make a book of a thousand good poems

The God Abandons Antony

When suddenly at midnight you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly;
as one long prepared and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of the coward;
listen – your final pleasure – to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- C.P. Cavafy

Another Westminster Bridge

go and glimpse the lovely inattentive water
discarding the gaze of many a bored street walker

where the weather trespasses into strip-lit offices
through tiny windows into tiny thoughts and authorities

and the soft beseeching tapping of typewriters

take hold of a breath-width instant, stare
at water which is already elsewhere
in a scrapwork of flashes and glittery flutters
and regular waves of apparently motionless motion

under the teetering structures of administration

where a million shut-away eyes glance once
restlessly at the river’s ruts and glints

count five, then wander swiftly
away over the stone wing-bone of the city.

- Alice Oswald

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave;
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said;
my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt; the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed; hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say; those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

- Adrienne Rich

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

- Ted Kooser

The Book of the Desert

Which we will never stop reading
Which is inked in no-color and dust
Which is the angry brother of the book of the sky
Which swallows our horses
Which is crosshatched with hunger
Whose covers cannot be closed
Which has more pages with every year
Which waits buried in sand
Whose rhythms are like the rhythm of the slowest dance
Which is crosshatched with stars
Which we cannot carry, but which comes with us, after us
Which is also a wolf, a field of grass frozen to the root
Which is the unceasing answer to the ocean
Which is written in the language of winter
Which is crosshatched with carelessness
Whose rhythms are staccato, fall harshly on our ears
Which brings the black famine and the white famine
and the famine of the hoof
Which is a gullet, swallowing, a feast of clean bone.

- MC Hyland

Giving a Box of Books Away

Little caskets of my former dreams,
I feed you back into the Ganges
of living perceptions, extravagant
longings, that life, no matter how
scattered, buffeted, ridden by floods
of feeling and need, can’t do without.
Let somebody else finish Tasso.
Let somebody else put the citadel
of Plutarch, the shield of Proust
on the shelf above his bed to protect him
from a life without extravagant hope.
My underlinings in Freud, my shouts
in the margins of Dostoyevsky, my first
edition of Goodbye Wisconsin, my
Swap and Go: Home Exchanging
As a Way of Life, as the way of my life
becomes clear and less cluttered,
I set afloat in the sleepy bulrushes
of the delta like a child I couldn’t keep.
Good-bye ambitions, good-bye to keeping
around what even memory lets go.
The sea greets us like a long-lost friend
while gigantic mountains of cumulonimbus
collapse and inflate across the sky.

- Roger Mitchell

Your Laughter

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
fat times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

- Pablo Neruda

A Secret Life

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that’s unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It’s why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who’ll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

- Stephen Dunn

Prayer for a Marriage

For Kathleen

When we are old one night and the moon
arcs over the house like an antique
China saucer and the teacup sun

follows somewhere far behind
I hope the stars deepen to a shine
so bright you could read by it

if you liked and the sadnesses
we will have known go away
for awhile – in this hour or two

before sleep – and that we kiss
standing in the kitchen not fighting
gravity so much as embodying

its sweet force, and I hope we kiss
like we do today knowing so much
good is said in this primitive tongue

from the wild first surprising ones
to the lower dizzy ten thousand
infinity slower ones – and I hope

while we stand there in the kitchen
making tea and kissing, the whistle
of the teapot wakes the neighbors.

- Steve Scafidi

The Alchemy of Love

You come to us
from another world

From beyond the stars
and void of space.
Transcendent, Pure,
Of unimaginable beauty,
Bringing with you
the essence of love

You transform all
who are touched by you.
Mundane concerns,
troubles, and sorrows
dissolve in your presence,
Bringing joy
to ruler and ruled
To peasant and king

You bewilder us
with your grace.
All evils
transform into
goodness.

You are the master alchemist.

You light the fire of love
in earth and sky
in heart and soul
of every being.

Through your loving
existence and nonexistence merge.
All opposites unite.
All that is profane
becomes sacred again.

- Rumi