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Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

© Naomi Shihab Nye

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Afterword

© Louise Gluck

Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.

Sonnets from the Portuguese 7: The Face

© Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The face of all the world is changed, I think,

Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul

Mechanism

© Archie Randolph Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

morality: any working order,

The Continent’s End

© Robinson Jeffers

At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,

The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

Mutability ["The flower that smiles to-day"]

© Percy Bysshe Shelley

The flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow dies;

Changing Woman

© Annie Finch

If we change as she is changing,

if she changes as we change

Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)

© Algernon Charles Swinburne

Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel

Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;

When She Wouldn’t

© Wesley McNair

When her recorded voice on the phone
said who she was again and again to the piles
of newspapers and magazines and the clothes

Paradise Lost: Book X

© Patrick Kavanagh

So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
"Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done?"
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelm'd,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abash'd replied,
"The Serpent me beguil'd, and I did eat."

from Briggflatts

© Ted Hughes

I

Brag, sweet tenor bull,

Sheep

© Judy Grahn

The first four leaders had broken knees
The four old dams had broken knees
The flock would start to run, then freeze
The first four leaders had broken knees

Her

© Billy Collins

There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence: