Tamer and Hawk
Thom Gunn


I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.

Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds—
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.

As formerly, I wheel
I hover and I twist,
But only want the feel,
In my possessive thought,
Of catcher and of caught
Upon your wrist.

You but half civilize,
Taming me in this way.
Through having only eyes
For you I fear to lose,
I lose to keep, and choose
Tamer as prey.

Poem Without a Title
Charles Simic

I say to the lead,

“Why did you let yourself

Be cast into a bullet?

Have you forgotten the alchemists?

Have you given up hope

Of turning into gold?”

Nobody answers.

Lead. Bullet.

With names like that

The sleep is deep and long.

Up
Margaret Atwood


You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can't get out of bed.

It's something about the crumpled sheets
hanging over the edge like jungle
foliage, the terry slippers gaping
their dark pink mouths for your feet,
the unseen breakfast — some of it
in the refrigerator you do not dare
to open — you will not dare to eat.

What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.

Forget all that and let's get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
and you must run or burn.
No, that one's useless.
It's never worked before.

Where is it coming from, this echo,
this huge No that surrounds you, 
silent as the folds of the yellow
curtains, mute as the cheerful

Mexican bowl with its cargo
of mummified flowers?
(You chose the colors of the sun,
not the dried neutrals of shadow.
God knows you've tried.)

Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?

The Poets
Michael Longley

poem beginning with a line of John Clare


Poets love nature and themselves are love.
Imagine an out-of-the-way cottage
Close to dunes, the marram grass whispering
Above technicolour snails and terns' eggs,
Intelligent choughs on the roof at dawn,
At dusk whimbrels whistling down the chimney,
And outside the kitchen window that cliff
Where ravens have nested for fifty years.
Moth-and-butterfly-wing decipherers,
Counters of Connemara ponies and swans,
Along the lazybeds at the lake's edge
They materialise out of sea-mist and 
Into hawkbit haziness disappear.
One has written a lovely blackbird poem.

Michiko Dead
Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms

underneath. When their strength gives out,

he moves the hands forward, hooking then

on the corners, pulling the weight against

his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly

when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes

different muscles take over. Afterward,

he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood

drains out of the arm that is stretched up

to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now

the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

Hawk
Stephen Dunn


What a needy, desperate thing
to claim what's wild for oneself, 
yet the hawk circling above the pines
looks like the same one I entertained

might become mine after it crashed
into the large window and lay
one wing spread, the other loosely
tucked, then no, not dead, got up

dazed, and in moments was gone.
Now once again
this is its sky, this its woods.
The tasty small birds it loves

have seen their God and know
the suddenness of such love
as we know lightning or flash flood.
If hawks can learn, this hawk learned

what's clear can be hard
down where the humans live.
It'll never hunt again
where the air is such a lie.

It glides above the pines and I
turn back into the room, the hawk book
open on the cluttered table,
everything that must happen

happening out of sight, perfectly,
as if to be wild
means you carry with you nothing
that needs to be explained.

The More Loving One
W. H. Auden


Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.