left his poached
Egg staring like a dying eye, his toast untouched."

Choices
Tess Gallagher


I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain 
would be.

                    for Drago Stambuk

Rain
Edward Thomas


Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Hamnavoe Market
George Mackay Brown

They drove to the Market with ringing pockets.

Folster found a girl
Who put wounds on his face and throat,
Small and diagonal, like red doves. 

Johnston stood beside the barrel.
All day he stood there.
He woke in a ditch, his mouth full of ashes. 

Grieve bought a balloon and a goldfish.
He swung through the air.
He fired shotguns, rolled pennies, ate sweet fog from a stick. 

Heddle was at the Market also.
I know nothing of his activities.
He is and always was a quiet man. 

Garson fought three rounds with a negro boxer,
And received thirty shillings,
Much applause, and an eye loaded with thunder. 

Where did they find Flett?
They found him in a brazen circle,
All flame and blood, a new Salvationist. 

A gypsy saw in the hand of Halcro
Great strolling herds, harvests, a proud woman.
He wintered in the poorhouse. 

They drove home from the Market under the stars
Except for Johnston
Who lay in a ditch, his mouth full of dying fires.

Wild Geese
Mary Oliver


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Dead End
Louise Glück


I said, "Listen, angel, wean me from this bit." 
I said, "Divorce me from this crap, this steady diet
Of abuse with cereal, abuse
With vodka and tomato juice,
Your planted billets doux among the bric-a-brac."
Staying was my way of hitting back.
I tended his anemia and did the dishes
Four months—the whole vicious,
Standard cohabitation. But my dear, my dear,
If now I dream about your hands, your hair,
It is the vividness of that dead end
I miss. Like chess. Mind against mind.

Beachcomber
George Mackay Brown

Monday I found a boot –
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.
I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.

Friday I held a seaman’s skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.

Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum.
What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins. 

To My Daughter
Stephen Spender


Bright clasp of her whole hand
Around my finger
My daughter as we walk together now
All my life I'll feel a ring invisibly
Circle this bone with shining:
When she is grown
Far from today as her eyes are far already.

A Veteran
Reginald Gibbons


My father came down not killed
from among others, killers or killed,
for whom he'd worn a uniform,
and he lived a long afterward,

a steady man on the flattest of plains.
I called after him many times, surprised
when I heard the catch in my own voice.
He didn't know how to find the solace

of listening to someone else speak of
what he'd seen and survived.
He himself closed his own
mouth against his own words.

In the wrong sequence, his spirit,
then his mind, and last his body
crossed over that infamous, peat-inky,
metaphorical water that has no far shore.

I think he was carried like a leaf
in currents so gentle that a duckling,
had it been alive, could have braved them,
but too strong for a leaf. And saturated

with minerals that steadily replaced
organic cells, the water turned my father,
an ex-soldier, the leaf-delicate stone inscribed
with the axioms of countless veins.

The Early Hours
Adam Zagajewski


The early hours of morning; you still aren't writing
(rather you aren't even trying), you just read lazily.
Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if
it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacations, when a colored
map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map
promising so much, deep ponds in the forest
like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning
    sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared,
but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world,
their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed
(grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval
    figures

compressed in endless stasis over the the cathedral;
the early hours of morning silence
                                         —you still aren't writing,
you still understand so much.
                          Joy is close.

Mindful
Mary Oliver


Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

The Finished House
George Mackay Brown


In the finished house a flame is brought to the hearth.
Then a table, between door and window
Where a stranger will eat before the men of the house.
A bed is laid in a secret corner
For the three agonies — love, birth, death —
That are made beautiful with ceremony.
The neighbours come with gifts —
A set of cups, a calender, some chairs.
A fiddle is hung at the wall.
A girl puts lucky salt in a dish.
The cupboard will have its loaf and bottle, come winter.
On the seventh morning
One spills water of blessing over the threshold.

Nostalgia
Don Paterson


I miss when I could drop down on all fours
and flick the ground away from under me.
I miss the wire I ran into the earth.
I miss when I was the bloom on the sea
and we slept forever under the warm clouds
till something spoiled in us twitched with design
and woke the clock. So we arose and went.
Last night I rowed out to the beeless glade
and lay down on the grass to listen
to the water eating at the edge of things.
My sister taught me to watch the stars this way
lest I think that heaven was up, or heaven,
lest I forget the stars are also under us
where they sink and sail into the dark like cinders.

Little Aster
Don Paterson

after Gottfried Benn


We hauled the drayman onto the slab.
He'd drowned in the canal. Some wag
had set a small blue flower between his teeth.

When I went below his skin with my long knife
and reached up along through the chest
to cut out the tongue and the soft palate

I must have touched the stem and dislodged the thing;
it'd slipped from his mouth and into the brain
I'd set beside him in a steel bowl.

I packed the flower with the woodshavings
back into his empty chest
and stitched him up again.

Drink your fill of that great vase!
Sleep well, my little aster!

Francesca Woodman
Don Paterson


                        i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone

                        ii
Behind the mirror. Favourite place to hide.
I didn't breathe. They looked so long I died.

                        iii
What's shown when we unveil, disclose, undress,
is first the promise, then its emptiness

                        iv
Ghost-face. Not because I turned my head,
but because what looked at me was dead.

                        v
— We don't exist — We only dream we're here —
This means we never die — We disappear —

                        vi
We'd met 'in previous lives', he was convinced.
Yeah, I thought. And haven't spoken since.

                        vii
All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so.
All ghosts know this. That's really all they know.

Radka Toneff
Don Paterson


I'll let you go, if you'll let this come good.
I'm speaking it as quietly as I can
a mile or so into the Bygdøy wood
where you lost your voice. So much for the plan
to master the sounds closest to silence, sing
piano. Though I know now what you meant.
When the ear lights on the half-said thing
it leans into its distance, and is sent
out into those spectral fires that play
between the inner world and outer dark
as we are, to this zone of breath and blue
between the world and the dark. Radka, skylark,
you rose too far; though as it died away
I heard right through the song to what sung you.

The Air
Don Paterson


What is this dark and silent caravan
that being nowhere, neither comes nor goes;
that being never, has no hour or span;
of which we can say only that it flows?
How was it that this empty datastream,
this cache of dead light could so lose its way
it wandered back to feed on its own dream?
How did that dream grow to the waking day?
What is the sound that fades up from the hiss,
like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing,
now full of its song to keep it singing?
When will the air stop breathing? Will it all
come to nothing, if nothing came to this?

The Wave 
Don Paterson


For months I'd moved across the open water
like a wheel under its skin, a frictionless
and by then almost wholly abstract matter
with nothing in my head beyond the bliss
of my own breaking, how the long foreshore
would hear my full confession, and I'd drain 
into the shale till I was filtered pure.
There was no way to tell on that bare plain
but I felt my power run down with the miles
and by the time I saw the scattered sails,
the painted front and children on the pier
I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown
and knew I was already in the clear.
I hit the beach and swept away the town.

Canopy
Emily Berry


The weather was inside.

The branches trembled over the grass as if to apologise; then
they thumped and they came in.

And the trees shook everything off until they were bare and
clean. They held on to the ground with their long feet and leant
into the gale and back again.

This was their way with the wind.

They flung us down and flailed above us with their visions and 
their pale tree light.

I think they were telling us to survive. That's what a leaf feels
like anyway. We lay under their great awry display and they
tattooed us with light.

They got inside us and made us speak; I said my first word in
their language: 'canopy'.

I was crying and it felt like I was feeding. Be my mother, I said
to the trees, in the language of trees, which can't be transcribed,
and they shook their hair back, and they bent low with their
many arms, and they looked into my eyes as only trees can
look into the eyes of a person, they touched me with the rain
on their fingers till I was all droplets, till I was mist, and they said
that they would.

Aura
Emily Berry


listen to me                         little water
I called you up        believing something
would arise                   i n me believing
I could make                     you reappear
on my way                    to the cemetery
every face was                        luminous
as if they knew            something about
the dark                               I think you
were in us all             reminding me not
to despair or if             despairing know
that we did not             lose each other
either side                    of the calamity
we fused                      you went inside
& I could not                            see you
but afterwards                    afterwards
I could see                       underwater I
could see in the dark           I could see
with my eyes closed     I could see past
the shimmer that   separates the living
and the dead I knew there was nothing
no separation                      it was just
aura the most                    remarkable
sadness &                      if only I would
keep looking                I would see you

Procession
Emily Berry


Once I had a day mother

Now I have a night mother

Mourners no longer murmuring

In the late afternoon

                              *

They say we are doomed to repeat ourselves

So I threw away my fate

The sun went in behind a cloud and all the daffodils darkened

                              *

Relics of ancient rituals

A house by the sea with no view of the sea

No lamps burning at this hour

                              *

Every day the loss of light

The new year comes in, carrying all my language

I do not know if it is bringing or taking away

                              *

Last time, last time...

I might feel infinitely wise as though it must show from a
    certain angle

When I saw the sea after many months it was such a meeting

Numerous dreams about rain, flooding, and bathing

                              *

Once I saw my mother rowing

At night across water

I called to her and she looked back

Smiling beautifully

Francesca
Ezra Pound

You came in out of the night
And there were flowers in your hands,
Now you will come out of a confusion of people,
Out of a turmoil of speech about you.

I who have seen you amid the primal things
Was angry when they spoke your name 
In ordinary places.
I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind,
And that the world should dry as a dead leaf,
Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,
So that I might find you again, 
Alone.

T
Emily Berry


This hope              with Australian wild peach
              is what keeps me going
                    I spell your name
with macadamia nut            never mind jojoba
                                                      One oil is the aroma
the other is the carrier              Often I wonder:
              how does the carrier feel?
                I always see hierarchy
Some letter of the alphabet, for example
are more powerful                                  T is one
T is such a strong character...

            Top note, heart note, base note:
which would you rather be?              I call my dad
to ask what botanicals were in vogue in his day
Whenever I pick up the phone I hear the sea
             Maybe balsam? he says
Sometimes the last one you think of
             is the one who'll know

Bird
Liz Berry


When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me.

              The air feathered
                                            as I knelt
by my open window for the charm —
                                           black on gold,
                                        last star of the dawn.

Singing, they came:
                             throstles, jenny wrens,
jack squalors swinging their anchors through the clouds.

              My heart beat like a wing.

I shed my nightdress to the drowning arms of the dark,
my shoes to the sun's widening mouth.

                                Bared,
   I found my bones hollowing to slender pipes,
       my shoulder blades tufting down.
             I   spread    my flight-greedy arms
to watch my fingers jewelling like ten hummingbirds,
my feet callousing to knuckly claws.
              As my lips calcified to a hooked kiss

silence

              then an exultation of larks filled the clouds
and, in my mother's voice, chorused:
        Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the winter.

So I left girlhood behind me like a blue egg
                                                    and stepped off
                               from the window ledge.

How light I was

as they lifted me up from Wren's Nest
bore me over the edgelands of concrete and coal.

I saw my grandmother waving up from her fode,
                              looped
    the infant school and factory,
                     let the zephrs carry me        out to the coast.

Lunars I flew

                      battered and tuneless

      the storms turned me inside out like a fury,
there wasn't one small part of my body didn't bawl.

Until I felt it at last        the rush of squall thrilling my wing
                  and I knew my voice
was no longer words but song        black upon black.

I raised my throat to the wind
                                      and this is what I sang...





charm birdsong or dawn chorus
jack squalor swallow
fode yard

Always & Forever
Ocean Vuong


Open this when you need me most,
                        he said, as he slid the shoe box, wrapped

in duct tape, beneath my bed. His thumb,
                        still damp from the shudder between mother's

thighs, kept circling the mole above my brow.
                        The devil's eye blazed between his teeth

or was he lighting a joint? It doesn't matter. Tonight
                        I wake & mistake the bathwater wrung

from mother's hair for his voice. I open
                        the shoe box dusted with seven winters

& here, sunk in folds of yellowed news
                        -paper, lies the Colt .45 — silent & heavy

as an amputated hand. I hold the gun
                        & wonder if an entry wound in the night

would make a hole wide as morning. That if
                        I looked through it, I would see the end of this

sentence. Or maybe just a man kneeling
                        at the boy's bed, his grey overalls reeking of gasoline

& cigarettes. Maybe the day will close without
                        the page turning as he wraps his arms around

the boy's milk-blue shoulders. The boy pretending
                        to be asleep as his father's clutch tightens.

The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten
                        around the bullet

to make it speak

Fire
Matthew Dickman


Oh, fire—you burn me! Ed is
singing
behind the smoke and coals, his
wife near him, the rest of us
below the stars
swimming above Washington
state,
burning through themselves,
he's like an Appalachian Prince
Henry with his banjo
and whiskey. The court
surrounding him and the deer
off in the dark hills like the
French, terrified
but in love and hungry.
I'm burning all the time. My 
pockets full of matches
and lighters, the blue smoke
crawling out like a skinny ghost
from between my lips.
My lungs on fire, the wings
of them falling grom the open
sky. The tops of Michelle's long
hands
looked like the beautiful coats
leopards have, covered in dark
spots. All the cigarettes she
would light
and then smash out, her eyes
the color of hair spray, cloudy
and stingy
and gone, but beautiful! She
carried her hands around
like two terrible letters of
introduction. I never understood
who could have opened them, 
read them aloud,
and still thrown her onto a bed,
still walked into the street she
was, still
lit what little fuse she had left.
Oh, fire—
you burn me. My sister and I
and Southern Comfort
making us singe and spark, the
family
ash all around us, the way she is
beautiful to me in her singular
blaze,
my brain lighting up, my tongue
like a monk in wartime, awash
in orange silk and flames.
The first time I ever crushed a 
handful of codeine into its
universe
of powdered pink, the last time
I felt the tangy aspirin drip of
ecstacy down my throat,
the car losing control, the sound
of momentum, this earth is not 
standing
still, oh, falling elevator—
you keep me, oh, graveyard—
you have been so patient, ticking
away, smoldering—
you grenade. Of, fire,
the first time I ever took a drink
I was doused with gasoline,
that little ember perking up
inside me, flashing, beginning to
glow and climb.

Do You Speak Persian?

Kaveh Akbar

Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars

separated by billions of miles, light traveling years

to die in the back of an eye.

Is there a vocabulary for this — one to make dailiness amplify

and not diminish wonder?

I have been so careless with the words I already have.

I don't remember how to say home

in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only

delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, good night.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?

Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?

Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I've taken

has been from one tongue to another.

To order the world:

I need, you need, he/she/it needs.

The rest, left to a hungry jackal

in the back of my brain.

Right now our moon looks like a pale cabbage rose.

Delam barat tang shodeh.

We are forever folding into the light.

Shab bekheir.