Travel poems

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Sonnet CIX: O! never say that I was false of heart

© William Shakespeare

O! never say that I was false of heart,

Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.

Each Defeat

© Eileen Myles

I couldn’t tell anyone about this sight.
Each defeat
Is sweet.

What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments?
I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves.
I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream, sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths? I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks, lining up donkeys in windowsills. To be good, a promise made to the roaches who scouted my closet at night. If you don’t get in my bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill.
The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show how to sleep without walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—next June I was stirring the stream like a soup, telling my brother dinner would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I saw it. The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag.

The Third Hour of the Night

© Frank Bidart

When the eye

You’re

© Sylvia Plath

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

She Was a Phantom of Delight

© André Breton

She was a Phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight;

If I Were Another

© Mahmoud Darwish

If I were another on the road, I would have said
to the guitar: Teach me an extra string!
Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier—
that’s what my new song would say. Whenever
the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two
on this road: I ... and another!

To His Mistress

© John Wilmot

Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Suns enlivening eye?

Up-Hill

© Christina Georgina Rossetti

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites

© Charles Simic

They also piss against the wind,
Pour water in a leaky bucket.
Strike two tears to make fire,
And have tongues with bones in them,
Bones of a wolf gnawed by lambs.

"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"

© Walt Whitman

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travelld a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once lookd on you,
For I feard I might afterward lose you.

The Song of the Wreck

© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The wind blew high, the waters raved,

A ship drove on the land,

[Over a cup of coffee]

© Stephen Dobyns

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or
walking the dog, he would recall some incident
from his youthnothing significantclimbing a tree
in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's