Sage Said So

To Hold

By Li-Young Lee

So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky,
she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

The Rider

By Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

PLUTO'S LOSS*

on hearing of efforts to declassify Pluto as a planet

By Paul Guest

Little star, how lost to us you are already
and more to become, so small

that we here, distant and large and not ice
only, would demote you

to bobbin status, unplanet, chink of light
in a sky of major and minor

fire. For all your long orbit, who here cares:
some nights I try my heart at it

but little happens. The trees hoard a music
in them that must be locusts

aching to mate, to make more,
even to die. Clouds scuff the scarred moon

until it’s easy to forget you —
to think of water clotted

with green, where once I read Neruda
and Ovid distracted not by light

skipping off the scalloped lake
but by the memory of lace and sheer and bra —

by whom I loved. In that moment,
and in this one, I could not be

more human, to the dead sky
making apologies heard by no one, by nothing.

* Thank you, Mari, for introducing me to this poem!

Snow, Aldo

By Kate DiCamillo

Once, I was in New York,
in Central Park, and I saw
an old man in a black overcoat walking
a black dog. This was springtime
and the trees were still
bare and the sky was
gray and low and it began, suddenly,
to snow:
big fat flakes
that twirled and landed on the
black of the man's overcoat and
the black dog's fur. The dog
lifted his face and stared
up at the sky. The man looked
up, too. "Snow, Aldo," he said to the dog,
"snow." And he laughed.
The dog looked
at him and wagged his tail.

If I was in charge of making
snow globes, this is what I would put inside:
the old man in the black overcoat,
the black dog,
two friends with their faces turned up to the sky
as if they were receiving a blessing,
as if they were being blessed together
by something
as simple as snow
in March.

Good People

By W. S. Merwin from The Pupil © Knopf.

From the kindness of my parents
I suppose it was that I held
that belief about suffering

imagining that if only
it could come to the attention
of any person with normal
feelings certainly anyone
literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend
pain when it went on before them
and would do something about it
whenever they saw it happen
in the time of pain the present
they would try to stop the bleeding
for example with their hands

but it escapes their attention
or there may be reasons for it
the victims under the blankets
the meat counters the maimed children
the animals the animals
staring from the end of the world

it is the world over my shoulder

By tom blood, from the sky position, winner of the 2007 Oregon Book Award

under cover of absences
inside a shell of doves

the moon seems sided with the others
a lion's edge the body of ash draped over
it is without us, where some of my song is
is not our music, it's the moon's kicked can
passing the whittlers and some don't know em's

I have discovered poles in the sidewalk holding up cables
yet at times my own presence escapes
and the cloud drills me to understand my own lack of intent
inchworm heart, I don't heap off
I don't step off a raft under a glass elephant sky
the chalk winds trace my outside corpse to a prism restrained
now we end the world and its blessed mangoes
then that and all the other mood poop tied to a pole
bay moon by whom, now to the best of our knowing
as we are all so obviously gone too far as to cry
in the unders morose
the dark cuddles me, minor elk are my emissary to belief
of the stuttering calliope moon, the brooks and streams
as the last thing re-emptying
hats passed off over tables
falcons burnt in offering to ravens
what is there without anyone
that storm dies from its own trouble

Of Paradox

By Bryan Cohen

She said she didn't want me
And I, not even breathing air
Asked why.
Because I love you
She replied.
Of paradoxes are made the womb
And the Edens and the hells.
And seeking the answer to a lifetime
Of rejection
I asked
How can you say you don't want me
If you love me?
And the angels laughed out loud
And God was the Mona Lisa
And She said
Because you asked me to.

The Secret of Poetry

By Jon Anderson, in memoriam

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my life I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife's cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I'd like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

Goodbye, Jane Cooper 1924-2007

The Blue Anchor
by Jane Cooper

The future weighs down on me
just like a wall of light!

All these years
I've lived by necessity.
Now the world shines
like an empty room
clean all the way to the rafters.

The room might be waiting for its first tenants--
a bed, a chair, my old typewriter.

Or it might be Van Gogh's room
at Arles:
so neat, while his eyes grazed among phosphorus.
A blue anchor.

To live in the future
like a survivor!
Not the first step up the beach
but the second
then the third

--never forgetting
the wingprint of the mountain
over the fragile human settlement--

Losing a Language

By W.S. Merwin, from The Rain in the Trees. © Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw