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 god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

~ Billy Collins

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

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, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

~ Shel Silverstein

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 and wants to know what poetry is, exactly,
so I tell him that when most non-poets think
of the word “poetry,” they think of “lyric poetry,”
not “narrative poetry,” whereas what I’m doing

is “narrative poetry” of the kind performed
by, not that I am in any way comparing myself
to them, Homer, Dante, and Milton,
and he’s liking this, he’s smiling and nodding,
and when I finish my little speech,
he shouts, “Thank you, Doctor! Thank you

for educating us!” And for the purposes
of this poem, he will be known hereafter
as the Nice Rotarian. But now while I was reading,
there was this other Rotarian who kept talking
all the time, just jacked his jaw right through
the poet’s presentations of some of the finest

vers libre available to today’s listening audience,
and he shall be known hereafter as the Loud Rotarian.
Nice Rotarian, Loud Rotarian: it’s kind of like Good Cop,
Bad Cop or Buy Low, Sell High. Win Some,
Lose Some. Comme Ci, Comme Ça. Half Empty,
Half Full. Merchant Copy, Customer Copy.

But in a sense the Loud Rotarian was the honest one;
he didn’t like my poetry and said so — not in so many words,
but in the words he used to his tablemates
as he spoke of his golf game or theirs
or the weather or the market or, most likely,
some good deed that he was the spearchucker on,

the poobah, the mucky-muck, the head honcho,
for one thing I learned very quickly
was that Rotarians are absolutely nuts
doctors to Africa
and take handicapped kids on fishing trips
and just generally either do all sorts of hands-on

projects themselves or else raise a ton of money
so they can get somebody else to do it for them,
whereas virtually every poet I know, myself included,
spends his time either trying to get a line right
or else feeling sorry for himself and maybe writing a check
once a year to the United Way if the United Way’s lucky.

The Nice Rotarian was probably just agreeing with me,
just swapping the geese and fish of his words
with the bright mirrors and pretty beads of mine,
for how queer it is to be understood by someone
on the subject of anything, given that,
as Norman 0. Brown says, the meaning of things

is not in the things themselves but between them,
as it surely was that time those kids scared us so bad
in Paris: Barbara and I had got on the wrong train, see,
and when it stopped, it wasn’t at the station
two blocks from our apartment but one
that was twenty miles outside of the city,

and we looked for someone to tell us how
to get back, but the trains had pretty much stopped
for the evening, and then out of the dark
swaggered four Tunisian teenagers,
and as three of them circled us, the fourth
stepped up and asked the universal ice-breaker,

i. e., Q.: Do you have a cigarette?
A.: Non, je ne fume pas.
Q.: You’re not French, are you?
A.: Non, je suis americain. Q.: From New York?
A.: Non, Florida. Q: Miami?
A.: Non, une petite ville qui s’appelle Tallahassee

dans le nord de…. And here the Tunisian kid
mimes a quarterback passing and says. Ah,
l’université avec la bonne équipe de futbol!
He was a fan of FSU sports, of all things
so we talked football for a while, and then
he told us where to go for the last train.

Change one little thing in my life or theirs
and they or I could have been either the Loud Rotarian
or the Nice one, and so I say to Rotarians everywhere,
please forgive me,
my brothers, for what I have done to you
and to myself as well,

for circumstances so influence us
that it is more an accident
than anything else that you are listening to me
and not the other way around,
and therefore I beg your forgiveness my friends,
if I wrote this poem before you did.

~ David Kirby

~  Matthew Deshe Cashion

~ Sharon Olds

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

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 open them again,
my heart in my mouth, everything is standing
just as before, but not as if nothing had happened.

~ Jonathan Aaron

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn’t sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.

~ Larry Levis

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come
to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what
is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded
night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action,
I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to
look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are
doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just
bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck
the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You
are a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think
these things of me even if he’s not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer
and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

~ Marie Howe