Category: Poetry

    It is a wheel, the rays Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths. The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods. To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine And pines that are cornets, so it occurs, And a little island full of geese and stars: It may be […]

From the tawny light from the rainy nights from the imagination finding itself and more than itself alone and more than alone at the bottom of the well where the moon lives, can you pull me into December? The black moon turns away, its work done. A tenderness, unspoken autumn. We are faithful only to […]

    In unexperienced infancy Many a sweet mistake doth lie: Mistake though false, intending true; A seeming somewhat more than view; That doth instruct the mind In things that lie behind, And many secrets to us show Which afterwards we come to know. Thus did I by the water’s brink Another world beneath me […]

        I speak this poem now with grave and level voice In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. I praise the fall: it is the human season. Now No more the foreign sun does […]

    have you not noticed what the world is really like? it is like moonlight shining in dewdrops shaken, flying, from the beak of a crane.

    THE TREES are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well […]

An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness […]

    salt rose, topaz, archery, carnations, the birth of fire. You are none of these. You are the holy secret darkness, that space between shadow and soul. There, where love is. You are the flower that only blooms within; hidden, but made of light. A tactile fragrance, an enhancement deep within the earth, my […]

  It feels that our love is more like a shoestring although it appears to be such a good thing, and all that we have now which is readily seen may either be too loose or tight for us between. If we continue on the path that we are both going and it still seems […]

  A nothing day full of wild beauty and the timer pings. Roll up the silver off the bay take down the clouds sort the spruce and send to laundry marked, more starch. Goodbye golden- and silver- rod, asters, bayberry crisp in elegance. Little fish stream by, a river in water.   James Schuyler, Closed […]

 Daughter of Jove, relentless power,  Thou tamer of the human breast,  Whose iron scourge and torturing hour,  The bad affright, afflict the best!  Bound in thy adamantine chain The proud are taught to taste of pain,  And purple tyrants vainly groan With pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone.    When first thy Sire to send […]

    Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know. If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you […]

  Expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise. become a stranger To need of pity Or, if compassion be freely Given out Take only enough Stop short of urge to plead Then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger Than your own small heart Or greater than a star; Tame wild disappointment With caress unmoved […]

A slash of Blue— A sweep of Gray— Some scarlet patches on the way, Compose an Evening Sky— A little purple—slipped between— Some Ruby Trousers hurried on— A Wave of Gold— A Bank of Day— This just makes out the Morning Sky. Emily Dickinson

    Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.   Andrew Marvell

  When I found the door I found the vine leaves speaking among themselves in abundant whispers. My presence made them hush their green breath, embarrassed, the way humans stand up, buttoning their jackets, acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if the conversation had ended just before you arrived. I liked the glimpse […]

  Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite Of our old paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light; Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought That on the lonely height where all are in God’s eye, […]

    And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, […]

    The west was getting out of gold, The breath of air had died of cold, When shoeing home across the white, I thought I saw a bird alight. In summer when I passed the place I had to stop and lift my face; A bird with an angelic gift Was singing in it […]

The métier of blossoming   If humans could be that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried, swift from sheer unswerving impetus! If we could blossom out of ourselves, giving nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!   From Denise Levertov, The métier of blossoming