POEMS TO BE DISCUSSED:

The Flurry

When we talk about when to tell the kids,

we are so together, so concentrated.

I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m

the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,

holding it. He is sitting on the couch,

the old indigo chintz around him,

rich as a night sea with jellies,

I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,

as if within some chamber of matedness,

some dust I carry around me. Tonight,

to breathe its Magellanic field is less

painful, maybe because he is drinking

a wine grown where I was born—fog,

eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m

sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch

my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want

to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,

I tell him I will try to fall out of

love with him, but I feel I will love him

all my life. He says he loves me

as the mother of our children, and new troupes

of tears mount to the acrobat platforms

of my ducts and do their burning leaps.

Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a

moment, I imagine a flurry

of tears like a whirra of knives thrown

at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt

of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod

to it, it is my hope.

-- Sharon Olds (1942)

My Weed

On the path to the water, I found an ugly weed

growing between rocks. The wind was stroking it,

saying, “My weed, my weed.” Its solid,

hairy body rose up, with big silver leaves

that rubbed off on me, like sex. At first,

I thought it was a lamb’s ear, but it wasn’t.

I’m not a member of the ugly school,

but I circled around it and looked a lot,

which is to say, I was just being, and it

seemed to me –

in a higher sense -- to represent the sanity

of living.

It was twilight. Planets were gathering.

“Mr. Weed,” I said, “I’m competitive,

I’m afraid, I’m isolated, I’m bright.

Can you tell me how to survive?”

Henri Cole (1956--)

                   Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

         -- William Stafford (1914-1993)

This Black Rich Country

Dispossess me of belief:

between life and me obtrude

no symbolic forms:

grant me no mission: let my

mystical talents be beasts

in dark trees: thin the wire

I limp in space, melt it

with quick heat, let me walk

or fall alone: fail

me in all comforts:

hide renown behind the tomb:

withdraw beyond all reach of faith:

leave me this black rich country,

uncertainty, labor, fear: do not

steal the rewards of my mortality.

                      –A.R. Ammons (1926-2001)

   Ah! Sun-flower

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:

Arise from their graves and aspire,

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

                     -- William Blake (1757-1827)

  At the Fishhouses

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting,

his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,

a dark purple-brown,

and his shuttle worn and polished.

The air smells so strong of codfish

it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

to storerooms in the gables

for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,

is of an apparent translucence

like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

growing on their shoreward walls.

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Up on the little slope behind the houses,

set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

is an ancient wooden capstan,

cracked, with two long bleached handles

and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

where the ironwork has rusted.

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

He was a friend of my grandfather.

We talk of the decline in the population

and of codfish and herring

while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water’s edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

descending into the water, thin silver

tree trunks are laid horizontally

across the gray stones, down and down

at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

I have seen here evening after evening.

He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

like me a believer in total immersion,

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

He stood up in the water and regarded me

steadily, moving his head a little.

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

as if it were against his better judgment.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,

the dignified tall firs begin.

Bluish, associating with their shadows,

a million Christmas trees stand

waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,

slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

icily free above the stones,

above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,

your wrist would ache immediately,

your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

as if the water were a transmutation of fire

that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.   

  -- Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater. 

-- Louise Glück (1943—2023)

As imperceptibly as Grief

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away –

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy –

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon –

The Dusk drew earlier in –

The Morning foreign shone –

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone –

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

-- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

   The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

                        -- Robert Frost (1874-1963)