[Sven2]

Northampton Style


Evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style, on the porch out back.
Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,

as if  it swam to time us down a river
where we dive and leave a single track
as evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer

that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.
Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

When we disentangle you are not with her
I am not with him. Redress calls for tact.
Evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer

still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir
as uneasy as we, while the woods go black;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer

and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack
though the player keeps up his plangent attack.
Evening falls. Someone's playing a dulcimer;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

--Marie Ponsot

[Sven2]

The Blue Dress


I don't recall pain, or joy, only the blue dress
I wore, and the door open to the sea,
and the liquid sun across the floor beside the bed,
and our crooning sense of having climbed Everest,
undaunted, undeceived.

I didn't know who I was or who you were,
or even what we hoped for, in that slow, rushed,
soft, harsh, pretend, real, world. Even now,
I don't know how to devour love like a golden apple
stolen from a teacher who gives too many tests.

So tell me what you remember,
and who you think we were,
and I will nod and agree, though I doubt it happened—
beyond the sea, the sun, the open door,
the blue dress, and the dream.

--Freya Manfred

[Sven2]

A Light Left On

In the evening we came back
Into our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find the light left on,
Falling on silent flowers,
Table, book, empty chair
While we had gone elsewhere,
Had been away for hours.

When we came home together
We found the inside weather.
All of our love unended
The quiet light demanded,
And we gave, in a look
At yellow walls and open book.
The deepest world we share
and do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.

--May Sarton

[Sven2]

Romantics

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

--Lisel Mueller

[Sven2]

A Dark Thing Inside the Day

So many want to be lifted by song and dancing,
and this morning it is easy to understand.
I write in the sound of chirping birds hidden
in the almond trees, the almonds still green
and thriving in the foliage. Up the street,
a man is hammering to make a new house as doves
continue their cooing forever. Bees humming
and high above that a brilliant clear sky.
The roses are blooming and I smell the sweetness.
Everything desirable is here already in abundance.
And the sea. The dark thing is hardly visible
in the leaves, under the sheen. We sleep easily.
So I bring no sad stories to warn the heart.
All the flowers are adult this year. The good
world gives and the white doves praise all of it.

--Linda Gregg

[Sven2]

Lois in the Sunny Tree

When in August 1920 I smiled for the camera
from my perch on the limb of a sun-spangled tree,
says Lois, long dead now but humorously seven years old then,
with a giant ribbon in my hair, the sorrow of living in time
was only very tiny and remote in some far corner of my mind

and for me to know then, as I smiled for that camera
in Michigan in the summer of 1920
that you would peer thoughtfully and admiringly
into my happy photographed eyes eighty-some years later
would have been good for me only in a very tiny and remote way.

--Mark Halliday

[Sven2]

What God Knew

when he knew nothing.  A leaf
looks like this, doesn't it? No one
to ask. So came the invention
of the question too, the way all
at heart are rhetorical, each leaf
suddenly wedded to its shade. When God

knew nothing, it was better, wasn't it?
Not the color blue yet, its deep
unto black.  No color at all really,
not yet one thing leading to another, sperm
to egg endlessly, thus cities, thus
the green countryside lying down
piecemeal, the meticulous and the trash,
between lake and woods
the dotted swiss of towns along
any state road. Was God

sleeping when he knew nothing?  As opposed
to up all night (before there was night)
or alert all day  (before day)?  As opposed to that,
little engine starting up by itself, history,
a thing that keeps beginning
and goes past its end. Will it end, this
looking back?  From here, it's one shiny
ravaged century after another,
but back there, in a house or two: a stillness,
a blue cup, a spoon, one silly flower raised up
from seed.  I think so fondly of the day
someone got lucky
and dodged the tragedy meant for him. It spilled
like sound from a faulty speaker
over an open field. He listened from
a distance. God-like, any one of us
could say.

--Marianne Boruch

[Sven2]

To Long
    from "Eden and After"

How beautiful they were,
Adam thought—
These beasts and birds;
These tall grasses
And flowering trees.

And yet, how full
The universe—
As if there were no room
For words he ached to say.

Shouted aloud, they
Might displace
The very things
He wished to celebrate.

Therefore, he sang
A dense and wordless song
That filled the only
Emptiness he knew:

Inside him,
Near his heart
Where a rib had been removed.

--Gregory Orr

[Sven2]

Friend

The Psalmist said, "Lord, how shall I not
call thy name?" The hills were green with
his wonder and the birds flew filled
with singing, so he sang, "Lord, how shall I
not know thee upon the mountain
when thy sheep are the great stars of heaven,
thy horn the sun and moon, and all the fields
bloom as thy glance approves?"

Under meditative graces of the trees, the Psalmist

sat him down without hindrance or favor.
Under his gaze rivers ran glinting among cedars
toward the dark blue paths strewn
with rushes and bordered with white stones.
And who did the Psalmist chance to see walking there
but the Lord and the Lord's loneliness, that friend
so much like ourselves
and so lost in what cannot be done about it.

--Christopher Howell

[Sven2]

Welcome Morning


There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

--Anne Sexton

[Sven2]

The Russian Greatcoat

While my children swim off the breakwater,
while my wife sleeps beside me in the sun,
I recall how you once said you knew
a sure way to paradise or hell.
Years ago, you stood on the Covington bridge,
demanded I throw my coat into the Ohio—
my five dollar "Russian greatcoat,"
my "Dostoevsky coat," with no explanations,
simply because you asked.

From that height, the man-sized coat fell
in slow motion, floated briefly,
one sinking arm bent at the elbow.
At first, I evade the question when my wife asks
as if just thinking of you were an act of betrayal.
The cigarette I shared with you above the river.
Our entrance into the city, your thin black coat
around both our shoulders. Sometimes I can go
weeks without remembering.

--Theodore Deppe

[Sven2]

Listening to Rain in My Hermitage

Who enjoys galloping
a road in rain?

In my hermitage, I sit in comfort—
the weather need not be clear.

Once rain ends, I can begin
my lazy excursion—

calmly, I listen near the eaves
to falling water.


--Chin'gak Kuksa Hyesim
translated by Ian Haight and T'ae-yong Ho

[wavewatcher]

"One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life."  Khalil Gibran

[Sven2]

in a clear dream

of last year

come from a thousand miles

cloudy city

winding streams

ice on the ponds

for a while

I gazed on my friend


--Li Qing-jao

[Sven2]

"There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by

evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people

and children is always shed."


― Vasily Grossman