Parenthesis
Nick Laird

I lie here like the closing bracket on the ledger of the

    mattress.

Asleep between us the children are hyphens — one hyphen, one

    underscore —

and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight

    that

what I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet

    snoring.

Asleep between us, the children, our hyphens (one hyphen, one

    underscore),

know love is a paragraph lacking an ending and typeset by

    hand in italics.

What I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet

    snoring

and it's alright to collapse like that, like a marquee gone into

    its final sigh.

No love is a paragraph lacking an ending and typeset by hand

    in italics.

It is an ellipsis of three drops of Night Nurse that leaves the 

    pillow sticky

and it's alright to collapse like that, like a marquee gone into

    its final sigh,

like my mother in the hard return of a long death and the 

    stanza break.

It is an ellipsis of three drops of Night Nurse that leaves the 

    pillow sticky.

I lie here like the closing bracket on the ledger of the

    mattress,

like my mother in the hard return of a long death and the

    stanza break,

and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight,

    that.

Desert
Josephine Miles


When with the skin you do acknowledge drought,
The dry in the voice, the lightness of feet, the fine
Flake of the heat at every level line;

When with the hand you learn to touch without
Surprise the spine for the leaf, the prickled petal,
The stone scorched in the shine, and the wood brittle;

Then where the pipe drips and the fronts sprout
And the foot-square forest of clover blooms in sand,
You will lean and watch, but never touch with your hand.

Love after Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Pike
Ted Hughes


Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads—
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them—
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb—

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks—
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes in the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.