A MEASURING WORM
This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,
Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.
It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant
To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,
And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.
Richard Wilbur
The measuring worm is the larval or caterpillar state of the geometer moth. Also called an inchworm because of its looping gait, it looks as if it is measuring the surface as it moves. When it is curled up, it resembles the last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega.
VESPERS
In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.
Louise Glück
“Vespers”: a service of evening prayer.
NOTE: THE SEA GRINDS THINGS UP
It’s going on now
as these words appear
to you or are heard by you.
A wave slaps down, flat.
Water runs up the beach,
then wheels and slides
back down, leaving a ridge
of sea-foam, weed, and shells.
One thinks: I must
break out of this
horrible cycle, but
the ocean doesn’t: it
continues through the thought.
A wave breaks, some
of its water runs up
the beach and down
again, leaving a ridge
of scum and skeletal debris.
One thinks: I must
break out of this
cycle of life and death,
but the ocean doesn’t: it
goes past the thought.
A wave breaks on the sand,
water planes up the beach
and wheels back down,
hissing and leaving a ridge
of anything it can leave.
One thinks: I must
run out the life
part of this cycle,
then the death part
of this cycle, and then
go on as the sea
goes on in this cycle
after the last word,
but this is not the last
word unless you think
of this cycle as some
perpetual inventory
of the sea. Remember:
this is just one sea
on one beach on one
planet in one
solar system in one
galaxy. After that
the scale increases, so
this is not the last word,
and nothing else is talking back.
It’s a lonely situation.
Alan Dugan
THE WAY
The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way
our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk
to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.
Albert Goldbarth
THE CITY LIMITS
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
A. R. Ammons
12
“NOW FOR LUNCH”
So what have we learned from our journey through the words of the hundred or so poets whom we have met in the preceding pages? We, Carolyn and Mary Ann, the compilers of this anthology, hope that you, our readers, have been persuaded that poetry can make a real difference in your lives as it has in ours, that it can offer an oasis of peace and quiet amidst the clamor of modern existence. We hope, too, that you have discovered that poetry can provide increased access to your own inner world, that it can enrich your own thoughts, and that it can contribute new ideas and insights.
But above all, we wish that you may return to your own life with renewed hope and vigor, appreciating your own daily round and rejoicing in the marvel of the quotidian.
LEAST ACTION
Is it vision
or the lack
that brings me
back to the principle
of least action,
by which in one
branch of rabbinical
thought the world
might become the
Kingdom of Peace not
through th
e tumult
and destruction necessary
for a New Start but
by adjusting little parts
a little bit—turning
a cup a quarter inch
or scooting up a bench.
It imagines an
incremental resurrection,
a radiant body
puzzled out through
tinkering with the fit
of what’s available.
As though what is is
right already but
askew. It is tempting
for any person who would
like to love what she
can do.
Kay Ryan
LOVE AFTER LOVE
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love-letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
A LIVING
A man should never earn his living,
if he earns his life he’ll be lovely.
A bird
picks up its seeds or little snails
between heedless earth and heaven
in heedlessness.
But, the plucky little sport, it gives to life
and all the unspeakable charm of birds hopping and fluttering and being birds,
—And we, we get it all from them for nothing.
D. H. Lawrence
THE WELL DRESSED MAN WITH A BEARD
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is the present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house…
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Wallace Stevens
“Douce campagna,” a conflation of French and Italian, means “pleasant plain” or “sweet place.”
AFTER READING A CHILD’S GUIDE TO MODERN PHYSICS
If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so’s,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.
Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely, it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
In which a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.
Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.
Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidean space:
Exploded myths,—but who
Would feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?
This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.
It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicising Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
W. H. Auden
Do we already know too much for our own good? And will further knowledge contribute to our well-being? Stay tuned.
THE END AND THE BEGINNING
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
LOVE IS A PLACE
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a word
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds
E. E. Cummings
THE LEAKY FAUCET
All through the night, the leaky faucet
searches the stillness of the house
with its radar blip: who is awake?
Who lies out there as full of worry
as a pan in the sink? Cheer up,
cheer up, the little faucet calls,
someone will help you th
rough your life.
Ted Kooser
TICKET
This is the ticket
I failed to spend.
It is still in my pocket
at the fair’s end.
It is not only
suffering or grief
or even boredom
of which we are
offered more than
enough.
Kay Ryan
Further good advice for all of us. Spend that ticket!
TO YOU, PERHAPS YET UNBORN
It is night, and we are alone together; your head
Bends over the open book, your feeding eyes devour
The substance of my dream. Oh, sacred hour
That makes us one—you, fleeting, and I, already fled!
Here is my joy, here is my sorrow, my heart’s rage,
Poured out for you. What tenderness brooding above you
Hallows these poems! I have made them all for you. I love you.
What love, what longing, my reader, speaks to you from this page!
John Hall Wheelock
THE CHEER
reader my friend, is in the words here, somewhere.
Frankly, I’d like to make you smile.
Words addressing evil won’t turn evil back
but they can give heart.
The cheer is hidden in right words.
A great deal isn’t right, as they say,
as they are lately at some pains to tell us.
Words have to speak about that.
They would be the less words
for saying smile when they should say do.
If you ask them do what?
they turn serious quick enough, but never unlovely.
And they will tell you what to do,
if you listen, if you want that.
Certainly good cheer has never been what’s wrong,
though solemn people mistrust it.
Against evil, between evils, lovely words are right.
How absurd it would be to spin these noises out,
so serious that we call them poems,
if they couldn’t make a person smile.
Cheer or courage is what they were all born in.
It’s what they’re trying to tell us, miming like that.
It’s native to the words,
and what they want us always to know,
even when it seems quite impossible to do.
William Meredith
THE DEATH DEAL
Ever since that moment
when it first occurred
to me that I would die