There is everything in the world still to do.

You spent so many years trying to find
the end of the day, the close of the shop,
when the work goes back in the box.

He calls work the throat. I call work the chest.

But it is lower than that,
the drawer in the belly,
where the remnants are.

And when you open it, what will you find?
That it was neither the throat nor the chest.

It was the ear that led you this far. 

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

It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said, 
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame -- besides I am used to it,
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.

- Robinson Jeffers
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~ October ~

In October the red leaves going brown heap and scatter
over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular driveway,

and rise is a curl of wind disheveled as schoolchildren
at recess, school just starting and summer done, winter's

white quiet beginning in ice on the windshield, in hard frost
that only blue asters survive, and in the long houses that once

more tighten themselves for darkness and hunker down. 

- Donald Hall
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~ September ~

We met at the end of the party
When most of the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
"Have this that's left," you said.
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: "There's autumn too."
Always for you what's finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving
And I not there. 

- Philip Larkin
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~ August ~

There is always something to be made from pain.
In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,

he looked at me as though he couldn't speak, as if
there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn't break.

His silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,

as we do, in time.
And I told him: I'm reading all this Buddhist stuff,

and listen, we don't die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass through. We go on and on

and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we'd pass

across the kitchen table when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,

in crowded room, something important, and can't.

-Marie Howe
from What The Living Do (Norton, 1998)
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~ July ~

There is always something to be made from pain.
You mother knits.
She turns out scarves for Christmas, and they kept you warm,
when she married over and over, taking you
along.  How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widow heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick after another. 

- Louise Gluck
from The First Four Books of Poems (Ecco Press, 1996)
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~ June ~

It started with the cat, a hungry stray.
I fed her, and she made me let her stay.
Soon she was pregnant; and what could I do?
I didn't want a cat and kittens too. 
I put their box outside, just past their blindness
and make a sign: these kittens need your kindness.
I had the females neutered, paying double,
to save the cat and me from further trouble. 

A girl came by and knelt beside the box,
all gray: her jacket, jeans and tennis socks. 
She said, "To be unwanted is so sad. 
I'd take one, but my father would be mad.
I fed a puppy once, outside.
My father came and kicked it till it died.
And then he threatened me because I cried."

The kittens gone, a few days after that,
she came inside to pet the mother cat.
"I think she's lonely." But she said, "Oh, no, 
mothers are glad to see their children go." 
Working all night and sleeping all the day, 
I watched for June and wanted her to stay. 

It looked like rain, one summer afternoon. 
The girl looked sad, "I must be going soon."
She laid her cheek against my jacket sleeve. 
"You are my husband when I make believe."
I would not do this trusting being harm,
but she turned woman in my circling arm.
She'd asked one time if I had wife and kids.
No, at that time my life was on the skids.
She said, "If I were yours, I'd never leave."
I took her in my arms, "You mustn't grieve."
Flooding the darkened, swiftly emptied streets,
the threatening rain came down in heavy sheets.
I gave her only once a tiny pain:
the price of entry to our love's domain.
We were two lonely persons, well aware
that hate and selfishness are everywhere.
I must have known it would be ending soon,
but for us both it meant a honeymoon.
Where is she now, her parents will not say.
For every inch of heaven, hell to pay;
does kindness always end in bars and chains?
In what we did was nothing cruel or dirty.
The social worker said, "The fact remains
that she was under twelve and you were thirty."

- Virginia Hamilton Adair
from Living on Fire (Random House, 2000)
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~ May ~

How mild these young men seem to me now
with their baggy shorts and clouds of musk,
as if younger brothers of the women they escort
in tight black leather, bangs and tattoos,
cute little toughies, so Louise Brooks annealed

in MTV, headed off for huevos rancheros
and the Sunday Times at some chic, crowded dive.
I don't recall it at all this way, do you?
How sweetly complected and confident they look,
their faces unclouded by the rages

and abandoned, tearful couplings of the night before,
the drunkenness, beast savor and remorse.
Or do I recoil from their youthfulness and health?
Oh, not recoil, just fail to see ourselves.
And yet, this tenderness between us that remains

was mortared first with a darkness that got loose, a frenzy,
we still, we still refuse to name.

- August Kleinzahler
from Green Sees Things In Waves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998)
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To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay
from The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library, 2001)
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Nature, by nature, has no answers,
                                                            landscape the same.
Form tends towards its own dissolution.

There is an inaccessibility in the wind,
In the wind that taps the trees
With its white cane,
                                    with its white cane and fingertips;
There is a twice-remove in the light
That falls,
                    that falls like stained glass to the ground:

The world has been translated into a new language
Overnight, a constellation of sighs and plain sense
I understand nothing of,
                                            local objects and false weather

Out of the inborn,
As though I had asked for them, as though I had been there. 

- Charles Wright
from The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 (Noonday, 1990)
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My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. 
Please, don't be angry, happiness, if I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. 
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths. 
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time. 
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
you gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed. 
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs. 
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous. 
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man. 
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

- Wislaw Szymborska
from view with a grain of sand (Harcourt, Brace, 1995)
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I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.

I was in a kind of dream, or trance --
in love, and yet
I wanted nothing.

It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.
I wanted only this:
the room, the hair, the sound of the rain falling,
hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.

I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.
My heart had become very small; it took very little to fill it.
I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city --

You were not concerned.  I did the things
one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,
but I moved like a sleepwalker.

It was enough and it no longer involved you.
A few days in a strange city.
A conversation, the touch of a hand.
And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.

That was what I wanted: to be naked.

- Louise Gluck
from The Seven Ages (Echo Press, 2001)
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