What Is Found There

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar’s portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge’s fire.

He walks by his ox’s head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year’s ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.

Old and New Poems, 1990

Donald Hall

The Garden is breathing out the air of Paradise
Today.  I can sense myself, and this lively wine,
And this friend whose nature approaches the divine.

It’s all right if the beggar claims to be a King
Today.  His tent is a shadow thrown by a cloud;
His banqueting hall is a newly sown field.

Paradise is here in the simple tale that the May
Meadow tells; the wise person lets the future
And its profits go and accepts the cash now.

Please don’t imagine that your enemy will ever
Be faithful to you.  The candle the hermit lights
Will always flutter out in the worldly church.

Make your soul strong then by letting it drink
The secret wine.  This rotten world has its own
Plans:  to press our dust into bricks.

My life is a black book.  But don’t rebuke a drinker
Like me too much.  No human being can ever read
The words written on his own forehead.

When Hafez’s coffin comes by, it’ll be all right
To follow behind.  Although he is
A captive of sin, he is on his way to the Garden.

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, 2008, p. 65
Translated by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
www.banyen.com/Reviews.htm?ISBNNum=9780061138843

Hafez

Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still four-leaf clovers
Is not our land still beautiful
our fields not full of armed enemies
our cities never bombed
by foreign invaders
never occupied
by iron armies
speaking iron tongues
Are not our warriors still valiant
ready to defend us
Are not our senators
still wearing fine togas
Are we not still a great people
in the greatest country in all the world
Is this not still a free country
Are not our fields still ours
our gardens still full of flowers
our ships with full cargoes
Why then do some still fear
the barbarians coming
coming coming
in their huddled masses
(What is that sound that fills the ear
drumming drumming?)
Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these not the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
Are there not still mothers
sisters and brothers
Is there not still a full moon
once a month
Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still stars at night
Can we not still see them
in bowl of night
signalling to us
our manifest destiny?

www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/july-dec01/ferlinghetti_10-26.html

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

XIII

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour.  I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.  I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
             up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age.  I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
             hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
             between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
             left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

An Atlas of the Difficult World, 1991, p.25

Adrienne Rich

If only you would touch my heart,

if only you were to put your mouth to my heart,

your delicate mouth, your teeth,

if you were to put your tongue like a red arrow

there where my dusty heart is heating,

if you were to blow on my heart near the sea, weeping,

it would make a dark noise, like the drowsy sound of

train wheels,

like the indecision of waters,

like autumn in full leaf,

like blood,

with a noise of damp flames burning the sky,

with a sound like dreams or branches or the rain,

or foghorns in some dismal port,

if you were to blow on my heart near the sea,

like a white ghost,

in th spume of the wave,

in the middle of the wind,

like a ghost unleashed, at the seashore, weeping.

Like a long absence, like a sudden hell,

the sea doles out the sound of the heart,

raining, darkening at sundown, on a lonely coast:

no question that night falls

and its mournful blue of the flags of shipwrecks

peoples itself with planets of throaty silver. Read more…

Pablo Neruda, Robert Hass

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.

New and Selected Poems, 1992, p.110

Mary Oliver

II

Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt
This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water
This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms
This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms
This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy
This is the cemetery of the poor
who died for democracy     This is a battlefield
from a nineteenth century war    the shrine is famous
This is a sea-town of myth and story    when the fishing fleets
went bankrupt    here is where the jobs were    on the pier
processing frozen fishsticks       hourly wages and no shares
These are other battlefields     Centralia    Detroit
here are the forests primeval    the copper    the silver lodes
These are the suburbs of acquiescence   silence rising fumelike
       from the streets
This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires
flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling
whose children are drifting blind alleys pent
between coiled rolls of razor wire
I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural
then yes let it be these are small distinctions
where do we see it from is the question

An Atlas of the Difficult World, 1991, p.6

Adrienne Rich

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;

Read more…

Martín Espada

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, 2003, p. 7

B.H. Fairchild

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty–

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
–Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,–
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Read more…

Hart Crane