Poetry

For a Dog

Ryan Wilson

You’d wake us up—that shrill, insistent bark
Driving away whatever dreams had fogged
Our vision—and we’d rise in the true dark,

All We Are Not

Geri Doran

Offshore, beyond the breakwater, past guiding pylons,
where the bottom sand drops to depth and the fog collects
dense and more wet—

There

Rush Rankin

The ineffable and haunting sublimated

Concave Decades

Steve Barbaro

But of the many, many (the un-sundry, soap-glossy) plates at hand

Quadratic

Steve Barbaro

So with the thickly throaty, curt finality of a deity

Next Moment

Marie Borroff

Tentative, the finger of the mind
Dabbles the water, future. The water wavers,
Assumes all shapes in seeming, but, being water,
Releases all, remains yet undefined;

Ars Poetica

Marie Borroff

He who would frame the corded lyre must take
Not of his bone, but some more steadfast thing;
There is no bended rib of body’s make
To stretch such string.

Noah’s Flood

The Gawain Poet

Translated by Marie Borroff

Then from the bowels of the abyss boiled up the big waters;
Each wellhead spewed wide its wild-racing torrent;
No bank but burst apart, by river or pool;

December Morning

W. S. Merwin

 

How did I come to this late happiness
as I wake into my remaining days
another morning in my life with Paula
taking me by surprise like the first one

Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud

W. S. Merwin

 

         Because I do not hope ever again
to pass this way I sing these
notes now in silence
each in its own time

Here Together

W. S. Merwin

 

These days I can see us clinging to each other
as we are swept along by the current
I am clinging to you to keep you from
being swept away and you are clinging to me

Losing a Language

W. S. Merwin

 

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

Native

W. S. Merwin

 

Most afternoons
of this year which is written as a number
in my own hand
on the white plastic labels

Humpty Dumpty

W.H. Auden  

From the Review, Autumn 1993.

Half February

Charles Wright  

St. Valentine’s. Winter is in us.
Hard to be faithful to summer’s bulge and buzz
in such a medicine.