[By any measure]

 

By any measure, it was endless

             winter. Emulsions with

Then circled the lake like

This is it. This April will be

Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose

early, erased for an hour

             Silk-brush and ax

I'd like to think I'm a different person

             latent image fading

around the edges and ears

             Overall a tighter face

now. Is it so hard for you to understand

From the drop-down menu

In a cluster of eight poems, I selected

sleep, but could not

             I decided to change everything

Composed entirely of stills

             or fade into the trees

but could not

             remember the dream

save for one brief shot

of a woman opening her eyes

Ari, pick up. I'm a different person

In a perfect world, this would be

             April, or an associated concept

Green to the touch

             several feet away

 

Ben Lerner 

wild geese

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

Mary J Oliver

The Eye-Mote

Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind

Sylvia Plath 

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always   

(Still the dead one lay moaning)   

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

 

Stevie Smith

Tree At My Window

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

 Robert Frost

Larme

Far from birds, from herds, from village girls,
I used to drink, squatting in some heather
Surrounded by tender woods of hazel trees,
By a warm green afternoon vapor.

What could I drink from this young Oise,
Voiceless elms, flowerless lawn, overcast sky.
What was I pulling from the colocase gourd?
Some golden liquor, insipid and sweaty.

As such, I would have made a bad inn sign.
Then the storm altered the sky until sundown.
It was black country, lakes, poles,
Columns beneath blue night, railway stations.

The water of the woods vanished over virgin sands,
The wind pitched icicles from the sky into the ponds...
Well! like a fisherman for gold or shells,
To say that I had no trouble drinking!

Arthur Rimbaud

 

Teardrop

Far from the village girls, cattle, birds,

I drank, kneeling down in the heather

Surrounded by tender copses of hazel,

In the green warm mist of afternoon.

 

What could I have drunk from that young Oise,

Elms without voices, turf without flowers,

Shut sky? Or sip from the gourd of the vine?

Some liquor of gold that causes pale sweats.

 

Like that I’d have made a poor inn-sign.

Then storms altered the sky till evening.

Black landscapes, poles, lakes, colonnades

under the blueness of night, rail-stations.

 

Wood’s water was lost in virgin sand.

The wind, out of heaven, iced the ponds...

But, like fishers for gold or shells, to think

That I didn’t take the trouble to drink!

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/larme-teardrop.html

[The cry of the cicada]

 

The cry of the cicada
Gives us no sign
That presently it will die. 

Matsuo Basho

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

By William Butler Yeats

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

My Blue Shirt

hangs in the closet

of this small room, collar open,

sleeves empty, tail wrinkled.

Nothing fills the shirt but air

and my faint scent. It waits,

all seven buttons undone,

button holes slack,

the soft fabric with its square white pattern,

all of it waiting for a body.

It would take any body, though it knows,

in its shirt way of knowing, only mine

has my shape in its wrinkles,

my bend in the elbows.

Outside this room birds hunt for food,

young leaves drink in morning sunlight,

people pass on their way to breakfast.

Yet here, in this closet,

the blue shirt needs nothing,

expects nothing, knows only its shirt knowledge,

that I am now learning—how to be private and patient,

how to be unbuttoned,

how to carry the scent of what has worn me,

and to know myself by the wrinkles.

 

Gary Whited