.--..-. .--. _.-.
( ) ) ☼ ( )' )
.-' `-. ☼ .-'. `-.
_ ( _home._)-' __ ( ) ) )
-~ ~-._ _.-~ ~-._..--~~--._.-~ ~~--..__-----' `-'
_.-~ ~-._ _.-~ ~~--..__ ___..
_.-~ · . ~-._.
·. ~-._ . . ·· . .
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Cabbage by Jim Harrison
If only I had the genius of a cabbage
or even an onion to grow myself
in their laminae from the holy core
that bespeaks the final shape. Nothing
is outside of us in this overinterpreted world.
Bruises are the mouths of our perceptions.
The gods who have died are able to come
to life again. It's their secret that they wish
to share if anyone knows that they exist.
Belief is a mood that weighs nothing on anyone's
scale but nevertheless exists. The moose
down the road wears the black cloak of a god
and the dead bird lifts from a bed of moss
in a shape totally unknown to us.
It's after midnight in Montana.
I test the thickness of the universe, its resilience
to carry us further than any of us wish to go.
We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,
which ends up as it will so utterly far from home.
tree by jane hirshfield
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
A Close Call by Jack Gilbert
Dusk and the sea is thus and so. The cat
from two fields away crossing through the grapes.
It is so quiet I can hear the air
in the canebrake. The blond wheat darkens.
The glaze is gone from the bay and the heat lets go.
They have not lit the lamp at the other farm yet
and all at once I feel lonely. What a surprise.
But the air stills, the heat comes back
and I think I am all right again.
Origin of the Marble Forest by Gregory Orr
Childhood dotted with bodies.
Let them go, let them
be ghosts.
No, I said,
make them stay, make them stone.
Consumed by James Tate
Why should you believe in magic,
pretend an interest in astrology
or the tarot? Truth is, you are
free, and what might happen to you
today, nobody knows. And your
personality may undergo a radical
transformation in the next half
hour. So it goes. You are consumed
by your faith in justice, your
hope for a better day, the rightness
of fate, the dreams, the lies
the taunts—Nobody gets what he
wants. A dark star passes through
you on your way home from
the grocery: never again are you
the same—an experience which is
impossible to forget, impossible
to share. The longing to be pure
is over. You are the stranger
who gets stranger by the hour.
St. Paul and All That by Frank O'Hara
Totally abashed and smiling
I walk in
sit down and
face the frigidaire
it’s April
no May
it’s May
such little things have to be established in the morning
after the big things of night
do you want me to come? when
I think of all the things I’ve been thinking of
I feel insane
simply “life in Birmingham is hell”
simply “you will miss me
but that’s good”
when the tears of a whole generation are assembled
they will only fill a coffee cup
just because they evaporate
doesn’t mean life has heat
“this various dream of living”
I am alive with you
full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety
hardness and softness
listening while you talk and talking while you read
I read what you read
you do not read what I read
which is right, I am the one with the curiosity
you read for some mysterious reason
I read simply because I am a writer
the sun doesn’t necessarily set, sometimes is just
disappears
when you’re not here someone walks in
and says “hey,
there’s no dancer in that bed”
O the Polish summers! those drafts!
those black and white teeth!
you never come when you say you’ll come but on the
other hand you do come