My father said I could not do it, 
but all night I picked the peaches. 
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily. 
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden. 
How many ladders to gather an orchard? 
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands 
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me 
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice 
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering 
and those who had gathered before me. 
I put the peaches in the pond's cold water, 
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands 
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors, 
all night my back a straight road to the sky. 
And then out of its own goodness, out 
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came, 
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses 
just after it has been rung, before the metal 
begins to long again for the clapper's stroke. 
The light came over the orchard. 
The canals were silver and then were not. 
and the pond was--I could see as I laid 
the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes.

- Brigit Pegeen Kelly
from To The Place Of Trumpets (Yale University Press, 1988)
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A story: There was a cow in the road, struck by a semi--
half-moon of carcass and jutting legs, eyes
already milky with dust and snow, rolled upward

as if tired of this world tilted on its side.
We drove through the pink light of the police cruiser,
her broken flank blowing steam in the air. 

Minutes later, a deer sprang onto the road
and we hit her, crushed her pelvis--the drama reversed,
first consequence, then action--but the doe,

not dead, pulled herself with front legs
into the ditch. My father went to her, stunned her
with a tire iron before cutting her throat, and today I think

of the body of St. Francis in the Arizona desert,
carved from wood and laid in his casket,
lovingly dressed in red and white satin

covered in petitions--medals, locks of hair,
photos of infants, his head lifted and stroked,
the grain of his brow kissed by the penitent.

O wooden saint, dry body. I will not be like you,
carapace. A chalky shell scooped of its life. 
I will leave less than this behind me.

 - Mark Wunderlich
from The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts, 1999)
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The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance --
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers? 

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

if only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
or acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

- Billy Collins
from Sailing Alone Around The Room (Random House, 2001)
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             I was a dog in my former life, a very good
dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.
I liked being a dog.  I worked for a poor farmer,
guarding and herding his sheep.  Wolves and coyotes
tried to get past me almost every night, and not
once did I lose a sheep.  The farmer rewarded me
with good food, food from his table.  He may have
been poor, but he ate well.  And his children
played with me, when they weren't in school or
working in the field.  I had all the love any dog
could hope for.  When I got old, they got a new
dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.
He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into
the house to live with the family.  I brought the farmer
his slippers in the morning, as he was getting
old, too.  I was dying slowly, a little bit at a
time.  The farmer knew this and would bring the
new dog in to visit me from time to time. The
new dog would entertain me with his flips and
flops and nuzzles.  And then one morning I just
didn't get up.  They gave me a fine burial down
by the stream under a shade tree.  That was the
end of my being a dog.  Sometimes I miss it so
I sit by the window and cry.  I live in a high-rise
that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises.
At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak
to anyone all day.  This is my reward for being
a good dog.  The human wolves don't even see me.
They fear me not.

- James Tate
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I can see them everywhere,
smiling at me on trains and sidewalks,
and they are still beautiful. Here
is the one with the body better than yours,
and there, there is the one
who can quote Holderlin in French
while doing push-ups. Here
is the one whose breasts will never sag,
and there is the one who would never draw
attention to my own emptiness, God bless
her blindness.  But I have known
the sadness of comparisons, that death
is not defeated by a loud grunt
delivered to a stranger at midnight.
So I pass with the ease of a man
come happily into his second poverty,
the cold wisdom of the oft-defeated.

O love, we are surrounded by those
we'd be happier with, in another life.
But let's stay together anyway, just
for the fun of it.  Let's wake
to the same face so often
we fatigue of our own singleness
and cry out :You!  Let's sleep
until we've lisped each other's name so deep
into the low moans of habit and dreaminess
that not even the forethought of our aftermath
can tear us apart. Let's die
in the same bed nightly, over and over
until we die for real.

- Michael Blumenthal
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How they're all around us, these gentlemen
in chamberlain's costumes and jabots
like a night growing ever darker 
around its Order Star, relentlessly,
and these ladies, slight, fragile, yet large
in their dresses, one hand in their laps, 
small as the collar for a Pekingese:
how they are all around us all: around the reader, 
around the peruser of these bibelots, 
of which several are still their property. 

Tactful, they let us live life undisturbed
as we conceive it and as they fail
to understand it.  They wanted to flower,
and flowering is being beautiful. But we want to ripen,
and that means being dark and taking pains.

- Ranier Maria Rilke
from Ranier Maria Rilke: New Poems (trans. Edward Snow) (North Point Press, 2001)

read this poem in the original german
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Nature's first Green is gold.
Her hardest hew to hold.
Her early leaf 's a flower.
But only so an hour.

As leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief.
As dawn gives on to day,
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost
from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt, 1979)
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There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams 
hurry too rapidly down to the sea, 
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops 
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, 
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. 
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, 
aren't waterfalls yet, 
in a quick age or so, as ages go here, 
they probably will be. 
But if the streams and clouds keep traveling, traveling, 
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, 
slime-hung and barnacled. 

Think of the long trip home. 
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? 
Where should we be today? 
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play 
in this strangest of theatres? 
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life 
in our bodies, we are determined to rush 
to see the sun the other way around? 
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? 
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, 
inexplicable and impenetrable, 
at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? 
Oh, must we dream our dreams 
and have them, too? 
And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? 

- Elizabeth Bishop
from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (Noonday, 1984)
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Alive and violated 
They lay on their beds of ice. 
Bivalves: the split bulb 
and philandering sigh of ocean. 
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered. 

We had driven to that coast 
Through flowers and limestone 
And there we were, toasting friendship, 
Laying down the perfect memory 
In the cool of thatch and crockery. 

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, 
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: 
I saw damp panniers disgorge 
The frond-lipped, brine stung 
Glut of privilege. 

And was angry that my trust could not repose 
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom 
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day 
Deliberately, that its tang 
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb. 

- Seamus Heaney 
from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996  (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999)
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What it must be like to be an angel 
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner. 

The last time we go to be good, 
they are there, lying about darkness. 

They dandle us once too often, 
these friends who become our enemies. 

Suddenly one day, their juniors 
are as old as we yearn to be. 

They get wrinkles where it is better 
smooth, odd coughs, and smells. 

It is grotesque how they go on 
loving us, we go on loving them 

The effrontery, barely imaginable, 
of having caused us. And of how. 

Their lives: surely 
we can do better than that. 

This goes on for a long time. Everything 
they do is wrong, and the worst thing, 

they all do it, is to die, 
taking with them the last explanation, 

how we came out of the wet sea 
or wherever they got us from, 

taking the last link 
of that chain with them. 

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling, 
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren. 

- William Meredith 
from The Cheer (Knopf, 1980) 
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Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

- Philip Larkin
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Somewhere 
without me 
my life begins 

He who lives it 
counts on a cold rosary 
God's ninety-nine Names in Arabic 

The unknown hundredth he finds in glaciers 
then descends into wet saffron fields 
where I wait to hold him 

but wrapped in ice 
he by-passes me 
in his phantom cart 

He lets go of the hundredth Name 
which rises in calligraphy from his palm 
Fog washes the sudden skeletons of maples 

Farther into the year by a broken fireplace 
I clutch the shiver of a last flame 
and forget every Name of God 

And there in the mountains 
the Koran frozen to his fingertips 
he waits 

farther much farther into the year 
he waits for news of my death

- Agha Shahid Ali 

~ in memoriam, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001 ~
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