Constancy to an Ideal Object
Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Since all that beat about in Nature's range,
Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain
The only constant in a world of change,
O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain?
Call to the Hours, that in the distance play,
The faery people of the future day—
Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!
Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou are she,
Still, still as though some dear embodied Good,
Some living Love before my eyes there stood
With answering look a ready ear to lend,
I mourn to thee and say—'Ah! loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be, 
To have a home, an English home, and thee!'
Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one.
The peacefull'st cot, the moon shall shine upon,
Lulled by the the thrush and wakened by the lark,
Without thee were but a becalméd bark,
Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.

And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver


Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Pieta
Donald Davie

Snow-white ray

coal-black earth will

swallow now.

The heaven glows

when twilight has

kissed it, but

your white face

which I kiss now does

not. Be still

acacia boughs,

I talk with my

small one. We speak

softly. Be still.

The sky is blind

with white

cloud behind

the swooping birds. The

garden lies

round us and

birds in the dead

tree's bare

boughs shut

and open themselves. Be

still, or be

your unstill selves,

birds in the tree.

The wind is 

grievous to the willow. The

underside of its

leaves as the wind

compels them is

ashen. Bow

never, nor dance

willow. How can

you bear it? My

head goes back on

my neck fighting

the pain off. Willow

in the wind, share it.

I have to learn

how time can be

passed in public

gardens. There my

dead lies idle. Much

bereaved and sitting

under a sunny wall

old women stare

through me. I

come too soon and

yet at last to

fixity, being alone and

with a crone's pastimes.

The Year of the Whale
George Mackay Brown


The old go, one by one, like guttered flames.
This past winter
Tammag the bee-man has taken his cold blank mask
To the honeycomb under the hill,
Corston who ploughed out the moor
Unyoked and gone; and I ask,
Is Heddle lame, that in youth could dance and saunter
A way to the chastest bed?
The kirkyard is full of their names
Chiselled in stone. Only myself and Yule
In the ale-house now, speak of the great whale year.

This one and that provoked the taurine waves
With an arrogant pass,
Or probing deep through the snow-burdened hill
Resurrected his flock,
Or passed from fiddles to ditch
By way of the quart and the gill,
All night lay tranced with corn, but stirred to face
The brutal stations of bread;
While those who tended their lives
Like sacred lamps, chary of oil and wick,
Died in the fury of one careless match.

Off Scabra Head the lookout sighted a school
At the first light.
A meagre year it was, limpets and crows
And brief mottled grain.
Everything that could float
Circled the school. Ploughs
Wounded those wallowing lumps of thunder and night.
The women crouched and prayed.
Then whale by whale
Blundering on the rock with its red stain
Crammed our winter cupboards with oil and meat.

Memory Cave
Yusef Komunyakaa


A tallow worked into a knot
of rawhide, with a ball of waxy light
tied to a stick, the boy
scooted through a secret mouth
of the cave, pulled by the flambeau
in his hand. He could see
the gaze of agate eyes
& wished for the forbidden
plains of bison & wolf, years
from the fermented honey
& musty air. In the dried
slag of bear & bat guano,
the initiate stood with sleeping
gods at his feet, lost
in the great cloud of their one
breath. Their muzzles craved
touch. How did they learn
to close eyes, to see into
the future? Before the Before:
mammon was unnamed & mist
hugged ravines & hillocks.
The elders would test him
beyond doubt & blood. Mica
lit the false skies where
stalactite dripped perfection
into granite. He fingered
icons sunlight & anatase
never touched. Ibex carved
on a throwing stick, reindeer
worried into an ivory amulet,
& a bear's head. Outside,
the men waited two days
for him, with condor and bovid,
& not in a thousand years
would he have dreamt a woman
standing here beside a man,
saying, "This is as good
as the stag at Salon Noir
& the polka-dotted horses."
The man scribbles Leo loves
Angela below the boy's last bear
drawn with manganese dioxide
& animal fat. This is where
sunrise opened a door in stone
when he was summoned to drink
honey wine & embrace a woman
beneath a five-pointed star.
Lying there beside the gods
hefty & silent as boulders,
he could almost remember
before he was born, could see
the cliff from which he's fall.

Drinking Memory
Megan Ross


Growing up, my mother, water diviner
& secret keeper, who looped sunlight through
the sky — who kept old jam jars & fields & fields
of knitting patterns as if one held the template for
happiness — warned me against Ouija boards
& communion with spirits.

We knew that a woman had lingered in the passage
of her childhood home, of a spirit thick as mist
in her bedroom & when I am ten
& playing Glassy-Glassy, my bedroom
takes on the same quality, a cool dense dark;
dusk clotting above my teddy bears and dolls.

In fertile sleep I inherit my mother's dreams,
pleating my nights with the same ribbons of fear
& I am sure that this is no longer my room,
that in 1977 a house climbed into her pocket
& waited its turn to unfold like a letter in a new life
where it thought it could be rewritten.

Dream
Elizabeth Bishop

I see a postman everywhere
Vanishing in thin blue air
A mammoth letter in his hand,
Postmarked from a foreign land.

The postman's uniform is blue.
The letter is of course from you
And I'd be able to read, I hope,
My own name on the envelope

But he has trouble with this letter
Which constantly grows bigger & bigger
And over and over with a stare,
He vanishes in blue, blue air.