The Farmer's Bride

by Charlotte Mew

Three Summers since I chose a maid, Too young maybe -- but more's to do At harvest-time than bide and woo. When us was wed she turned afraid Of love and me and all things human; Like the shut of a winter's day Her smile went out, and 'twasn't a woman -- More like a little frightened fay. One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

'Out 'mong the sheep, her be,' they said, Should properly have been abed; But sure enough she wasn't there Lying awake with her wide brown stare. So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down We chased her, flying like a hare Before our lanterns. To Church-Town All in a shiver and a scare We caught her, fetched her home at last And turned the key upon her, fast.

She does the work about the house As well as most, but like the mouse: Happy enough to chat and play With birds and rabbits as such as they, So long as men-folk keep away. 'Not near, not near!' her eyes beseech When one of us comes within reach. The women say that beasts in stall Look round like children at her call I've hardly heard her speak at all

Shy as a leveret, swift as he, Straight and slight as a young larch tree, Sweet as the first wild violets, she, To her wild self. But what to me?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown, The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky, One leaf in the still air falls slowly down, A magpie's spotted feathers lie On the black earth spread white with rime, The berries redden up to Christmas-time. What's Christmas-time without there be Some other in the house than we!

She sleeps up in the attic there Alone, poor maid. 'Tis but a stair Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down, The soft young down of her; the brown, The brown of her -- her eyes, her hair, her hair!

Tonight I Can Write

by Pablo Neruda tr. W.S. Merwin

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer. My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses. Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

Hitch Hiker at a Truck Stop

by Mary Crow

The hitch hiker asks to look at the palms of my cold hands and thanks me for unfolding them on the frost-edged picnic table between us. While I look at his downcast eyes trying to see if he sees, nearby truckers stare at his narrow face, long blond hair. He asks me if I garden, rips a scrap of newspaper and folds it up into a tiny origami package for anise seed. Here, he says, seed I gathered in Oregon, plant it in Colorado. I always have a garden, he adds, I plant and leave to others. He tells me he has no sex; when you ride in the righthand seat, you have to nod your head without listening. Face pressed to the window, he can see the lacquered edges of the earth. So I imagine him practicing calligraphy on truck windows, recommending honey and vinegar in a glass of water every morning. Mad, mad, mad. A yellow warbler, the moon at the bottom of the stream. Out on the highway he is raising his thumb again.

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

by Joy Harjo

And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking. It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing. The door to the mind should only open from the heart. An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

I Have Started to Say

by Philip Larkin

I have started to say "A quarter of a century" Or "thirty years back" About my own life.

It makes me breathless It's like falling and recovering In huge gesturing loops Through an empty sky.

All that's left to happen Is some deaths (my own included). Their order, and their manner, Remain to be learnt.

"Fall, leaves, fall..."

by Emily Brontë

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.

I Know

by Joseph Payne Brennan

It is always snowing in my deepest being, a snow of sleep, a snow unending.

When I see the blur of snow falling over distant pines, I feel a subtle peace, a reassurance.

When I watch it blowing over the stubble, over the stalks, a kind of serenity fills me.

My friends have warned: the death wish is symbolized by snow. I know. I know.

Stars, Songs, Faces

by Carl Sandburg

Gather the stars if you wish it so Gather the songs and keep them. Gather the faces of women. Gather for keeping years and years. And then… Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye. Let the stars and songs go. Let the faces and years go. Loosen your hands and say good-bye.

Child Burial

by Paula Meehan

I chose your grave clothes with care, your favourite stripey shirt,

your blue cotton trousers. They smelt of woodsmoke, of October,

your own smell there too. I chose a gansy of handspun wool,

warm and fleecy for you. It is so cold down in the dark.

No light can reach you and teach you the paths of wild birds,

the names of the flowers, the fishes, the creatures.

Ignorant you must remain of the sun and its work,

my lamb, my calf, my eaglet, my cub, my kid, my nestling,

my suckling, my colt. I would spin time back, take you again

within my womb, your amniotic lair, and further spin you back

through nine waxing months to the split seeding moment

you chose to be made flesh, word within me.

I’d cancel the love feast the hot night of your making.

I would travel alone to a quiet mossy place,

you would spill from me into the earth drop by bright red drop.

The Portrait

by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time and in a public park, that spring when I was waiting to be born. She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping. When I came down from the attic with the pastel portrait in my hand of a long-lipped stranger with a brave moustache and deep brown level eyes, she ripped it into shreds without a single word and slapped me hard. In my sixty-fourth year I can feel my cheek still burning.

Personal

by Tony Hoagland

Don’t take it personal, they said; but I did, I took it all quite personal —

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields; the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain — And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy, the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father, with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom, with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard; barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else to take it personal too.

Nostos

by Louise Glück

There was an apple tree in the yard — this would have been forty years ago — behind, only meadows. Drifts of crocus in the damp grass. I stood at that window: late April. Spring flowers in the neighbor’s yard. How many times, really, did the tree flower on my birthday, the exact day, not before, not after? Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for relentless earth. What do I know of this place, the role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai, voices rising from the tennis courts — Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. As one expects of a lyric poet. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

After Love

by Maxine Kumin

Afterward, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries

These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Domestic Interior

by Eavan Boland

The woman is as round As the new ring Ambering her finger. The mirror weds her. She has long since been bedded.

There is a glow About it all. A quiet search for attention Like the unexpected shine Of a despised utensil.

The old oils, The varnishes, The cracked light, The worm of permanence -- All of them supplied by Van Eyck

By whose edict she will stay Burnished, fertile, On her wedding day, Interred in her joy. Love, turn:

The convex of your eye That is so loving, bright And constant yet shows Only this woman in her varnishes Who won't improve in the light.

But there's a way of life That is its own witness: Put the kettle on, shut the blind. Home is a sleeping child, An open mind

And our effects, Shrugged and settled In the sort of light Jugs and kettles Grow important by.

Offering

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I made a poem going to sleep last night, woke in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.

If it was any good, gods of the great darkness where sleep goes and farther death goes, you not named, then as true offering accept it.

Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; -- on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

How to Survive

by Joseph Fasano

Love the small things of the earth. The dust. The dark rain in the lemon trees. The sound of moonflowers opening at evening. Love them even when the sky is burning, even when a mother crouches with her child in a dark room, wetting his lips with a small glass of water. Love them quietly, quietly but ferociously, their hearts in them like flocks the wind has furled.

And then, in the spring, if the world has survived, walk out with your gift that you have practiced, your fresh gift that has ripened in secret; lie down in the long, soft grass of summer and wait for love, wait for it to find you, and when it lays its hand at last upon your shoulder, open to all that is about to happen; rise up and walk off into the lemon trees

and live awhile, live awhile with someone — their eyes, their scent, their curls — and when love departs, when love is done and fallen, stand there in the coming winds of autumn and turn back to the small things that have been with you — buttons, apples, chapters — and then, because you've practiced this forever, because you are ready now for the hardest task of all of them,

lay your hand on the changed face in the mirror and look at it — its wounds, its crimes, its changes — and tell yourself what you see deserves your mercy — that face, that name, that stranger — and place your palms on that one life in the mirror and open to the whole of it, the whole of it, and love it like the last chance of the world.