Dreaming at the Ballet by Jack Gilbert

Dreaming at the Ballet

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.

They will do anything it’s true.

And the skin is beautifully cared for.

But they have no sense of it. They are

all manner and amazing technique.

I lie with them thinking of your

foolish excess, of you panting

and sweating, and your eyes after.

Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop

Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake.

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,

in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet

of interrupting water comes and goes

and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.

He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains

rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,

he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is

minute and vast and clear. The tide

is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst. 

Who Talks Like That? by Lawrence Joseph

Who Talks Like That?

The Narrows is strips of yellow and jade,

Verrazano Bridge silver, horizontal lines,

here; and here, someone alone, afraid, crying,

sad, sunken eyes, emaciated body; and, here,

the speed of a slap, the strain under the skin;

and this murky and absurdly massive figure

bent over double under an unknown burden;

and this bandaged wound, smudged contours,

body and mind breached;

                                                 and I thought this,

waking early, looking out, the too magnificent

to be described unclouded sky, night still

in the west, the eastern horizon crimson,

melting into blue, light’s solid pact being

forged without apotheosis, Governors Island

lashed by waves, where the two rivers meet.

Who talks like that? I talk like that. Blinding

point of light in which everything converges,

everything is revealed. Dense constellations

of abject suffering, hell-holes, hell-time,

all things associated with what is configured.

Light not only looked at, but the light we have

looked at with, in common with Byzantine

mosaics, iconic, chromatic, glowing, as if

caught by the sunlit sky, revised, added to, a separate

palette kept for each poem, in the present, a presence,

here, a man who watches the woman he loves

as she walks toward him, in Battery Park, in patches

of light, in the birch leaf green, the harbor

bright blue, in pockets of deep green shade.

Idyll by Richie Hofmann

Idyll

Cicadas bury themselves in small mouths

of the tree’s hollow, lie against the bark tongues like amulets,

though it is I who pray I might shake off this skin and be raised

from the ground again. I have nothing

to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess

a body built for love. When the wind grazes

its way toward something colder,

you, too, will be changed. One life abrades

another, rough cloth, expostulation.

When I open my mouth, I am like an insect undressing itself.

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes. 

Her Kind by Anne Sexton

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind. 

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind. 

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

Childlessness by Henri Cole

Childlessness

For many years I wanted a child

though I knew it would only illuminate life

for a time, like a star on a tree; I believed

that happiness would at last assert itself, 

like a bird in a dirty cage, calling me, 

ambassador of flesh, out of the rough

locked ward of sex.

Outstretched on my spool-bed, 

I am like a groom, alternately seeking fusion

with another and resisting engulfment by it.

A son's love for his mother is like a river

dividing the continent to reach the sea: 

I believed that once. When you died, Mother, 

I was alone at last. And then you came back, 

dismal and greedy like the sea, to reclaim me.