Jonathan Wells, “April Morning”

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life, As a questioner about reality, A countryman of all the bones in the world? Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomes Part of the major reality, part of An appreciation of a reality; And thus an elevation, as if I lived With something I could touch, touch every way.

Wallace Stevens, "First Warmth," from Collected Poetry and Prose

The katy-dids at Ephrata return But this time at another place. It is the same sound, the same season, But it is not Ephrata. You said the dew falls in the blood. ne dew falls deep in the mind On life itself and there the katy-dids Keep whanging their brass wings . . . Say this to Pravda, tell the damned rag That the peaches are slowly ripening. Say that the American moon comes up Cleansed clean of lousy Byzantium. Say that in the clear Atlantic night The plums are blue on the trees. The katy-dids Bang cymbals as they used to do. Millions hold millions in their arms.

Wallace Stevens, "Memorandum," from Collected Poetry and Prose

The father keeps on living in the son, the world Of the father keeps on living in the world Of the son. These survivals out of time and space Come to us every day. And yet they are Merely parts of the general fiction of the mind: Survivals of a good that we have loved, Made eminent in a reflected seeming-so.

Wallace Stevens, excerpt of "Tradition," from Collected Poetry and Prose

The Night Migrations

by Louise Glück

This is the moment when you see again the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think the dead won’t see them -- these things we depend on, they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won’t need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.

Letter to a Lost Friend

by Barbara Hamby

There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened between us, like ostyt, which can be used for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something so much over months and even years that when you get it, you have lost the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky, “It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.” What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men, who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné, so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia, I see what she sees  —  all my books alphabetized and on shelves, feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins, neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’, and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin, a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.          

One day the patterned carpet, the folding chairs, the woman in the blue suit by the door examining her split ends, all of it will go on without me. I'll have disappeared, as easily as a coin under lake water, and few to notice the difference —a coin dropping into the darkening— and West 4th Street, the sesame noodles that taste like too much peanut butter lowered into the small white paper carton—all of it will go on and on— and the I that caused me so much trouble? Nowhere or grit thrown into the garden or into the sticky bodies of several worms, or just gone, stopped—like the Middle Ages, like the coin Whitman carried in his pocket all the way to that basement bar on Broadway that isn't there anymore. Oh to be in Whitman's pocket, on a cold winter day, to feel his large warm hand slide in and out, and in again. To be taken hold of by Walt Whitman! To be exchanged! To be spent for something somebody wanted and drank and found delicious.

Marie Howe, "One Day," from Magdalene: Poems

I know that you think you already know but— Wait Longer than that. even longer than that.

Marie Howe, "What the Silence Says," from Magdalene: Poems

The first cold morning, the little pumpkins lined up at the corner market, and the girl walks along Hudson Street to school and doesn't look back. The old sorrow blows in with the scent of wood smoke as I walk up the five flights to our apartment and lean hard against the broken dishwasher so it will run. Then it comes to me: Yes I'll die, so will everyone, so has everyone. It's what we have in common. And for a moment, the sorrow ceased, and I saw that it hadn't been sorrow after all, but loneliness, and for a few moments, it was gone.

Marie Howe, "October," from Magdalene: Poems

When he went into the garden the night before And fell with his face to the ground what he imagined was not his torture, not his own death That's what the story says, but that's not what he told me. He said he saw the others the countless in his name raped, burned, lynched, stoned, bombed, beheaded, shot, gassed, gutted and raped again.

Marie Howe, "Magdalene on Gethsemane," from Magdalene: Poems

When Moses pleaded, and Yaweh agreed at least to let the people hear His voice, it's said that he allowed each person to hear what each could bear to the very brim of that and no more. Afterwards the people said, Please Moses, from now on you listen. We don't want to hear it. You do the talking and listening now. Being with the teacher was a little like that as thought he were a book too difficult to read. So, I thought I had to become more than I was, more than I'd been. but that wasn't it. It seemed rather that something had to go. Something had to be let go of. It wasn't that I saw something new—or saw suddenly into him, not that, not ever but that the room itself, whatever room we might be standing in, assumed an astonishing clarity: and the things in the room: a table, a cup, a meowing cat.

Marie Howe, "The Teacher," from Magdalene: Poems

Teacher, they said to Jesus, The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say? —John 8:5 You know how it is when your speeding car spins on the ice at night and you think here it is? When the deer spring across the headlights? When you begin to slip down the steep and icy steps? Now imagine someone is about to push you, someone you know and then they don’t.

Marie Howe, "Magdalene: The Woman Taken in Adultery," from Magdalene: Poems

When I walked across a room I saw myself walking as if I were someone else, when I picked up a fork, when I pulled off a dress, as if I were in a movie.                                     It's what I thought you saw when you looked at me. So when I looked at you, I didn’t see you I saw the me I thought you saw, as if I were someone else. I called that outside—watching. Well I didn’t call it anything when it happened all the time. But one morning after I stopped the pills—standing in the kitchen for one second I was inside looking out. Then I popped back outside. And saw myself looking. Would it happen again? It did, a few days later. My friend Wendy was pulling on her winter coat, standing by the kitchen door and suddenly I was inside and I saw her. I looked out from my own eyes and I saw: her eyes: blue gray    transparent and inside them: Wendy herself! Then I was outside again, and Wendy was saying, Bye-bye, see you soon, as if Nothing Had Happened. She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t known that I’d Been There for Maybe 40 Seconds, and that then I was Gone. She hadn’t noticed that I Hadn’t Been There for Months, years, the entire time she’d known me. I needn’t have been embarrassed to have been there for those seconds; she had not Noticed The Difference. This happened on and off for weeks, and then I was looking at my old friend John: : suddenly I was in: and I saw him, and he: (and this was almost unbearable) he saw me see him, and I saw him see me. He said something like, You're going to be ok now, or, It's been difficult hasn't it, but what he said mattered only a little. We met—in our mutual gaze—in between a third place I'd not yet been.

Marie Howe, "The Affliction," from Magdalene: Poems

I care for neither fugues nor feathers. What interests me most is the people Who have always interested me most, To see them without their passions And to understand them. Perhaps, without their passions, they will be Men of memories explaining what they meant. One man opposing a society If properly misunderstood becomes a myth. I fear the understanding. Death ought to spare their passions. Memory without passion would be better lost. But memory and passion, and with these The understanding of heaven, would be bliss, If anything would be bliss. How strange a thing it was to understand And how strange it ought to be again, this time Without the distortions of the theater, Without the revolutions' ruin, In the presence of the barefoot ghosts! Perception as an act of intelligence And perception as an act of grace Are two quite different things, in particular When applied to the mythical. As for myself, I feel a doubt: I am uncertain whether the perception Applied on earth to those that were myths In every various sense, ought not to be preferred To an untried perception applied In heaven. But I have no choice. In this apologetic air, one well Might muff the mighty spirit of Lenin. That sort of thing was always rather stiff. Let's hope for Mademoiselle de Lepinasse, Instead, or Horace Walpole or Mrs. Thrale. He is nothing, I know, to me nor I to him. I had looked forward to understanding. Yet An understanding may be troublesome. I'd rather not. No doubt there's a quarter here, Dixhuitième and Georgian and serene.

Wallace Stevens, "Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven," from Collected Poetry and Prose

— Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses, "Little Crazy Love Song"

Meyer is a bum. He eats his pie. He eats red cherry pie and never says— He makes no choice of words— Cherries are ri . . . He would never say that. He could not. Neither of us could ever say that. But Meyer is a bum. He says "That's what I call red cherry pie." And that's his way. And that's my way as well. We two share that at least. What is it that we share? Red cherry pie When cherries are in season, or, at least The way we speak of it. Meyer has my five senses. I have his. This matters most in things that matter least. And that's red cherry pie.

Wallace Stevens, "What They Call Red Cherry Pie," from Collected Poetry and Prose

The sounds of rain on the roof Are like the sound of doves. It is long since there have been doves On any house of mine. It is better for me In the rushes of autumn wind To embrace autumn, without turning To remember summer. Besides, the world is a tower. Its winds are blue. The rain falls at its base, Summers sink from it. The doves will fly round. When morning comes The high clouds will move, Nobly as autumn moves. The man of autumn, Behind its melancholy mask, Will laugh in the brown grass, Will shout from the tower's rim.

Wallace Stevens, "Secret Man," from Collected Poetry and Prose