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 fall,
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.

Words
Sylvia Plath


Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

The Oak Tree Loves Patience
Mary Oliver


The oak tree
      loves patience,
the mountain is
      still looking,

as it has for centuries,
      for a word to say about
the gradual way it
      slides itself

back to the
      world below
to begin again,
      in another life,

to be fertile.
      When the wind blows
the grass
      whistles and whispers

in myths and riddles
      and not in our language
but one far older.
      The sea is the sea is

always the sea.
      These things
you can count on
      as you walk about the world

happy or sad,
      talky or silent, making
weapons, love, poems.
      The briefest of fires.

Adlestrop
Edward Thomas


Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Storms River:
Chaos Theory
C. J. Driver


     I watch the winter waves all day
To guess the places they'll start to gather up
And lift, and lift so slowly to the cusp
     Which hangs a moment as it breaks
In sudden downward curve of lighter green
     Before the backward spray of spume
          Which tags the wave
Appends a rainbow briefly to its edge.

     Though gravity has not yet trapped
The further stars in ordered evidence
(For light allows I may not see them now
     Where curves the fleeting universe)
This random music in my head includes
     The rainbow, cusp and spray,
          The light and stars,
The wave's return, the certain night to come.

Wilderness:
Written on Water
C. J. Driver


The sheen of dying wind
Across the lake —
The darkling light
As light delights the air
(The language knows so much beyond oneself)

The web of weaving wind
Across the lake —
The water light
Of silver shining air
(The language knows so much beyond oneself)

We think of something lost
In writing down
The flux of time:
But what completes our thought?
(The language knows so much beyond oneself)

The thread of meaning lost
In noting down
That fleeting time:
Precise the moment caught
(The language knows so much beyond oneself)

Beyond the Red River
Thomas McGrath


The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.

A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.

Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.
My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.
I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,
Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.