singing sad and beautiful

Mountain Pines

by Robinson Jeffers

 

In scornful upright loneliness they stand, 

Counting themselves no kin of anything 

Whether of earth or sky. Their gnarled roots cling 

Like wasted fingers of a clutching hand 

In the grim rock. A silent spectral band 

They watch the old sky, but hold no communing 

With aught. Only, when some lone eagle's wing 

Flaps past above their grey and desolate land, 

Or when the wind pants up a rough-hewn glen, 

Bending them down as with an age of thought, 

Or when, 'mid flying clouds that can not dull 

Her constant light, the moon shines silver, then 

They find a soul, and their dim moan is wrought 

Into a singing sad and beautiful.

Winter Wool

Sheep in the Winter Night

by Tom Hennen

Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one
another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening
in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked
weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought
of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they
eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have
just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian
religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were
full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their
white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods,
night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering,
along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes,
but the power that moves through the world and makes our
hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.

Secret Sleigh Ride

It had been long dark, though still an hour before supper-time

by Charles Reznikoff

 

 

It had been long dark, though still an hour before supper-time.
The boy stood at the window behind the curtain.
The street under the black sky was bluish white with snow.
Across the street, where the lot sloped to the pavement,
boys and girls were going down on sleds.
The boys were after him because he was a Jew.

At last his father and mother slept. He got up and dressed.
In the hall he took out his sled and went out on tiptoe.
No one was in the street. The slide was worn smooth and 

slippery--just right.

He laid himself down on his sled and shot away. He went down 

only twice.

He stood knee-deep in snow:
no one was in the street, the windows were darkened;
those near the street-lamps were ashine, but the rooms inside 

were dark;

on the street were long shadows of clods of snow.
He took his sled and went back into the house.

Austerity

Austerity

by Janet Loxley Lewis

 

 

From "Cold Hills" 

  

 

I have lived so long

On the cold hills alone ...

I loved the rock

And the lean pine trees,

Hated the life in the turfy meadow, 

Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.

I have lived so long

Under the high monotony of starry skies,

I am so cased about

With the clean wind and the cold nights, 

People will not let me in

To their warm gardens

Full of bees. 

Emily D's Lover

At Emily's In Amherst

by David Ray

On this day of our visit they are spraying the attic
for spiders, hoping to kill a black widow or two,
and I know she would not like that.

Outside, standing between cypresses, I imagine her
as a girl, playing in cool shadows, little Emily
struck through the heart with an icicle of loneliness.

Upstairs, her tiny bed, the white dress with pearl buttons,
and the bureau where she left the poems
folded, each with a stitch or two of blue thread.

I look across the field to where they carried her
on a door, as if to a bed with wrought iron railings.
There she lies silent while we fall to our knees, speak to her.

Sipping wine from the dandelions of her yard, I ask her
about the lover, if there was one. And I feel certain
I am that lover, all she could look forward to.

Yet I am not such a bad choice. I sit devoted for hours,
loving her well, sharing the wine, the growing darkness,
and I promise to come back, to think of her always.

Seduction in the heat of summer

Prague

by Khadijah Queen

 

 

Yes as thievery, except if saved for
a fantasy in which I in a backless
dress encounter

you on a typical balcony
overlooking Vltava, gripping the latticework,
metal, a barrier to leaping

into an esoteric night, fixed and ornate
enough, like my penchant for the infinite
within the singular, encounter you

as tributary, serpentine, the heat of your fingers
on my spine, my head turning
as you bend to catch the yes

I'd held latent, a mine you trigger with
your tongue, neither of us
mean to stop exploding.

Birding at the Dairy  

by Sidney Wade

 

 

We're searching
for the single

yellow-headed
blackbird

we've heard
commingles

with thousands
of starlings

and brown-headed
cowbirds,

when the many-
headed body

arises
and undulates,

a sudden congress
of wings

in a maneuvering
wave that veers

and wheels, a fleet
and schooling swarm

in synchronous alarm,
a bloom radiating

in ribbons, in sheets,
in waterfall,

a murmuration
of birds

that turns
liquid in air,

that whooshes
like waves

on the shore,
or the breath

of a great
seething prayer.

Each morning

Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry "hello there, Anne" each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning. All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds. So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken. The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.

plum trees in the breakdown lane

Walking in the Breakdown Lane

by Louise Erdrich

Wind has stripped
the young plum trees
to a thin howl.
They are planted in squares
to keep the loose dirt from wandering.
Everything around me is crying to be gone.
The fields, the crops humming to be cut and done with.

Walking in the breakdown lane, margin of gravel,
between the cut swaths and the road to Fargo,
I want to stop, to lie down
in standing wheat or standing water.

Behind me thunder mounts as trucks of cattle
roar over, faces pressed to slats for air.
They go on, they go on without me.
They pound, pound and bawl,
until the road closes over them farther on.

there is nothing you won't do

fury
          for mama


by Lucille Clifton

remember this. 
she is standing by 
the furnace. 
the coals 
glisten like rubies. 
her hand is crying. 
her hand is clutching 
a sheaf of papers. 
poems. 
she gives them up. 
they burn 
jewels into jewels. 
her eyes are animals. 
each hank of her hair 
is a serpent's obedient 
wife. 
she will never recover. 
remember. there is nothing 
you will not bear 
for this woman's sake.

Thank You

Variation on a Theme

by W. S. Merwin

Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen
and the dogs who are guiding me

glint of the sun off a spider web

Full Moon, Key West

by Elizabeth Bishop

The town is paper-white:
the moonlight is so bright.
Flake on flake
of wood and paint
the buildings faint.
The tin roofs break
into a sweat
of heavy dew
dripping steadily
down the gutters
click click.
Listen!
All over town
from black gaps
in bedroom gables
from little tables
behind the shutters
big alarm clocks
tick tick.
A spider's web
glints blue, glints red,
the mirrors glisten
and the knobs on the bed.

The island starts to hum
like music in a dream.
Paper-white, drunk,
the sailors come
stumbling, fighting,
mumbling threats
in children's voices,
stopping, lighting
cigarettes
with pink dull fires,
in groups like hands
and fingers on
the narrow sidewalks
of cement
that carry sounds
like tampered wires,
—the long strings of
an instrument
laid on the stream,
a zither laid
upon the flood
of the glittering Gulf.

Wishing

Wishes

by Ted Berrigan

Now I wish I were asleep, to see my dreams taking place
I wish I were more awake
I wish a sweet rush of tears to my eyes
Wish a nose like an eagle
I wish blue sky in the afternoon
Bigger windows, & a panorama—light, buildings & people in street air
Wish my teeth were white and sparkled
Wish my legs were not where they are—where they are
I wish the days warmly cool & clothes I like to be inside of
Wish I were walking around in Chelsea (NY) & it was 5:15 a.m., the
           sun coming up, alone, you asleep at home
I wish red rage came easier
I wish death, but not just now
I wish I were driving alone across America in a gold Cadillac
           toward California, & my best friend
I wish I were in love, & you here

Heavy Flight

A Sighting

by Connie Wanek

The gray owl had seen us and had fled
but not far. We followed noiselessly,
driving him from pine to pine:
I will not let thee go except thou bless me.

He flew as though it gave him no pleasure,
forcing himself from the bough,
falling until his wings caught him:
they had to stroke hard, like heavy oars.

He must have just eaten
something that had, itself, just eaten.
Finally he crossed the swamp and vanished
as into a new day, hours before us,

and we stood near the chest-high reeds,
our feet sinking, and felt
we'd been dropped suddenly from midair
back into our lives.

Unexpected rhythm

Hard Music

by Tom Chandler

The hammers of the builders
of the house across the street

sometimes fall by accident inside
the same beat, as if the rhythm

of our separate work can
melt without our knowing

into something far sleeker
than our laboring lives

and I wonder if the carpenters
are happy in themselves when

they realize how they improvise,
how the nails bite the wood

to such natural jazz, the house
rising tall in grace because of hard

music, lifting up its chimneyed head
and shoulders to the sky.

The Peace of Wild Things

With thanks to my friend Jenna for posting this on her blog today.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Sonnet for Minimalists
by Mona Van Duyn

From a new peony,
my last anthem,
a squirrel in glee
broke the budded stem.
I thought, Where is joy
without fresh bloom,
that old hearts' ploy
to mask the tomb?

Then a volunteer
stalk sprung from sour
bird-drop this year
burst in frantic flower.

The world's perverse,
but it could be worse.

Faith

Another Elegy

by Jericho Brown

To believe in God is to love

What none can see. Let a lover go,

Let him walk out with the good

Spoons or die

Without a signature, and so much

Remains for scrubbing, for a polish

Cleaner than devotion. Tonight,

God is one spot, and you,

You must be one blind nun. You

Wipe, you rub, but love won't move.

The Widow's Lament in Springtime by William Carlos Williams Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. Thirtyfive years I lived with my husband. The plumtree is white today with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some bushes yellow and some red but the grief in my heart is stronger than they for though they were my joy formerly, today I notice them and turn away forgetting. Today my son told me that in the meadows, at the edge of the heavy woods in the distance, he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers and sink into the marsh near them.

warmth of spring

Philosophy in Warm Weather

by Jane Kenyon

Now all the doors and windows
are open, and we move so easily
through the rooms. Cats roll
on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp
climbs the pane, pausing
to rub a leg over her head.

All around physical life reconvenes.
The molecules of our bodies must love
to exist: they whirl in circles
and seem to begrudge us nothing.
Heat, Horatio, heat makes them
put this antic disposition on!

This year's brown spider
sways over the door as I come
and go. A single poppy shouts
from the far field, and the crow,
beyond alarm, goes right on
pulling up the corn.

On being a poet

"Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!"


- Elizabeth Bishop

The Pain by  Laura Kasischke   Like the human brain, which organizes The swirls and shades of the bathroom tiles Into faces, faces With expressions Of exhaustion, of disdain. The Virgin Mary in the toast of course But also the penance in the pain, and the way My mother invented Plums and tissue paper, while My father invented the type of Sudden kindness That takes you by surprise When you've expected to be chastised And makes you cry

Letting Go

The Neighbors

by Jack Ridl

Sometimes they
go outside, maybe

move a rosebush
to the back yard or

clean a window.
Usually they

simply stand,
under a maple

or in a snowfall.
And this is often

when they see
a nuthatch on its

dizzy route down
a trunk, or

the quick flick
of a chickadee

across the yard
and onto a branch.

They don't do
much. That's for

others. They know
how to take things

for granted, know
what to miss.

Every morning
they make breakfast.

And when the sun
sets, they let it go.

rhubarb in spring

April Chores

by Jane Kenyon

When I take the chilly tools
from the shed's darkness, I come
out to a world made new
by heat and light.

The snake basks and dozes
on a large flat stone.
It reared and scolded me
for raking too close to its hole.

Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam.

Undone

Yours

by Daniel Hoffman

 

I am yours as the summer air at evening is
Possessed by the scent of linden blossoms,

As the snowcap gleams with light
Lent it by the brimming moon.

Without you I'd be an unleafed tree
Blasted in a bleakness with no Spring.

Your love is the weather of my being.
What is an island without the sea?

Birth of a Poem

Birth of a Poem 
C. P. Cavafy
(transl. by Daniel Mendelsohn

One night when the beautiful light of the moon
poured into my room . . . imagination, taking
something from life: some very scanty thing—
a distant scene, a distant pleasure—
brought a vision all its own of flesh,
a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . .

Poetry, you are mine...

Compassion IV
by Noelle Kocot

The human realities of the living are now 
As close to me as my own--oh, see how 
Dusty that plant gets when you don't clean
It! The rippling day is a fabulous lesson,
My pants are too loose, and yet. Bon nuit,
Mes chéries! All over the whole neighbor-
Hood, your fluid legs move--you are all
Permission and flounce, and your stockings
Catch in the mere light. Perfection, wholeness
Is what I see now in everyone I touch. That
Day when two men came in from the stream,
Wet, bothered, the windows were blackened,
And the cats ran around. Rain came, but
Also sunlight, and the years of hard living
Dissolved. A blanket of verbs crosses the
Threshold. Poetry, you are mine, and I will
Go anywhere with you. A gap in the mind,
A spangled street, my spine, perfectly erect now,
Chooses these words, yet it as if I have no choice.

Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for     fear I effuse unreturn'd love, But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay     is certain one way or another, (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was     not return'd, Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

I scald alone...

The Letter by Amy Lowell   Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper Like draggled fly's legs, What can you tell of the flaring moon Through the oak leaves? Or of my uncertain window and the bare floor Spattered with moonlight? Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them Of blossoming hawthorns, And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness Beneath my hand. I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against The want of you; Of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire Of the great moon.

February bullies her way in

Paradise

by Louis Jenkins

January finally drags into February and one fumbles with
numb fingers at the ordinary knots and hooks of life. People
are irritable, difficult. Some days you want to stay in bed
with the covers over your head and dream of paradise. A
place where the warm sea washes the white sand. There
are a few palm trees on the higher ground, many brightly
colored fish in the lagoon, waves breaking on the reef
farther out. No one in sight. Occasionally an incredibly
large, split-second shark darkens the clear water. Sea birds
ride the wind currents, albatross, kittiwake, ... and pass
on. Day after day, sea wind and perfect sky .... You make a
big heap of driftwood on the beach.

Snow in the mountains

Snow

by Kenneth Rexroth

Low clouds hang on the mountain.
The forest is filled with fog.
A short distance away the
Giant trees recede and grow
Dim. Two hundred paces and
They are invisible. All
Day the fog curdles and drifts.
The cries of the birds are loud.
They sound frightened and cold. Hour
By hour it grows colder.
Just before sunset the clouds
Drop down the mountainside. Long
Shreds and tatters of fog flow
Swiftly away between the
Trees. Now the valley below
Is filled with clouds like clotted
Cream and over them the sun
Sets, yellow in a sky full
Of purple feathers. After dark
A wind rises and breaks branches
From the trees and howls in the
Treetops and then suddenly
Is still. Late at night I wake
And look out of the tent. The
Clouds are rushing across the
Sky and through them is tumbling
The thin waning moon. Later
All is quiet except for
A faint whispering. I look
Out. Great flakes of wet snow are
Falling. Snowflakes are falling
Into the dark flames of the
Dying fire. In the morning the
Pine boughs are sagging with snow,
And the dogwood blossoms are
Frozen, and the tender young
Purple and citron oak leaves.