Open with a long shot.  Chimneys and spires
Of the old town, rouged in the copper glow
Of sunset.  Intense, arterial red
Dyeing the trees as the day slowly expires,
Staining the churches, pathways, fence-posts, spread
From roof to roof, while rising from below,
Cool tides of shadow lap the countryside,
Engulf the cemetery headstones, shroud
Arbor, toolshed, curbstone and portico.
Now from behind a lazily drifting cloud
A full, Pierrot-white moon; its bleaching light
Drains the lifeblood of everything in sight.
Zoom down to a derelict alley, a scrawny cat
a male, black-skinned, mature, immobile hand,
Its parent limb, head, body all concealed
By liquor cartons, broken Venetian blinds,
Worn tires, an unraveled welcome mat.
The creature paws at a finger, which remains
Inert, sniffs once again, looks up and walks
calmly across the hand into the dark.
Credits.  The title, the studio, the stars
Flash on, then fade.  Henry Mancini noise.
And then my name glows on the darkened screen.
It lingers there a wile, etching the mind
Of every member of the audience.
As well it should.  This film required of me
Immense executive abilities --
All those subordinates to keep in line,
trained to alert me with their signal cries:
"Ready when you are, C.B."  That's what I like,
That fine docility.  As for the cast,
If the truth be known, actors are idiots.
Theirs is the glamour, of course.  Their gorgeous looks
Along with large, unmerited salaries,
Must compensate them for their tiny minds.
But in the end, after repeated takes,
The prints, the cutting-room floor, I am the one
Who sees that everything falls into place,
The master plan.  This film has a large cast,
A huge cast; countless, you might almost say;
And for them all, for every one of them,
I have designed, with supreme artfulness,
What could be called an inevitable plot.

- Anthony Hecht
from Flight Among the Tombs (Knopf, 1996)
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I propose to put things differently,
but then I forget to & get lost watching fall decorate the peach trees
& barely know myself.  Light fades among the mown yellow grasses.
In Maine the ocean wears a black tuxedo.
Sunlight comes to mind, a return to quiet afternoons, someone
lazing in tall grass.  I keep bringing the old love back to mind.
She's gone away for good, but I can't get over it.
I record my voice saying her name, then mimic her
saying I love you.  It gets no better,
trails away
into undistinguished pleading and lies.  The day
strains against itself, gives up, slides into twilight & soft ex-summer airs.
I'm not trying to tell a story.
I watch my best friend paint, watch him lean into the small square
he's set against an easel dabbing yellow into the field.
More often than not the old men don't pass the old ways on.
The young men walk down the road singing stupid songs
& making promises they'll never keep, & this is familiar.
Love watches itself go to pieces in someone's backyard,
& later we admit we have no explanation for how things turned out.
My friend, with a brush tipped lightly against the canvas,
holds down a world -- as dark comes -- half-done world, already passed.

- Charlie Smith
from Heroin: And Other Poems (Norton, 2000)

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It was the beginning of a chair;
It was the gray couch; it was the walls,
The garden, the gravel road, it was the way
The ruined moonlight fell across her hair.
It was that, and it was more.  It was the wind that tore
At the trees; it was the fuss and clutter of clouds, the shore
Littered with stars.  It was the hour which seemed to say
That if you knew what time it really was, you would not
Ask for anything again.  It was that.  It was certainly that.
It was also what never happened -- a moment so full
That when it went, as it had to, no grief was large enough
To contain it.  It was the room that appeared unchanged
After so many years.  It was that.  It was the hat
She'd forgotten to take, the pen she left on the table.
It was the sun on my hand.  It was the sun's heat.  It was the way
I sat, the way I waited for hours, for days.   It was that.  Just that.

- Mark Strand
from Blizzard of One (Knopf, 2000)

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It was a night like this, at the end of summer.

We had rented, I remember, a room with a balcony.
How many days and nights? Five, perhaps -- no more.

Even when we weren't touching we were making love.
We stood on our little balcony in the summer night.
And off somewhere, the sounds of human life.

We were the soon to be anointed monarchs,
well disposed to our subjects. Just beneath us,
sounds of a radio playing, an aria we didn't in those years know.

Someone dying of love. Someone from whom time had taken
the only happiness, who was alone now,
impoverished, without beauty.

The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,
the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figures --
they drifted out over the dark water
like an ecstasy.

Such a small mistake. And many years later,
the only think left of that night, of the hours in that room.

- Louise Gluck

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Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best --
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso --

maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmfull of vitamins --
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows --
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

- Billy Collins
from Picnic, Lighting (Pittsburgh, 1998)

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House

The way you'd renovate a ruined house, keeping the "shell," as we call it, brick, frame or stone,
and razing the rest: the inside walls, -- partitions, we say -- then stairs, pipes, wiring, commodes
saving only . . . no, save nothing this time; take the self-shell down to its emptiness, hollowness, void.

Down to the scabrous plaster, down to the lining bricks with mortar squashed through their joints,
down to the eyeless windows, the forlorn doorless doorways, the sprung joists powdery with rot;
down to the slab of the cellar, the erratically stuccoed foundation, the black earth underneath all.

Down under all to the ancient errors, indolence, envy, pretension, the frailties as though in the gene:
down to where consciousness cries, "Make me new" but pleads as pitiably, "Cherish me as I was."
Down to the swipe of the sledge, the ravaging bite of the pick; rubble, wreckage, vanity: the abyss.

- C.K Williams
from Repair (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999)

Once in a small rented room, awaiting
a night call from a distant time zone,
I understood you could feel so futureless
you'd want to get a mermaid

tattooed on your biceps.  Company
forever.  Flex and she'd dance.
The phone never rang, except for those
phantom rings, which I almost answered.

I was in D.C., on leave from the Army.
It was a woman, of course, who didn't call.
Or as we said back then, a girl.
It's anybody's story.

But I think for me it was the beginning
of empathy, not a large empathy
like the deeply selfless might have,
more like a leaning, like being able

to imagine a life for a spider, a maker's
live, or just some aliveness
in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets
so you take it outside in two paper cups

instead of stepping on it.
The next day she called, and it was final.
I remember going to the zoo
and staring a long time

at the hippopotamus, its enormous weight
and mass, its strange appearance
of tranquility.
And then the sleek, indignant cats.

Then I went back to Fort Jackson.
I had a calendar taped inside my locker,
and I'd circle days for which I
had no plans, not even hopes --

big circles, so someone might ask.
It was between wars.  Only the sergeants
and a few rawboned farm boys
took learning how to kill seriously.

We had to traverse the horizontal ladder,
rung after rung, to pass
into the mess hall.  Always the weak-handed,
the weak-armed, couldn't make it.

I looked for those who didn't laugh
at those of us who fell.
In the barracks, after drills,
the quiet fellowship of the fallen.

- Stephen Dunn
from Different Hours: Poems (Norton, 2000)  

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It is hard to want a thing you know will hurt another,
yet the heart persists, doesn't it, with its dark urges, liquid wish?

A sea town.  Gull, those malefica, uselessly scissor
thin-boned bodies against a beach washed of its will,

where a season long ago women lay, dogs and children fastened
to the long arms of their concern, the men vacant and glittery

with spandex and oil.  It is November, and already books thicken
at my bedside, a crush of paper characters awaiting the eye's

hurried pass, their unread stories attendant through the night,
until its bandage lifts to a morning blush, and I am held

within the parenthesis of a spare white house, a little thinner,
empty hands chilled like the faithful, offering myself to discipline's

cool machinery.  I will stand on the pier, gesturing and cold.
I will open my mouth to your opening mouth.

- Mark Wunderlich
from The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)

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I am rich I am poor.  Time is all I own.
I spend or hoard it for experience.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.

Thrift is a venomous error, then, a stone
named bread or cash to support the pretense
that I'm rich.  I am poor; time is all I own . . .

though I hold to memory: how spent time shone
as you approached, and the light looked immense.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known,

though scars fade.  I have memory on loan
while it evaporates; though it be dense
& I am rich, I am poor.  Time is all I own

to sustain me -- the moonlit skeleton
that holds my whole life in moving suspense.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.

Ownership's brief, random, a suite of events.
If the past is long the future's short.  Since
I am rich I am poor.  Time is all I own.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.

- Marie Ponsot
from The Bird Catcher (Knoff, 1998)

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It's the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees who take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
press their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things -- this fact of glass -- and can only go on
making the one sound that tethers their pure
electric fury to what's impossible, will not change.

- Eamon Grennan
from Relations: New And Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998)

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Years ago,
in the bottle-green light
of the cold January sea,

two seals
suddenly appeared together
in a single uplifting wave --

each in exactly the same position --
each, like a large, black comma,
upright and staring;

it was like a painting
done twice
and, twice, tenderly.

The wave hung, then it broke apart;
its lip was lightning;
its floor was the blow of sand

over which the seals rose and twirled and were gone.
Of all the reasons for gladness,
what could be foremost of this one,

that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!
Now the seals are no more than the salt of the sea.
If they live, they're more distant than Greenland.

But here's the kingdom we call remembrance
with its thousand iron doors
through which I pass so easily,

switching on the old lights as I go --
while the dead wind rises and the old rapture rewinds,
the stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow.

- Mary Oliver

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A storm front wanders down from the mountains, gray and white
  as Rip van Winkle, and as dazed, unable
to decide between rain and snow, and whose city this is, and what does
  YEAR NOW mean spray-painted on the walls.

If it rains, you'll watch the windshield wipers trudging right to left,
  a chained elephant lifting first one leg, then another,
and think of the days left till the weekend, and the weeks till a short
  vacation, and the year slipping away,

and being young blame only the sameness of things, how it would all be
  different, somewhere with somebody else,
the rain erasing their passage even before the wiper blades can complete
  a turn, the ads all saying, buy now, pay later.

Or the snow swirls between the buildings, solemn and frenzied as a ghost
  dance, and you look up at the rooftops vanishing,
to the commuters stamping their feet, their coats bunched at the collar,
  almost invisible, and the exhaust from cars,

and imagine it would be different some other time or place, the snow so
  thick it could almost be happening,
the other riders wrapped in themselves like explorers lost in a blizzard.
  Then they're gone, too, and you could be anything.

-Alpay Ulku
from meteorology (Consortium, 1999)

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