HOUSE FOR THE STUDY OF WATER
Katharine Kilalea


1. Whatever you love most dearly

My dearest brother, last night
I saw water playing in the pond
where the women were swimming.
I was stationed in the House for
the Study of Water amid parapets
ad ruby red columns under the
open sky. I was with a man. His
name was Curtis. It was muggy
outside. He said, it wants to be a
storm. I said, it (the water) held 
no more shape than a dream. He
is so much better than me. I have 
so much confusion. I lay on my
stomach to make notes in pencil.
From the veranda in front of the
waiting room I can see the entire 
garden, including the river, and
further, the shapes of people I 
knew, including you. I'd like to 
get closer but what the hell. In
any case I can almost hear you
saying to yourself he always was
an over-ambitious but timorous
child to which I can add only the
assurance that now I am a man
and nothing in a man's life is
more certain than his being too
timid or too stupid or something.
It goes without saying: a man can-
not have intercourse with a river.
But what then can he hope for?
If you do not know, she says, why
then do you not ask? You want to
stay with me? To come away with
me on holiday? To live with me in 
my house? The truth is, if I could,
I would have followed her perm-
anently and without resistance. Or 
did you expect me to just lie here
like a corpse?

Mutability
Percy Bysshe Shelley


I.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:—

II.
Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings
    Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
    One mood or modulation like the last.

III.
We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep;
    We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:—

IV.
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
    The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
    Nought may endure but Mutability.

The Milkweed
Richard Wilbur

Anonymous as cherubs 

Over the crib of God
White seeds are floating 

Out of my burst pod.

What power had I

Before I learned to yield?

Shatter me, great wind:

I shall possess the field.

Ode to the Duduk
Peter Balakian

It’s not the wind I hear driving south

through the Catskills—it’s just bad news from the radio

and then a hailstorm morphs into sunlight

—look up and there’s—

an archipelago of starlings trailing some clouds—

But how does the wind come through you

primordial hollow—unflattened double reed—

so even now when bad news comes with the evening report—

I can press a button on the dashboard and hear your breath implode

the way wind blows through the slit windows of a church in Dilijan,

then a space in my head fills with a sound that rises from red clay dust

         roads

and slides through your raspy apricot wood—

Hiss of tires, wet tarmac, straw white lines

night coming like wet dissolve to pixilation—

Praise to the glottal stop of every hoarse whisper, every sodden tree

which speaks through your hollow carved wood—

so we can hear the air flow over starlings rising and dipping as 

         the mountain glaze the sun—

so we can hear the bad news kiss the wind through your whetted reed—

Stargazers abd Others
Elizabeth Jennings


      One, staring out stars,
Lost himself in looking and almost
Forgot glass, eye, air, space;
Simply, he thought, the world is improved
By my staring, how the still glass leaps
When the sky thuds in like tides.

      Another, making love, once
Stared so far over his pleasure
That woman, world, the spiral
Of taut bodies, the clinging hands, broke apart
And he saw, as the stargazer sees,
Landscapes made to be looked at,
Fruit to fall, not be plucked.

      In you also something
Of such vision occurs.
How else would I have learnt
The tapered stars, the pause
Of the nervous spiral? Names I need
Stronger than love, desire,
Passion, pleasure. Oh discover
Some star and christen it, but let me be
The space that your eye moves over.

Winter bird: on a painting by Shozo Ozaki
Tony Ullyatt

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
—e e cummings


Winter:
the earth draped
to the horizon
in that whiteness
that clenches
the eyes yet insists
you gaze upon it.
The filigree of
bare branches curves
with the deep snow
lodged there.
Amid a myriad shades
of glistening white
a small bird's silhouette
the epitome of stillness
in this starkest
of landscapes.
It knows this
is perfect weather
for carolling
its pure song resonating
far into the impeccable
quiet of the winter woods.
It's quite irrelevant
whether we listen.

The Diamond Cutter
Elizabeth Jennings


Not what the light will do but how he shapes it
And what particular colours it will bear,

And something of the climber's concentration
Seeing the white peak, setting the right foot there.

Not how the sun was plausible at morning
Nor how it was distributed at noon,

And not how much the single stone could show
But rather how much brilliance it would shun;

Simply a paring down, a cleaving to
One object, as the star-gazer who sees

One single comet polished by its fall
Rather than countless, untouched galaxies.