A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

-Richard Wilbur, 2000

The Long Voyage

Not that the pines are darker there,
nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,
nor swifts more swift in summer air;
---it was my own country,

having its thunderclap of spring,
its long midsummer ripening,
its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,
---almost like any country,

yet being mine; its face, its speech,
its hills bent low within my reach,
its river birch and upland beech
---were mine, of my own country.

Now the dark waters at the bow
fold back, like earth against the plow;
foam brightens like the dogwood now
---at home, in my own country.

-Malcolm Cowley, 1929

Highway

Glow of ice on the dark maples,
shape of blue fish in the clouds,
burn of tires, stutter of the car radio.
You know the highway is kindly,
the curve of it, your family at the end of it,
the lull of wheels, the sudden view
of a mill town dropped among trees
thin as eyelashes, and the buildings,
small heaving chests with breaths
of smoke. And a sudden tenderness
fills you for the idea of people,
their wills and habits, the machinery
of their kindness, the way meals are
served with salt and with a spoon.
And you think of them as birds
driven by some wind, and such mercy
passes that it makes you weep for it
and soon you can't see the road
for the awful kindness of it, and
the idea of you, your name vanishes
leaving you so alone that you must reclaim
it fast as you can in thought,
that dark bird circling over
the road until you are lost, or found
again in its wide wings lacing the blue
moving sky, the car now in motion
past the flash of sun again on an icy branch,
the self safely wrapped back inside its body,
which is your own, driving a car, yours.

-Gene Zeiger, 1995

Bread and Wine, Part 7

Oh friend, we arrived too late. The divine energies
---Are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypal world.
They keep on going there, and, apparently, don't bother if
---Humans live or not... that is a heavenly mercy.
Sometimes a human's clay is not strong enough to take the water;
---Human beings can carry the divine only sometimes.
What is living now? Night dreams of them. But craziness
---Helps, so does sleep. Grief and Night toughens us,
Until people capable of sacrifice once more rock
---In the iron cradle, desire people, as the ancients, strong enough for water.
In thunderstorms it will arrive. I have the feeling often, meanwhile,
---It is better to sleep, since the Guest comes seldom;
We waste our life waiting, and I haven't the faintest idea
---How to act or talk... in the lean years who needs pots?
But poets as you say are like the holy disciple of the Wild One
---Who used to stroll over the fields through the whole divine night.

-Friedrich Hölderlin, 1803

Mass MoCA--so this is contemporary art.