Resurrection

By Margaret Tongue

For Viktor Vida

It is like angels -
A glass leopard stirring
In the depths of sleep -
It is like that.

It is like children
Staring at the winter sun
As if through a slender glass,
Through a narrow throat;
It is like that.
It is spiralling upwards
In crystal,
It is quiet, like air
Moving between crystal glasses;
It is like
It is like that.

Why at me?
Your nearness, a sword
Of glass, pierces my dreams.
Children stare like this
At the darkening sun.

When I dive into deeper dreams
Spiralling upwards,
In chrystal, in flight,
The leopard stirs.
It is like that.

It is like angels.
I start, because
Dear fingers are waking me -
Like air, your nearness.
It is like
It is like that.

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

By John Keats

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's--he takes the lead
In summer luxury,--he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

The Wheelchair Butterfly

By James Tate

O sleepy city of reeling wheelchairs
where a mouse can commit suicide if he can

concentrate long enough
on the history book of rodents
in this underground town

of electrical wheelchairs!
The girl who is always pregnant and bruised
like a pear

rides her many-stickered bicycle
backward up the staircase
of the abandoned trolleybarn.

Yesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze
in midair; and was plucked like a grape
by a child who swore he could take care

of it. O confident city where
the seeds of poppies pass for carfare,

where the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart
may slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge

in an orange garage of daydreams,
we wait in our loose attics for a new season

as if for an ice-cream truck.
An Indian pony crosses the plains
whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas.
Honeysuckle says: I thought I could swim.

The Mayor is urinating on the wrong side
of the street! A dandelion sends off sparks:
beware your hair is locked!

Beware the trumpet wants a glass of water!
Beware a velvet tabernacle!

Beware the Warden of Light has married
an old piece of string!

Lines 153 to 208, Book V of Paradise Lost

By John Milton

These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almightie, thine this universal Frame,
Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sitst above these Heavens
To us invisible or dimly seen
In these thy lowest works, yet these declare
Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine:
Speak yee who best can tell, ye Sons of Light,
Angels, for yee behold him, and with songs
And choral symphonies, Day without Night,
Circle his Throne rejoycing, yee in Heav'n,
On Earth joyn all ye Creatures to extoll
Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.
Fairest of Starrs, last in the train of Night,
If better thou belong not to the dawn,
Sure pledge of day, that crownst the smiling Morn
With thy bright Circlet, praise him in thy Spheare
While day arises, that sweet hour of Prime.
Thou Sun, of this great World both Eye and Soule,
Acknowledge him thy Greater, sound his praise
In thy eternal course, both when thou climb'st,
And when high Noon hast gaind, and when thou fallst.
Moon, that now meetst the orient Sun, now fli'st
With the fixt Starrs, fixt in thir Orb that flies,
And yee five other wandring Fires that move
In mystic Dance not without Song, resound
His praise, who out of Darkness call'd up Light.
Aire, and ye Elements the eldest birth
Of Natures Womb, that in quaternion run
Perpetual Circle, multiform; and mix
And nourish all things, let your ceasless change
Varie to our great Maker still new praise.
Ye Mists and Exhalations that now rise
From Hill or steaming Lake, duskie or grey,
Till the Sun paint your fleecie skirts with Gold,
In honour to the Worlds great Author rise,
Whether to deck with Clouds th' uncolourd skie,
Or wet the thirstie Earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.
His praise ye Winds, that from four Quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of Worship wave.
Fountains and yee, that warble, as ye flow,
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
Joyn voices all ye living Souls; ye Birds,
That singing up to Heaven Gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise;
Yee that in Waters glide, and yee that walk
The Earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep;
Witness if I be silent, Morn or Eeven,
To Hill, or Valley, Fountain, or fresh shade
Made vocal by my Song, and taught his praise.
Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us onely good; and if the night
Have gathered aught of evil or conceald,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark.

To the Lacedemonians

By Allen Tate

The people - people of my kind, my own
People but strange with a white light
In the face: the streets hard with motion
And the hard eyes that look one way.
Listen! the high whining tone
Of the motors, I hear the dull commotion:
I am come, a child in an old play.

I am here with a secret in the night;
Because I am here the dead wear gray.

It is a privelege to be dead; for you
Cannot know what absence is nor seize
The odour of pure distance until
From you, slowly dying in the head,
All sights and sounds of the moment, all
The life of sweet intimacy shall fall
Like a swift at dusk.

Sheer time! Stroke of the heart
Towards retirement. . . .

Gentlemen, my secret is
Damnation: where have they, the citizens, all
Come from? They were not born in my father's
House, nor in their fathers': on a street corner
By motion sired, not born; by rest dismayed.
The tempest will unwind - the hurricane
Consider, knowing its end, the headlong pace?
I have watched it and endured it, I have delayed
Judgment: it warn't in my time, by God, so
That the mere breed absorbed the generation!

Yet I, hollow head, do see but little;
Old man: no memory: aimless distractions.

I was a boy, I never knew cessation
Of the bright course of blood along the vein;
Moved, an old dog by me, to field and stream
In the speaking ease of the fall rain;
When I was a boy the light on the hills
Was there because I could see it, not because
Some special gift of God had put it there.
Men expect too much, do too little,
Put the contraption before the accomplishment,
Lack skill of the interior mind
To fashion dignity with shapes of air.
Luxury, yes - but not elegance!
Where have they come from?

Go you tell them
That we their servants, well-trained, gray-coated
Gray-haired (both foot and horse) or in
The grave, them obey . . . obey them,
What commands?

My father said
that everything but kin was less than kind.
The young men like swine argue for a rind,
A flimsy shell to put their weakness in;
Will-less, ruled by what they cannot see;
Hunched like savages in a rotten tree
They wait for the thunder to speak: Union!
That joins their seperate fear.

I fought
But did not care; a leg shot off at Bethel,
Given up for dead; but knew neither shell-shock
Nor any self-indulgence. Well may war be
Terrible to those who have nothing to gain

For the illumination of the sense:
When the peace is a trade route, figures
For the budget, reduction of population,
Life grown sullen and immense
Lusts after immunity to pain.

There is no civilization without death;
There is now the wind for breath.

Waken, lords and ladies gay, we cried,
And marched to Cedar Run and Malvern Hill,
Kinsmen and friends from Texas to the Tide -
Vain chivalry of the personal will!

Waken, we shouted, lords and ladies gay,
We go to win the precincts of the light,
Unshadowing restriction of our day . . . .
Regard, now, in the seventy years of night,

Them, the young who watch us from the curbs:
They hold the glaze of wonder in their stare -
Our crooked backs, hands fetid as old herbs,
The tallow eyes, wax face, the foreign hair!

Soldiers, march! we shall not fight again
The Yankees with our guns well-aimed and rammed -
All are born Yankees of the race of men
And this, too, now the country of the damned:

Poor bodies crowding round us! The white face
Eyeless with eyesight only, the modern power -
Huddled sublimities of time and space,
They are the echoes of a ringing tower

That reared its moment upon a gone land,
Pouring a long cold wrath into the mind -
Damned souls, running the way of sand
Into the destination of the wind!

The City Limits

A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

The Life

Li Young lee

My son grows limp
and heavy in my arms,
and I don't need to see his face
to know his eyes are closed,
his jaw hangs slack.
After hours of rocking, and pacing, and humming --
not a melody, but what
he likes, the single syllable his grandmother
has intoned to him since his birth, a monotone
nasal wail approaching mourning --
he's asleep, and I'm too tired
to get up from his chair, too dazed
to close my eyes, so keep
gaping out the window at the winter
sky, an hour ago black, now a deep blue,
and even as I think this, becoming
gray, the color changing
so fast, the light
coming so furiously that I think if I close my eyes and listen
I might hear grind
the great soft heart
of the sky. I close my eyes.
I listen.

I hear not the sky,
but the sea, or someone breathing near me,
and I watch
a boy ascend a ladder
into a ceiling of water, having slipped
out of his father's lap and arms, and replacing
his precise weight there

with an earthen jar,
having fooled his poor father,
whose sleep has finally come
after long bitterness, after hours
of hard thoughts about winter,
and money, and the exhaustions of fathers,
and the exhaustions of sons, and their loves
and trusts that shall be breached,
and all of our essential, human separateness.

It is a depthless hour of sweet sleep
as the man's brow unwrinkles,
as if a hand had smoothed it,
the way a hand does a crushed
ball of paper, opens it,
smoothes it, and smooths it,
as the poet might
begin again
his poem.