The Necklace (XXXII)

The Gulf! Whole oceans scaled over my head,
and gold fish fashioned out of crystallites,
I ask where Madam Moonlight’s lain abed,
and blue horizons haze blue mountain heights.

The dawn is spiked with delicate clear dread,
thought’s needles – piercing, lucid – snap and freeze.
No scales or spirals raise me, spirited,
nor mirrorings of rocked realities.

The heart’s a world unfathomed, fertile, deep,
and man, beneath his lead sky, breaks and sinks,
while life, a seagull, soars above his head.

Aye, well-fed easy woman, stuffed on bread,
thought’s rhythms broke our last connecting links,
but oh, how heart and pulse beat, beat and leap.

-Tin Ujević

Conjugation

This early the garden’s bare
but people pay to walk it,

at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,

and stoop to mouth the names—
araucaria

araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something

Japanese—each particular
ridiculous to be.

-Nate Klug, 2010

Driving in Oklahoma

On humming rubber along this white concrete,
lighthearted between the gravities
of source and destination like a man
halfway to the moon
in this bubble of tuneless whistling
at seventy miles an hour from the windvents,
over prairie swells rising
and falling, over the quick offramp
that drops to its underpass and the truck
thundering beneath as I cross
with the country music twanging out my windows,
I'm grooving down this highway feeling
technology is freedom's other name when
—a meadowlark
comes sailing across my windshield
with breast shining yellow
and five notes pierce
the windroar like a flash
of nectar on mind,
gone as the country music swells up and drops
-------------------------------me wheeling down
----------------------my notch of cement-bottomed sky
-----------------------------between home and away
and wanting
to move again through country that a bird
has defined wholly with song,
and maybe next time see how
-------------------------he flies so easy, when he sings.

-Carter Revard, 2005

Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

-Delmore Schwartz, 1959

The Clearing

The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.

He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss;
twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls
and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth;
his pink tongue lolls.

I look for sticks of proper heft
to throw for him, while he sits, prim
and earnest in his love, if it is love.

All night a soaking rain, and now the hill
exhales relief, and the fragrance
of warm earth. . . . The sedges
have grown an inch since yesterday,
and ferns unfurled, and even if they try
the lilacs by the barn can’t
keep from opening today.

I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens,
and the white-throated sparrow’s call
that borders on rudeness. Do you know—
since you went away
all I can do
is wait for you to come back to me.

-Jane Kenyon

It's late, and I think this is the third Jane Kenyon poem in here, and she may be catching up to Frost.

Life is Fine

I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.

-----But it was------Cold in that water!------It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.

-----But it was------High up there!------It was high!

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love--
But for livin' I was born

Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry--
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

-----Life is fine!------Fine as wine!-----Life is fine!

-Langston Hughes, 1949