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Here’s Looking At You, Kid
You can tell Gail, if she calls That I’m famous now for all of these rock and roll songs And even if that’s a lie She shoulda given me a try When we were kids on the field of the first day of school I would’ve been her fool And I would’ve sang out your name in those old high school halls You tell that to Gail, if she calls And you can tell Jane, if she writes That I’m drunk off all these stars and all these crazy Hollywood nights And that’s total deceit But she shoulda married me And tell her I spent every night of my youth…
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Tigers
by Eliza Griswold What are we now but voices who promise each other a life neither one can deliver not for lack of wanting but wanting won’t make it so We cling to a vine at the cliff’s edge. There are tigers above and below. Let us love one another and let go.
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Winter Grace
by Patricia Fargnoli If you have seen the snow under the lamppost piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table or somewhere slowly falling into the brook to be swallowed by water, then you have seen beauty and know it for its transience. And if you have gone out in the snow for only the pleasure of walking barely protected from the galaxies, the flakes settling on your parka like the dust from just-born stars, the cold waking you as if from long sleeping, then you can understand how, more often than not, truth is found in silence, how the natural world comes to you if you…
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What the Bones Know
BY CAROLYN KIZER Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath. I think that Yeats was right, That lust and love are one. The body of this night May beggar me to death, But we are not undone Who love with all our breath. I know that Proust was wrong, His wheeze: love, to survive, Needs jealousy, and death And lust, to make it strong Or goose it back alive. Proust took away my breath.…
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The Want of Peace
All goes back to the earth,and so I do not desirepride of excess or power,but the contentments madeby men who have had little:the fisherman’s silencereceiving the river’s grace,the gardner’s musing on rows. I lack the peace of simple things.I am never wholly in place.I find no peace or grace.We sell the world to buy fire,our way lighted by burning men,and that has bent my mindand made me think of darknessand wish for the dumb life of roots.
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THE FATHER By Ronald Ross
Come with me then, my son; Thine eyes are wide for truth: And I will give thee memories, And thou shalt give me youth. The lake laps in silver, The streamlet leaps her length: And I will give thee wisdom, And thou shalt give me strength. The mist is on the moorland, The rain roughs the reed: And I will give thee patience, And thou shalt give me speed. When lightnings lash the skyline Then thou shalt learn thy part: And when the heav’ns are direst, …
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Finding a Box of Family Letters by Dana Gioiat
The dead say little in their lettersthey haven’t said before.We find no secrets, and yethow different every sentence soundsheard across the years. My father breaks my heartsimply by being so young and handsome.He’s half my age, with jet-black hair.Look at him in his navy uniformgrinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout.He says he misses all of us(though I haven’t yet been born).He writes from places I never knew he saw,and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photographcurled like a diploma–a banquet sixty years ago.My parents sit uncomfortablyamong tables of dark-suited strangers.The mildewed paper reeks of regret. I wonder what song the…
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In the Basement of the Goodwill Store
by Ted Kooser In the musty light, in the thin brown airof damp carpet, doll heads and rust,beneath long rows of sharp footfallslike nails in a lid, an old man standstrying on glasses, lifting each pairfrom the box like a glittering fishand holding it up to the lightof a dirty bulb. Near him, a heapof enameled pans as white as skullslooms in the catacomb shadows,and old toilets with dry red throatscough up bouquets of curtain rods. You’ve seen him somewhere before.He’s wearing the green leisure suityou threw out with the garbage,and the Christmas tie you hated,and the ventilated wingtip shoesyou found in your father’s closetand wore as a joke. And…
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Their lonely betters
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shadeTo all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that wordsShould be withheld from vegetables and birds. A robin with no Christian name ran throughThe Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third party waitedTo say which pairs, if any, should get mated. Not one of them was capable of lying, There was not one which knew that it was dyingOr could have with a rhythm or a rhymeAssumed responsibility for time. Let them leave language to their lonely bettersWho count some days and long for certain letters; We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: Words…
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The More Loving One W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total darkness sublime, Though this might take me…
