Poem a Day

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
-What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Caught As We Are

Caught as we are in the human condition —

Subject to vices variously begun —
in curiosity, from nature, or malaise.

Hungry for joy and fed less than our hunger

Charitable when we can save ourselves
from more involvement than we know how to bear.

Simple in our silences, made intricate by vocabularies.
Greedy because we were all once children.

Forgoing because we have read dreams and visions
that do not come to us when we lay the book by.

Loving in desperation, in fear of loneliness.

Begetting in the arsons and Olympics of first love
or in the habituated rutting of the long bed
the children that sadden us to an uneasy tolerance.

Afraid of death in our dying and liberated
only partially by the partial loss of ignorance.

Eager for friendships from which we may demand
what we ourselves give with two motives, if at all.

Suspected by States for our best intuitions.

Solemn at funerals but glad to have outlived
one other as proof that we are, after all, right.

Liars because we must live in what seems possible.

Fools because we lie, and fools again for assuming
the possible to be any more likely than the impossible.

Faithless because our houses are destroyable but not our fears.

Brave because we dare not stop to think. Proud
because we are wrong. Wrathful because we are powerless.

Envious because we are uncertain. Lazy because we were born.

Avaricious because we are afraid. Gluttonous
because bellies are a mother to warm and assure us.

Murderous and adulterous because opportunity and energy
will sometimes be added to motive. Ungrateful
because gratitude is a debt, and because it is easier
to betray our benefactors than to await new benefactions.

Religious because it is dark at night, and because
we have been instructed, and because it is easier to obey
than to believe our senses or to learn to doubt them
exhaustively. Sad because we are as we are,
time-trapped, and because our images of ourselves
and the facts of ourselves wake at night and bicker
and lay bets with one another, with us as the stakes.

Then moved to pity at last because we hear and are saddened

Nearly beautiful in the occasions of our pity not of
ourselves. Nearly affectionate when we are free of pain.

Caught as we are in these and our other conditions —

Which include a distaste for the littleness of our motives,
and, therefore, some wish to live toward some reality.

Terrified by realities. Addicted to evasions. Daring, perhaps
once, to look into the mirror and see and not look away.

Beginning again, then, with those who share with us and
with whom we share the sorrows of the common failure.

Fumbling at last to the language of a sympathy
that can describe, and that will be, we are persuaded,
sufficiently joy when we find in one another its idioms.

Caught as we are in these defining conditions —

I wish us the one fact of ourselves that is inexhaustible
and which, therefore, we need not horde nor begrudge.

Let mercy be its name till its name be found.

And wish that to the mercy that is possible because it takes
nothing from us and may, therefore, be given indifferently,
there be joined the mercy that adds us to one another.

-John Ciardi

Southern Pacific
Huntington sleeps in a house six feet long
Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned,
Huntington dreams of ten thousand men saying: Yes, sir.

Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long.
Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid.
Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir.

Huntington,
Blithery sleep in houses six feet long.
-Carl Sandburg

A week ago on longer clocks than ours
a supernova in Orion lit
the sky like a full moon. The dinosaurs
might have looked up and made a note of it
but didn’t, and the next night it blinked out.
The next day from a metaphoric tree
my father’s father’s beetle brow and snout
poked through the leaves. Just yesterday at three
he spoke his first word. And an hour ago
invented God. And, in the last hour, doubt.

I, because my only clock’s too slow
for less than hope, hope he will not fall out
of time and space at least for one more week
of the long clock. Think, given time enough,
what languages he might yet learn to speak
when the last hairs have withered from his scruff,
when his dark brows unknit and he looks out,
when the last ape has grunted from his throat.

 
-John Ciardi

I reckon—when I count it all—
First—Poets—Then the Sun—
Then Summer—Then the Heaven of God—
And then—the List is done—

But, looking back—the First so seems
To Comprehend the Whole—
The Others look a needless Show—
So I write—Poets—All—

Their Summer—lasts a Solid Year—
They can afford a Sun
The East—would deem extravagant—
And if the Further Heaven—

Be Beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them—
It is too difficult a Grace—
To justify the Dream—

-Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility–
A fairer House than Prose–
More numerous of Windows–
Superior–for Doors–

Of Chambers as the Cedars–
Impregnable of Eye–
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky–

Of Visitors–the fairest–
For Occupation–This–
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise–

-Emily Dickinson

Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists—just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.
-E.B. White

Hope is a waking dream.
-Aristotle

Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.

-Rumi

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

-Iris Murdoch