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.