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Bright Leaf
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
Ars Poetica?
© Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
Final Autumn
© Annie Finch
Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard.
Light drives lower and one bluejay crams
our cold memories out past the sun,
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
Smokers of Paper
© Cesare Pavese
He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner
mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins.
Somebody Trying
© Denise Levertov
‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed.
‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’
Something about his brother dying.
Rivers and Mountains
© John Ashbery
On the secret map the assassins
Cloistered, the Moon River was marked
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
© Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;
Soonest Mended
© John Ashbery
Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
Dejection: An Ode
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
© Charles Bukowski
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein’s
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
The Stream's Secret
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
What thing unto mine ear
Wouldst thou convey,what secret thing,
O wandering water ever whispering?
Surely thy speech shall be of her.
Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer,
What message dost thou bring?
Satire III
© John Donne
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids
Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids;
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."
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
The Right Whale in Iowa
© Debora Greger
The shag rug of a Great Plains buffalo,
a flightless bird
gone to stone: over its fellow keepsakes,
Cabin
© Anne Waldman
eviction people arrive to haunt me
with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers
how they are carpet of fierce colors
