Time poems
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your little voice... (I)
© Edward Estlin Cummings
your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
if everything happens that can't be done
© Edward Estlin Cummings
if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
but if a living dance upon dead minds
© Edward Estlin Cummings
but if a living dance upon dead minds
why,it is love;but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon's utmost magic,or stones speak or one
it may not always be so
© Edward Estlin Cummings
if this should be,i say if this should be-
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.
in time of daffodils
© Edward Estlin Cummings
in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how
The Sash
© Sharon Olds
The first ones were attached to my dress
at the waist, one on either side,
right at the point where hands could clasp you and
pick you up, as if you were a hot
The Arrivals
© Sharon Olds
I pull the bed slowly open, I
open the lips of the bed, get
the stack of fresh underpants
out of the suitcasepeach, white,
The Mortal One
© Sharon Olds
Three months after he lies dead, that
long yellow narrow body,
not like Christ but like one of his saints,
the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are
Topography
© Sharon Olds
After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
A Week Later
© Sharon Olds
A week later, I said to a friend: I don't
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.
There is something in me maybe someday
The End
© Sharon Olds
We decided to have the abortion, became
killers together. The period that came
changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple
who had been for life.
Sex Without Love
© Sharon Olds
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
Directions
© Billy Collins
You know the brick path in the back of the house,
the one you see from the kitchen window,
the one that bends around the far end of the garden
where all the yellow primroses are?
For Bartleby The Scrivener
© Billy Collins
ice skating into a sixty
mile an hour wind, fully exerting
the legs and swinging arms
Man Listening To Disc
© Billy Collins
This is not bad --
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones,
Pinup
© Billy Collins
The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense
that you cannot make out the calendar of pinup
drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.
Your ears are ringing with the sound of
I Go Back To The House For A Book
© Billy Collins
I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
Marginalia
© Billy Collins
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Japan
© Billy Collins
Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.
Shoveling Snow With Buddha
© Billy Collins
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
