A Blessing - James Wright
Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Note: N, finally, arrived, bringing real spring weather to these northern latitudes, and made me break into blossom.
Big Book Of Poetry
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The Language - Robert Creeley
Locate I
love you some-
where in
teeth and eyes, bite it but
take care not to hurt, you want so
much so little. Words say everything.
I love you again,
then what is emptiness for. To
fill, fill. I heard words and words full of holes aching. Speech is a mouth.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Nature - Tony Hoagland
I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds
I had when I was ten.
And it has been forever since I pushed my head
under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.
What I had with them was tender and private. The lake was practically my girlfriend. I carried her picture in my front shirt pocket. Even in my sleep, I heard the sound of water.
The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king whose name we could almost remember. Under the rooty bank you could dimly see the bunk beds of the turtles.
Maybe twice had I said a girl's name to myself; I had not yet had my weird first dream of money.
Nobody I know mentions these things anymore. It's as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated among flow charts and complex dinner party calendars.
Now I want to turn and run back the other way barefoot into the underbrush, getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.
Down to the muddy bed of the little stream where my cupped hands make a house, and
I tilt up the roof to look at the face of the frog.
Note: At the end of a day spent wrestling with "flow charts", he secretively reads poetry magazines (this one April/ March issue of The American Poetry Review), and tries to let poems take him back to places including lakes, and creatures, whose memories are going faint in his brain, just like the wetness of water just dispersed from the tongue on a hot summer day.
Big Book Of Poetry
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