A Wreathe

REPORT TO SOMEONE

William Stafford


We think we’re all there is, then the big light,
and a call comes and everyone understands.
All right, we’re lonely: -- trees never need us, and
wind in its wandering visits us then goes away.
And we can’t see it but we think there’s a light inside
everything. Even at night it wants out and pushes
quietly, insistently on the wall with its tiny hands

In the silence that comes flooding down from the mountains
a shapeless lament begins to press toward sound.
It can wait: it gains by every day
of being unrecognized. Without moving,
it explores a way to be ready, and when
pieces of time break off it follows them,
alive in their being and unkown but true.

from Even in Quiet Places: Collected Poems


AT THE LAKE

Mary Oliver

A fish leaps
like a black pin—
then—when the starlight
strikes its side—

like a silver pin.
In an instant
the fish's spine
alters the fierce line of rising

and it curls a little—
the head, like scalloped tin,
plunges back,
and it's gone.

This is, I think,
what holiness is:
the natural world,
where every moment is full

of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind
there's a hermie's cave
full of light,

full of snow,
full of concentration.
I've knelt there,
and so have you,

hanging on
to what you love,
to what is lovely.
The lake's

shining sheets
don't make a ripple now,
and the stars
are going off to their blue sleep,

but the words are in place—
and the fish leaps, and leaps again
from the black plush of the poem,
that breathless space.


MIRROR

Mark Strand

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looks up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on
to the next party.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

(New Yorker, Dec. 6, 2004)



MAKESHIFT

Laura Riding

I stood once at the tip of the earth,
Feeling myself no longer still,
But tossed with it about the sun
In an exquisite insecurity.

Behind me
Words
And the clothes
of my sobriety
And people.

Before me
The sky
Parting like a curtain
Upon the ecstasy of all the universes beyond.

Oh, who was my unknown lover, there at the edge,
Come like a cloud to me,
Too large for my beholding?

I threw back my head for him
And he loved my throat
And brushed the tips of my breasts
And caressed my whole body,
Making me giddy with the sense of myself
And of the space about me
That was my lover.

Had I perceived too much?
Had my lover wearied of me so soon?
Or were my feet too quiet,
Planted perilously on the tip,
Too safe for leaping?

For the sky dropped again before me,
Formal and final as the end of a play,
And my words came to me again
And clothes
And people
And one among them, one of all others,
Who put his arms about me
And paid a ceremony to my lips
And to whom I answered: I love you.

What else could I do,
Planted at the tip of the earth,
With my blossom lifted to the sky?
What else is left?

I will get me a child,
Another to yearn at the edge,
Better beloved than myself, perhaps,
Less secure, perhaps.


CALZONE

Giuseppi Ungaretti
transl. Andrew Frisardi

describes the poet’s state of mind

Those bare arms surfeited with secrets have,
In swimming, stirred the depths of Lethe,
And bit by bit set loose the vehement graces
And the weariness that gave the world its light.

There is nothing stiller on that strange road
Where leaves don’t bud or fail in winter,
Where nothing ever suffers or pleases,
Where waking never alternates with sleep.

All things leaned forward then, insidde transparence,
In the trusting hour, when, -- the stillness tired,
Re-extended measure of destinations
From the opened graves of branching trees,
Enervating the rainbow echoes -- here
Started from the airy riverbed surprised
Turning the darkness rose, and, in that color,
More than every life an arc, sleep, stretched taut.

Prey to phantom tendrils sprung from walls,
Those endless heirs of minutes, the prima image
Excludes us more and more, and yet,
Like lightning, breaks the ice, is lord again.


WATER SERPENTS

David St. John

Beneath the lit silk of your naked body

When you move your bones move like nervous water snakes
A complicated Medusan nest of rippling eels

Currents in the dawn river

My own body littered by broken limbs of almond sunlight
As your breath uncoils its music & anxious histories of sexual pride

Echo from the hotel room next door

As our own pasts rise through the water like sacred filaments
& in our dead lovers’ eyes we can recall

Woman upon woman upon man swirling in a pool of memorylessness

& upon the shore the day arrives entwined in its sisterly mass of red hair
Those brash & roiling fields of ruby kelp where

The dark sailor's body is found