The Arrow and the Song

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For, so swiftly it flew, the sight

Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For who has sight so keen and strong,

That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak

I found the arrow, still unbroke;

And the song, from beginning to end,

I found again in the heart of a friend.

____________________________________________________________________

 Wind in a Box

Terrance Hayes

   —after Lorca

I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket

of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice.

I want to learn to walk without blinking.

I want to outlive the turtle and turtle's father,

the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions

and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill

can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk

out of this house wearing nothing but wind.

I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you

weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts

of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths

of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings

of snow. I want to fight off the wind.

I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind

with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging

screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets

of noise. i want to fight off the dull straight lines

of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals,

your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies.

If the locust can abandon its suit,

I want a brand new name. I want the pepper's fury

and the salt's tenderness. I want the virtue

of the evening rain, but not its gossip.

I want the moon's intuition, but not its questions. 

I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter

every room in a strange electrified city

and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh

at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror,

but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch.

I do not want to be the yellow photograph

or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman,

I want to be a pure flame. I want to be your song.

____________________________________________________________________

Love Song

Denise Levertov

Your beauty, which I lost sight of once

for a long time, is long,

not symmetrical, and wears

the earth colors that make me see it.

A long beauty, what is that?

A song

that can be sung over and over,

long notes or long bones.

Love is a landscape the long mountains

define but don't

shut off from the

unseeable distance.

In fall, in fail,

your trees stretch

their long arms in sleeves

of earth-red and

sky-yellow, a little

lop-sided. I take

long walks among them. The grapes

that need frost to ripen them

are amber and grow deep in the

hedge, half-concealed,

the way your beauty grows in long tendrils

half in darkness.

The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry


When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


_________________________________________________

Argument

Argument
Elizabeth Bishop

Days that cannot bring you near

or will not,

Distance trying to appear

something more than obstinate,

argue argue argue with me

endlessly 

neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.

Distance: Remember all that land

beneath the plane;

the coastline

of dim beaches deep in sand

stretching indistinguishably

all the way to where my reasons end?

Days: And think

of all those cluttered instruments,

one to a fact, 

canceling each other's experience;

how they were

like some hideous calendar

"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc."

The intimidating sound

of these voices

we must separately find

can and shall be vanquished:

Days and Distance disarrayed again

and gone

both for good and from the gentle battleground.

______________________________________

Plea to the Wind

Alice Oswald

Describe the Wind, 

                        Wind!

Say something marked by discomfort

That wanders many cities and harbours,

Not knowing the langauge.

Be much travelled.

Start with nothing but the hair blown sideways

And say:

            Gentle

                       South-easterly

                                  Drift

                       With Rain.

Say: Downdraught.

Unglue the flog from the woods from the waist up

And speak disparagingly of leaves.

Be an old man blowing a shell.

Blow over the glumness of a girl

Looking up at the air in her red hood

And say:

                         Suddenly

                                     Violent

                                          Short-lived

                                     Gust.

Then come down glittering

With a pair of ducks to rooftop.

Go on. Be North-easterly.

Be enough chill to ripple a pool.

Be a rumour of winter.

Whip the green cloth off the hills

And keep on quietly

Lifting the skirts of women not wanting to be startled

And pushing clouds like towers of clean linen

Till you get to the

                         Thin

                              Cry

                         That 

                              Suffers

                 On seas.

Ignore it.

Say Snow.

Say Ditto.

Wait for five days

In which everything fades except aging.

Then try to describe being followed by heavy rain.

Describe voices and silverings,

Say:

           Strong

              Wet

       Southwester

From December to March.

Describe everything leaning.

Bring a tray of cool air to the back door.

Speak increasingly rustlingly.

Say something winged

Om the branch of the heart.

Say:

               Song.

Beacsue you know these things.

You are both Breath

             And Breath

And your mouth mentions me

Just at the point where I end.

                                                                                                     

Hymn to Iris

Alice Oswald

Quick moving goddess of the rainbow

You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-through

Put your hands

Put your heaven-taken shape down

On the ground. Now. Anywhere

Like a bent down bough of nothing

A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air

And let there be instantly in its underlight —

At street corners, on swings, out of car windows —

A three-moment blessing for all bridges

May impossible rifts be often delicately crossed

By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plank

May the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over

On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain

And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space drips and echoes

May two fields be bridged by a stile

And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance

And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,

Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing

Crossing the Water
Sylvia Plath

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.

Where do the black trees go that drink there?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:

They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale land;

Stars open among the lilies.

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

An October Salmon

Ted Hughes

He's lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety.

Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,

Half under a tangle of brambles.

After his two thousand miles, he rests,

Breathing in that lap of easy current

In his graveyard pool.

About six pounds weight,

Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea —

But already a veteran,

Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it's over!

So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!

Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth's beauty-dress,

Her life-robe —

Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,

Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf —

An autumnal pod of his flower,

The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank.

The sea-going Aurora Borealis of his April fury,

The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary

Ripened to muddy dregs,

The river reclaiming his sea-metals —

In the October light

He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.

Death has dressed him

In her clownish ceremonials, badges and decorations,

Mapping the completion of his service,

His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body

A fungoid anemone of canker —

Can the caress of water ease him?

The flow will not let up for a minute.

What a change! From that covenant of Polar light

To this shroud in a gutter!

What a death-in-life! — to be his own spectre!

His living body become death's puppet,

Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes —

He haunts his own staring vigil,

And suffers the subjugation, and the dumbness,

And the humiliation of the role!

And that is how it is.

That is what is going on here, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour.

That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,

And the eye of ravenous joy — king of infinite liberty

In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

On the surge-ride of elation, weightless,

Body simply the armature of energy

In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,

The salt mouthful of actual existence,

With strength like light —

Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.

This chamber of horrors is also home.

He was probably hatched in this very pool.

And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows

Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles 

And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.

People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.

If boys see him they will try to kill him.

All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness, 

The epic poise

That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient

In the machinery of heaven.