A neighborhood tuxedo cat’s walking the fence line and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning. The louder they bark, the more their vexation grows, the less the cat seems to care. She’s behind my raised beds now, no doubt looking for the family of field mice I’ve been leaving be because, why not? The cat’s dressed up for this occasion of trespass, black tie attire for the canine taunting, but the whole clamor is making me uneasy. This might be what growing older is. My problem: I see all the angles of what could go wrong so I never know what side to be on. Save the mice, shoo the cat, quiet the dogs? Let the cat have at it? Let the dogs have at it? Instead, I do what I do best: nothing. I watch the cat leap into the drainage ditch, dew-wet fur against the day lilies, and disappear. The dogs go quiet again, and the mice are safe in their caves, and I’m here waiting for something to happen to me.
— Ada Limón
At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over — this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a spooky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind — fresh, various — here blue, & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. That was within the power of nature…. Then — it was all over till 1999.
— from the diary of Virginia Woolf, June 30, 1927
Untitled Poem
All I want to do is get drunk with my wife
An endless glass of wine both of us on the floor
So what if squares look down on us?
Boring and misguided are their miserable lives
When my wife is in the city and I’m home I want to cry
The moonlight on the cypress tree is a bitter light
No book has ever kissed me like she does
— Hafiz
By Hafiz (c. 1320–89), published in the November/December 2012 issue ofThe American Poetry Review. Translated by Matthew Rohrer, who consulted earlier English versions rather than the Persian.
Be Drunk
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking… ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
— Charles Baudelaire
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.
— Phillip Larkin
November, Remembering Voltaire
In the evenings I scrape my fingernails clean, hunt through old catalogues for new seed, oil workboots and shears. This garden is no metaphor— more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can. I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt with leaf-mold and bulb, plant into the oncoming cold. Not that I ever thought the philosopher meant to be taken literally, but with no invented God overhead, I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting that ripens into soil, in an old corm that rises steadily each spring: not symbols, but reassurances, like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long- familiar book, the known words barely listened to, but joining, for all the nights of a life, each world to the next.
— Jane Hirshfield
“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”
— Robert Wilson Lynd
There is nothing so humiliating as to see idiots succeed in undertakings in which we fail.
— Gustave Flaubert
In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa
Arching under the night sky inky with black expansiveness, we point to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth, we read the sky as if it is an unerring book of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky: the whale song, the songbird singing its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein. O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.
