Unaccompanied
Fiona Benson


It's raining at the garden centre.
I walk through dripping aisles of potted herbs
in a cool green rinse of aniseed and catmint.

The water falls in diatonic intervals – 
each drop calls out its one clear note
as the canopy of leaves sings counterpoint.

I want you here to listen that way you do
with your eyes half-closed and mouth a little tense,
but don't come and get you. Instead, I rehearse

this trick of solitary listening
against the time you leave, like a beginner
at piano with the practice pedal down

crawling a way through the minor scale
until my fingers have it blind.
But, like listening with one ear sealed,

it misses a dimension, or depth of sound...
the rain taps shallow as a glockenspiel,
an infant music, untutored and unreal.

Elegy
Linda Pastan


Last night the moon lifted itself
on one wing,
over the fields,

and struggling to rise
this morning
like a hooked fish

through watery 
layers
of sleep,

I know 
with what difficulty
flowers

must pull themselves
all the way up 
their stems.

How much easier
the free fall of snow
or leaves in their season.

All week, watching
the hospital gown
rising

and falling
with your raggedy breath,
I dreamed

not of resurrections
but of the slow, sensual
slide each night

into sleep, of dust,
of newly shovelled earth
settling.

Up the Dark Valley
Thomas McGrath


After the lean road looping the narrow river,
At a break in the valley, turned northward up the coulee,
Past the slow shallows where minnows, a tin flash
Patterned the trellised shadow. Then, leaving behind the last trees,
The spider sun laid on the hot face a tight miraculous web.

Northward then. All afternoon beneath my feet the ground gave
Uneven going. The colorless silence, unraveled by the flies, 
Stitched again by the locusts, was heard, was smelled —
Swamp-smell, dead coulee water.
                                                           And the easy hills,
Burnt brown, green, grass color, went on through the afternoon,
Then blue-gray in the blue shadow. The path went on.
Darkness hid in the draws. I was soon surrounded.
Only the wind sound now. All through the evening,
Homeward I walk, hearing no human sound.

The birds of darkness sang back every call.

Wind
Ted Hughes


This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up —
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep 
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Storm on the Island

Seamus Heaney

We are prepared: we build our houses squat,

Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.

This wizened earth has never troubled us

With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks

Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees

Which might prove company when it blows full

Blast: you know what I mean — leaves and branches

Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale

So that you listen to the thing you fear

Forgetting that it pummels your house too.

But there are no trees, no natural shelter.

You might think that the sea is company,

Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs

But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits

The very windows, spits like a tame cat

Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives

And strafes visibly. Space is a salvo,

We are bombarded with the empty air.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Roses Only
Marianne Moore


You do not seem to realize that beauty is 
a liability rather than
   an asset — that in view of the fact that 
spirit creates form we are
      justified in supposing
      that you must have brains. For you, a 
symbol of the unit, stiff
      and sharp,
   conscious of surpassing by dint of 
native superiority and liking
      for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for 
you, unaided, to attempt
      through sheer
   reserve to confute presumptions
resulting from observation is
      idle. You cannot make us
      think you a delightful happen-so. But
rose, if you are brilliant,
      it
   is not because your petals are the
without-which-nothing of pre-
      eminence. You would look, minus
thorns — like a what-is-this, a mere

peculiarity. They are not proof against a
storm, the elements, or 
      mildew
   but what about the predatory hand?
What is brilliance without 
      coordination? Guarding the 
      infinitesimal pieces of your mind,
compelling audience to 
   the remark that it is better to be
forgotten than to be
      remembered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm
Wallace Stevens


The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.