C a r o l y n D a u g h t e r s

September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

~ William Wordsworth

GO and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find’st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she … Continue Reading

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid … Continue Reading

You air that serves me breath to
speak!

You objects that call from
diffusion my meanings and
give them shape!

You that wraps me and all
things in delicate equible
showers!

You paths worn in irregular
hollows by the roadsides!

I believe you are latent with
unseen existences, you are
so dear to me.

—WALT WHITMAN

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, … Continue Reading

Like shadow across a stone,
gradually–
the name it darkens;

as one enters the world
through language–
like a child learning to speak
then naming
everything; as flower,

the neglected hydrangea
endlessly blossoming–
year after year
each bloom a blue refrain; as

the syllables of birdcall
coalescing in the trees,
repeating
a single word:
forgets;

as the dead bird’s bright signature–
days after you buried it–
a single red feather
on the window glass

in the middle of your reflection.

~ Natasha Trethewey 

If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other, may the
reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before him.

— Jorge Luis Borges
Foreword to his first book of poems

After they go to the podium and turn in their Happy Bucks
and recite the Pledge of Allegiance
and the Four Truths (“Is it the Truth?
Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill
and better friendships? Will it be beneficial
to all concerned?”), I get up to read my poetry,

and when I’m finished, one Rotarian expresses
understandable confusion at exactly what it is
I’m doing … Continue Reading

When my mother’s third husband took me
thirty years ago to see his daughter
from his first marriage
smash the cymbals
with the high-school marching band,
he told me to be nice afterward because
she was “slow,”
which is not the same as retarded, he explained,
though I doubted the difference
as soon as the people in the bleachers
all around us began to point and laugh at the obese girl
who turned the wrong way and wandered
toward the goal posts, banging the cymbals at her whim, then
ran to rejoin the drum
line, completing circles at right angles,
forming figure eights at intersections,
bumping oboe players; one time falling down.
She twice tried suicide that … Continue Reading

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong … Continue Reading

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

~ Lucille Clifton

Blondin made a fortune walking back and forth
over Niagara Falls on a tightrope—blindfolded,
or inside a sack, or pushing a wheelbarrow, or perched on stilts,
or lugging a man on his back.  Once, halfway across,
he sat down to cook and eat an omelette.

Houdini, dumped into Lake Michigan chained
and locked in a weighted trunk, swam back to the boat
a few moments later.  He could swallow more than a hundred needles
and some thread, then pull from between his lips
the needles dangling at even intervals.

I can close my eyes and see your house
explode in a brilliant flash, silently,
with a complete absence of vibration. And when I … Continue Reading