He couldn't remember what propelled him 
out of the bedroom window onto the fire escape 
of his fifth-floor walkup on the river, 

so that he could see, as if for the first time, 
sunset settling down on the dazed cityscape 
and tugboats pulling barges up the river. 

There were barred windows glaring at him 
from the other side of the street 
while the sun deepened into a smoky flare 

that scalded the clouds gold-vermillion. 
It was just an ordinary autumn twilight -- 
the kind he had witnessed often before -- 

but then the day brightened almost unaturally 
into a rustling, burnished, purplish-red haze 
and everything burst into flame; 

the factories pouring smoke into the sky, 
the trees and shrubs, the shadows, 
of pedestrians scorched and rushing home.... 

There were storefronts going blind and cars 
burning on the parkway and steel girders 
collapsing into the polluted waves. 

Even the latticed fretwork of stairs 
where he was standing, even the first stars 
climbing out of their sunlit graves 

were branded and lifted up, consumed by fire. 
It was like watching the start of Armageddon, 
like seeing his mother dipped in flame.... 

And then he closed his eyes and it was over. 
Just like that. When he opened them again 
the world had reassembled beyond harm. 

So where had he crossed to? Nowhere. 
And what had he seen? Nothing. No foghorns 
called out to each other, as if in a dream, 

and no moon rose over the dark river 
like a warning -- icy, long forgotten -- 
while he turned back to an empty room. 

- Edward Hirsch

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I. 

And the morning green, and the build-up of weather, and my brows 
Have not been brushed, and never will be, by the breezes of divinity. 
That much is clear, at least to me, but yesterday I noticed 
Something floating in and out of clouds, something like a bird, 
But also like a man, black-suited, with his arms outspread. 
And I thought this could be a sign that I've been wrong. Then I woke, 
And on my bed the shadow of the future fell, and on the liquid ruins 
Of the sea outside. and on the shells of buildings at the water's edge. 
A rapid overcast blew in, bending trees and lattening fields. I stayed in bed,

Hoping it would pass. What might have been still wited for its chance. 

II.

Whatever the starcharts told us to watch for or the maps 
Said we would find, nothing prepared us for what we discovered. 
We toiled in the shadowless depths of noon, 
While an alien wind slept in the branches, and dead leaves 
Turned to dust in the streets. Cities of light, long summers 
Of leisure were not to be ours; for to come as we had, long after 
It mattered, to live among the tombs, as great as they are, 
Was to be no nearer the end, no farther from where we began. 

III. 

These nights of pinks and purples vanishing, of freakish heat 
Stroking our skin until we fall asleep and stray to places 
We hoped would always be beyond our reach -- the deeps 
Where nothing flourishes, where everything that happens seems 
To be for keeps. We sweat, and plead to be released 
Into the coming day on time, and panic at the thought 
Of never getting there and being forced to drift forgotten 
On a midnight sea where every thousand years a ship is sighted, or a swan, 
Or a drowned swimmer whose imagination has outlived his fate, and who swims 
To prove, to no one in particular, how false his life had been. 

- May Swenson

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At this time of day
One could hear the caulking irons sound
Against the hulls in the dockyard.
Tar smoke rose between trees
And large oily patches floated on the water,
Undulating unevenly
In the purple sunlight
Like the surfaces of Florentine bronze.

At this time of day
Sounds carried clearly
Through hot silences of fading daylight.
The weedy fields lay drowned
In odors of creosote and salt.
Richer than double-colored taffeta,
Oil floated in the harbor,
Amoeboid, iridescent, limp.
It called to mind the slender limbs
Of Donatello's David.

It was lovely and she was in love.
They had taken a covered boat to one of the islands.
The city sounds were faint in the distance:
Rattling of carriages, tumult of voices,
Yelping of dogs on the decks of barges.

At this time of day
Sunlight empurpled the world.
The poplars darkened in ranks
Like imperial servants.
Water lapped and lisped
In its native and quiet tongue.
Oakum was in the air and the scent of grasses.
There would be fried smelts and cherries and cream.
Nothing designed by Italian artisans
Would match the evening's perfection.
The puddled oil was a miracle of colors.

- Anthony Hecht
from The Darkness and the Light (Knopf, 2001)

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South into Jersey on I-95 rain and
windshield wipers and someone you love asleep
in the seat beside you, light on all sides
like teeth winking and that smell like baking
bread gone wrong and you want
to die it's so beautiful -- 
you love the enormous trucks floating in spray
and the tall smokestacks rimmed with flame
and this hammering in your head
this magnet drawing what's deepest
in you you can't name
except you know it's there.

- Joyce Carol Oates

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The shape of any thing
is the shape a line makes 
around it.

So whatever my body can recall
of another's hands -- 
hard, spent upon it.

So whatever fossil
-- a feather, a fern --
slate surrounds. 

If there can be one, the shape
of any line
is its direction.

Shape, direction: the crosstrees.
That point where the two
cross has been narrative,

history -- our story.
When did I choose
The Flesh, wanting? 

- Carl Phillips
from Pastoral (Graywolf, 2000)

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Harder to breathe
near the summit, and harder

to remember
where you came from,

why you came

Winter's
harder, and harder to say
the word "I"
with a straight face,
and sleep--

who can sleep. Who has time

to prepare for the big day
when he will be required
to say goodbye to everyone, including
the aforementioned pronoun, relinquish
all earthly attachment
completely, and witness
the end of the world --

harder in other words
not to love it

not to love it so much

- Franz Wright
from Ill Lit (Oberlin College Press, 1998)

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I'm nothing
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world. 

Windows of my room,
The room of one of the world's millions nobody knows
(And if they knew me, what would they know?).
You open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people,
A street inaccessible to any and every thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain,
With the mystery of things beneath the stones and beings,
With death making the walls damp and the hair of men white,
With Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.

Today I'm defeated, as if I'd learned the truth.
Today I'm lucid, as if I were about to die
And had no greater kinship with things
Than to say farewell, this building and this side of the street becoming
A row of train cars, with the whistle for departure
Blowing in my head
And my nerves jolting and bones creaking as we pull out.

Today I'm bewildered, like a man who wondered and discovered and forgot.
Today I'm torn between the loyalty I owe
To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street
And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything's a dream. 

- Fernando Pessoa
from Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998)

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The weird containing stillness of the neighborhood
just before the school bus brings the neighborhood kids
home in the middle of the cold afternoon: a moment
of pure waiting, anticipation, before the outbreak of anything,
when everything seems just, seems justified, just hanging
in the wings, about to happen, and in your mind you see
the flashing lights flare amber to scarlet, and your daughter
in her blue jacket and white-fringed sapphire hat
step gingerly down and out into our world again
and hurry through silence and snow-grass
as the bus door sighs shut
and her own front door flies open and she finds you
behind it, father-in-waiting, the stillness in bits
and the common world restored as you bend
to touch her; take her hat and coat from the floor
where she's dropped them, hear the live voice of her
filling every crack.  In the pause
before all this happens, you know something
about the shape of the life you've chosen to live
between the silence of almost infinite possibility and that
explosion of things as they are -- those vast unanswerable
intrusions of love and disaster, of just the casual scatter
of your child's winter clothes on the hall floor.

- Eamon Grennan
from So It Goes (Graywolf Press, 1995)

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Listen to that drumming, so light it skims along the surface
like the birds at dusk dipping down to the water,
or a nonsense rhyme going on below the song.

He sipped.

                          Then the evening was over, even though
it was soft and if we were to go on we would reach the sea.

I wore red beneath my shirt.

What was to come?

There was a plank between my shoulder blades
leaning against the wall inside of me, waiting to be
put to use by the workmen
who come at six and work until three.

Sleep while you can for tomorrow it will be morning.

- Saskia Hamilton
from As For Dream (Graywolf Press, 2000)

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Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water,
A wild sky full of stars at rising
And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise,
Gulls following a motorboat against the wind,
Trees with branches rooted in air --
Sitting in the sun at noon with the furiously
Smoking shadow of the shack chimney --
Eagles drive downwind in one,
Terns blow backward,
A new kind of tobacco at eleven,
And my love returning on the four o'clock bus
--My God, why have you given this to us?

- Malcolm Lowry
from Selected Poems (City Lights, 1962)

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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 lover 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.

- Pablo Neruda
(translated by W.S. Merwin)
from Twenty Love Poems and a Song Of Despair (Penguin, 1993)

read this poem in the original spanish

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So long as terror does not knock me down,
I am all light. And all created things become
so strangely joined to me, my senses start
to grasp the world's occult relationships.

And yet I fear. I fear the war of accidents,
the man I liberate in me and in
the forms in me imprisoned. Too sweet
my days on earth would be, were this not so.

Concerned by turns with superhuman loves
and destiny, I hold most every life in me.
Such has been my gift and castigation.

My wish is not that I were never born,
nor dead before my time, but that I had already
done the work that is my fate: to have lived.

- Umberto Saba
(translated by Stephen Sartarelli)
from Songbook: Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 1998)

read this poem in the original italian

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