POEM DEPOT: An Anthology of Assorted Poems

 

"The Winter Palace"

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

-- Philip Larkin

 

THE ONLY YAK IN BATESVILLE, VIRGINIA

At first I spent hours gazing at the black and white horse
in the farthest pasture. He was so far away,
so tiny between the fence slats, and even then I knew
all he cared about was his mane and that his tail
was properly braided. He never so much as galloped
in my direction. Even the flies that edged
his beautiful eyes never flew into my wool
or landed on my nose. The love affair

was over before it began. I started to dream
of a dry cistern in the middle of the forest
and dry leaves where the other yaks could play
until leaves stuck out of their hair and they looked

like shrubs. In my dream the lived
in the cistern and each morning looked out
with periscopes before scrambling up the concrete walls
to search in the forest for sprouting trees.

In winter I realized that for the other yaks
it was fall all year round, and that it had to be fall,
because otherwise they couldn't roll in the leaves
to look like shrubs, and there had to be a cistern,
because otherwise they couldn't huddle in the pitch black,
and I knew that I had forgotten
what a yak looks like, though I am a yak,
and I knew then that I had been away for a long time.

-- Oni Buchanan
from the collection What Animal?, published by the University of Georgia Press

 

 

A DRINK OF WATER

She came every morning to draw water
Like an old bat staggering up the field:
The pump's whooping cough, the bucket's clatter
And slow diminuendo as it filled,
Announced her. I recall
Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel
Of the brimming bucket, and the treble
Creak of her voice like the pump's handle.
Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable
It fell back through her window and would lie
Into the water set out on the table.
Where I have dipped to drink again, to be
Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,
Remember the Giver fading off the lip.

-- Seamus Heaney

 

LIGNTENINGS VIII

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

-- Seamus Heaney

 

THE ORANGE

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange --
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave --
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.

-- Wendy Cope

 

SPRING NIGHT

Spring night - one hour worth a thousand gold coins;
clear scent of flowers, shadowy moon.
Songs and flutes upstairs - threads of sound;
in the garden, a swing, where night is deep and still.

-- Su Tung-P'o (1037-1101)

 

PAUSE

<for Kira>

The weird containing stillness of the neighbouhood
just before the school bus brings the neighbourhood 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, or just the casual scatter
of your child's winter clothes on the hall floor.

-- Eamon Grennon

 

THE DEAD

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

-- Billy Collins

 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I am in love with the English language
here, where I happen to be,
rounding a curve of road

in a neighborhood, in a small town.
The houses sit back from the curb,
stately nouns, and their fancy

adjectives of porches modify
with gingerbread and grille,
the sky blue ceilings, only imagined

from the road. The lawns roll out
like active verbs or lie flat
and square-cornered as bed sheets,

while their flowers adverb raucously
in and through and against the green.
Ready to connect all the parts

of the language, the avenues wait:
Because, However, But, and Since.
And still the prepositions! Inside

someone being read to, dreaming of
the wonderful English language
channeled up, out, into thought.

-- Sherry Olson

 

JOB AND THE CROCODILE

Job became a virtuoso
of suffering. He sat on an ashheap
outside the city gates
and challenged God Himself
to face him in court.
"Explain it to me, if you can!
The dead children, the boils
like anthills in my skin, explain
even the stolen sheep and camels."

Job saw an arabesque
of light and dust
picking its way casually
over the plain,
through the garbage
and broken pots in the dump
until it sat beside him
and a voice from the whirlwind
called him by name.

"Job, I wish
you could have seen this place
hen it was new. It was dark
when the mountains formed. The sea
collected in all the hollows,
and the living things
began to make their ways.
Everyone in my family
gathered to look on.
When the first light
suddenly broke in the east
we all shouted for joy!
I remember the morning stars
all sang together. What a song that was!"

"Look at me, I'm dying," said Job.
"My skin is covered with sores
and all I can do is scratch them
with shards from this dump.
I had seven sons and three daughters.
Do You know where they are now?"

"Job, have you ever looked
really closely at a crocodile?
Look at his back some time,
like a row of shields joined so tight
even air can't pass between them.
His teeth are surrounded by terror,
but his eyes are the eyelids of dawn.
When he sneezes--light flashes out!
It's like he could kindle wood
with his breath. Iron is like straw
to him, bronze is like rotten wood,
and his underparts are sharp as broken pottery--
he could scratch your sores for you!

"Don't interrupt, I'm not finished.
You should watch a crocodile move, too.
He spreads himself like a threshing sledge
on the mud where the water's low
and makes it boil like a pot!
He leaves a wake like a torch
thrown through the air, and he's afraid
of nothing--ah, there's nothing else
like him on earth! You could never
make anything like that, Job."

It struck Job that the ways of God
were stranger than he'd thought.
He found humility in the notion,
and God found cause to bestow
a new life on him--further camels,
children, healing from his pain.

Then God left him and traveled
once again as a dust dervish
to a riverbank where He sat down,
this time beside a crocodile.
"God," said the crocodile,
"the fish in this river taste
like cypress knees, and besides
there's not enough of them."

"Shut up," said God.
"Do you ever notice the people
who come here and catch fish with you?"

"The little ones are tasty,"
said the crocodile, "but the big ones
get loud and throw sharp sticks at me
if I eat even one or two.
I laugh at them. They can't hurt me."

"You should pay more attention.
They have good hands, better than anything
on a crocodile. They build boats
of reeds and get inside.
You can't eat them then,
and they'll outswim you, too.
It's their minds that fascinate me,
though. There's no end
to what they'll think up--heated
houses, calendars, makeup,
philosophy, alimony. Listen to this!"
God sang a few measures of Die Forelle
while the croc salivated
appreciatively. "They'll think of ways
to catch every fish in the river,"
God mused, "and then they'll starve
because the fish are gone.
They're clever, but they don't seem
to think ahead very well."

"They sound like a damn menace," said
the crocodile. "Speaking of fish, now..."
"Shut up," said God. "Look,
do that thing where you make the water
boil like a pot. That always knocks me out."

These conversations are a big part
of God's work. What's the point? you may ask.
Sometime in the future, in heaven,
when Job is resting beside a river,
a crocodile will crawl up
and lie beside him and ask,
"Did you folks ever learn
to work thing out with the fish?"
And Job will answer, "At best
I guess we only muddled through it.
Look, would you show me how
to do that threshing-sledge trick
I've heard so much about
if I teach you to tie a clove hitch?"

--Bill Holshouser  

 

 

THE SCIENTISTS EXPLAIN

They don't know what they're doing
sometimes. They look down a theory
with a cool smile and don't see the smoke
rising in premonition; how, afterward,
the numb body of the world
sprawls in a kind of a confused poetry.
They come right out and say: Neptune,
Planet where diamonds rain.
They might as well say Milk:
source of everlasting life. Or Air:
conveyor of all knowledge, or Rain:
Earth's milk and we, never weaned.
It's like a joke we've been dying to hear
and when someone finally tells it,
standing at the bus stop, or buying cigarettes,
we can't stop repeating it. It's the way we would
have this life work: methane's extraordinary blue
up there, gigantus blue cloud
dropping its carbon-carbon-carbon-carbon beads
off a necklace that will never restring,
lost baubles left to their own drift, just like our nine.

-- Jean Monahan

 

THE MOMENT

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won't wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chickory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and small flowers
I don't know the names for, saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua -- words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into the faultless
flesh of his soft hands, into his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

-- Len Roberts

WILLOWS
i.m. Anne Kennedy (1935 - 1998)

"No, plant me,
like my Grandmother's blazing dahlias
in the subsuming earth,
where I can be lifted,
where there's a chance of resurrection".

One day in March you lined up
willow cuttings on your table, stems wrapped
in foil, a gift for each of your friends.

"These will take" you said,
"they will take, I promise,
like no other tree you've ever known."

I placed mine in water
near the light
and waited for the roots to appear.

Even when they did and white fronds
filled the jar, I feared transplanting
my willow into the dark.

In September you left. The first frosts now
lie on the grass and on the willows
whose disconsolate leaves blow around us.

-- Joan McBreen

TODAY

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermitten breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seem so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

-- Billy Collins

 STOP ACTION

Slowly as an underwater dance
the shortstop dips to take the ball
on a low hop, swings back his arm, balancing
without thought, all muscles intending
the diagonal to the first baseman's glove.

As the ball leaves his hand, the action stops --
and, watching, we feel a curious poignancy,
a catch in the throat. It is not this play
only. Whenever the sweet drive is stopped
and held, our breath swells up like the rush

of sadness or longing we sometimes feel
without remembering the cause of it.
The absolute moment gathers the surge
and muscle of the past, complete,
yet hurling itself forward -- arrested
here between its birth and perishing.

-- Conrad Hilberry

SPRING FEVER

Last Sunday in February
Neighbors lean on warm cars.
Snow pulls away from the grass.

At the corner variety store
kids huddle out front,
hustle off, scattering
baseball card wrappers
colorful as April tulips.

-- Paul Marion

IT AIN'T OVER

Baseball is something
like love. There's an elegance
about it -- a fine tension.

Fielders pluck comets
from thin and glorious air.
Pitchers make solid spheres
disappear. And batters smash meteors
with matchsticks.

But fielders also topple
over fences, sprawl empty-handed
in the dust. Pitchers throw wild.
And batters sometimes tilt
at windmills.

Yet they lean in -- watch -- wait.
They risk looking foolish
in order to be brilliant.

-- Louise Greco

All from a wonderful anthlogy called LINE DRIVES, published by Southern Illinois University Press, and presumably available from grolierpoetrybookshop@compuserve.com

HARPO

That's right. When words don't say it,
stop talking. Become beautiful and strange.
The one of sudden arrivals,
announced by a horn.
A faun, seen between trees.
Pluck your thin music, your eyes
getting rounder, face changing
like clouds. And when lies
don't work, even silent ones,
get caught silver-handed,
with everything tucked up your sleeve.

-- Susan Donnelly

 

BLACKBIRD SEASON

It is March, and my hands have
that wintered touch,
my fingertips split with cold.

I don't want to feel now,
but I am stung by the green
gaudiness of your body,

the generosity of skin.
Without stirring, you have gone
south and flown back again.

You have become motion, a tree
full of blackbirds, and the light
splashing from glossy glossy wings.

-- Nora Mitchell

 

HOMAGE TO THE COMMON

How I love the blazing dailiness
of this world, the way my shoes
wear down their heels in the same spot
each year; the gene-print of freckles
on my children's cheeks, the plain truth
that dust-balls breed, regardless;
the unmade beds and other signs
of absent domesticity; the late-night hum
of the furnace pumping out its heat,
even the knots in my shoulders
I've known since childhood.

I celebrate alike the lumpy August lawn
awash with acorns and the first new snow
which tempers my memory of wrong;
my aging Ford Escort and the slush
that city buses sling across its windshield,
the pageantry of light each morning
from the east, strong coffee
halved by cream; that in these last late years
of the 20th century, this planet
keeps on spinning toward some destiny
beyond our knowing. And always,

How utterly my friends astonish me
with their simple ordinary faith and care
for this or that. For the common grace
of all of it, the way the earth's
relentless lovely roots pull us deeper
in, I offer blessings, praise,
amazement.

-- Eithne McKiernan

 

WHY WAIT FOR SCIENCE

Sarcastic Science, she would like to know,
In her complacent ministry of fear,
How we propose to get away from here
When she has made things so we have to go
Or be wiped out. Will she be asked to show
Us how by rocket we may hope to steer
To some star off there, say, a half light-year
Through temperature of absolute zero?
Why wait for Science to supply the how
When any amateur can tell it now?
The way to go would be the same
As fifty million years ago we came --
If anyone remembers how that was.
I have a theory, but it hardly does.

-- Robert Frost

 

A DRINK OF WATER

She came every morning to draw water
Like an old bat staggering up the field:
The pump's whooping cough, the bucket's clatter
And slow diminuendo as it filled,
Announced her. I recall
Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel
Of the brimming bucket, and the treble
Creak of her voice like the pump's handle.
Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable
It fell back through her window and would lie
Into the water set out on the table.
Where I have dipped to drink again, to be
Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,
Remember the Giver, fading off the lip.

-- Seamus Heaney

 

Just to prove that annotation helps not a bit, I can explain (?) the title. A 'booby' is an
aquatic bird, especially common in the Galapagos Islands. Fernando Po is an island,
off the coast of Africa. What on earth that has to do with the poem itself escapes me.

THE BOOBIES OF FERNANDO PO

We stopped at a tag sale and there was
a blender that I was considering. The owner
walked up to me and I asked him if it worked.
"Sure, it works," he said. "If it works so good
how come you want to get rid of it?" I
asked him. He told me they had got a new one.
And I said, "Why would you get a new one if
this one still works?" "Upgrading," he said.
"So you think you're too good for this blender
but it's just right for me, is that it?" I
said. "Listen, buddy, you don't
want my money, my money's not good enough
for you?" "Just take the blender and go," he said.
"So now you're giving me, a complete stranger,
a gift of this perfectly good blender?" I said.
My wife was tugging at my arm. "Come on, honey,"
she said, "this man's crazy, let's go." Back
in the car, I said, "I guess we showed him who's
boss." You sure did," my wife said. "Even
free that blender was much too expensive." I
thought that over for a moment. "Didn't Nietzsche
say that?" I asked, swerving to miss a a pig.
in the road.

-- James Tate

 

WHEN THE COOK FALLS IN LOVE

When the cook falls in love we can all eat for free
and the diner stays open all night.
Even Jesus comes in, the body of Christ,
bread and fish once again,
and water that turns into grigio wine.

That cook wants his love to work as his waitress
so she'll call out to him, call him peaches or honey,
two eggs on a raft, one scrambled, one sunny,
two pigs in a blanket, two oinks in a stack,
two cinnamon buns, two stickies, too sweet,
one Adam and Eve in a garden.

He'll change the name of his diner for her,
call it Anna and the Hat, put in a new floor,
serve Honeymoon Salad, lettuce alone,
put her name on the specials, Soup Anna Smile,
call the breakfasts Anna Begins.

When the cook falls in love the world is his oyster,
some flavor he's after, some season he's known.
When he holds out his soup spoon he can sip the whole world.
say this is my body that is broken for thee.
And the world comes for dinner, sits at the counter,
spins on the stool and orders a round,
so famished, so weary, so hungry for living,
for the night neverending, for the diner of love.

-- John Hodgen

 

INVITATION

Anywhere and always just as you expect it least,
Welling or oozing from nowhere a desire to feast.

At Auschwitz Wolf hums Brahms' rhapsody by heart
As Eddy, thief turned juggler, rehearses his art.

Fling and abandon, gaeities colorful and porous.
The Mexican beggar's skirt, an Araner's crios.

Irresistible laughter, hiss and giggle of overflow.
That Black engine-driver crooning his life's motto:

"Paint or tell a story, sing or shovel coal,
You gotta get a glory or the job lacks soul."

Abundance of joy bubbling some underground jazz.
A voice whispers: Be with me tonight in paradise.

-- Micheal O'Siadhaill

 

THE THIRD PRIZE PHOTOGRAPH

I would give this First Prize:
the couple at odds, clearly,
while someone at the end of the same bench
looks off toward the river,
a cyclist goes by on the path.
Boxes within boxes,
like an antique camera,
for of course there was also
the photographer, who chose this print
from the contact sheet,
and now there's the viewer
with her own stories.
It may be that no one
knows quite what is going on,
not what choices
lead to the moment the lens flies open --
the woman's dismissing hand,
the man urgently leaning,
an eavesdropper stiffened,
one foot bent sideways,
he cyclist in his own world.

-- Susan Donnelly

 

LOW TIDE

I walk the barrier beach
parallel to a ferry
quite far out at sea. We keep
the same speed, relatively;
at least we seem to advance
equally on this eastern
course, adamant as the knees
beneath a bronze colossus.
But when I reach the small rise
of a shellheap, I can see
the ferry flings out a fine
furrow, a compilation
of greens that leaves me jealous.
There is nothing I can do
to make the air demonstrate
how I have earned my passage.

-- Erica Funkhouser

 

Whom I ask for no gift,
whom I thank for all things,
this is the morning.
Night is gone, a dawn
comes up in birds and sounds of the city.
There will be light
to live by, things
to see: my eyes will lift
to where the sun in vermilion sits,
and I will love and have pity.

-- Michael Hartnett

 

ONE ART

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hours badly spent,
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing 's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

 

LET EVENING COME

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down. 

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

-- Jane Kenyon