the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

[My prime of youth is but a frost of cares]

© Chidiock Tichborne

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

For My Wife

© Wesley McNair

How were we to know, leaving your two kids

behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon

Unholy Sonnet 1

© Mark Jarman

I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what’s the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

Men at My Father’s Funeral

© William Matthews

The ones his age who shook my hand
on their way out sent fear along
my arm like heroin. These weren’t
men mute about their feelings,
or what’s a body language for?

In the Fog

© Plato

I stared into the valley: it was gone—
wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained,
gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one.

Inscription for a Gravestone

© Robinson Jeffers

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:

That is to say,

The Pattern

© Robert Creeley

As soon as
I speak, I
speaks. It

Some Assembly Required

Standing in line at the SuperSave, it all falls

Into place, Princess Di and the aliens and diet

Come Up from the Fields Father

© Walt Whitman

Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

The Bitterness of Children

© Thomas Lux

Foreseeing typographical errors
on their gravestones, the children
from infancy—are bitter.
Little clairvoyants, blond, in terror.

His death in Benares

© Kabir

his front yard
is the true Benares
— Devara Dasimayya,
tr. A.K. Ramanujan
His death in Benares
Won’t save the assassin
From certain hell,

A Little Called Pauline

A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.
A little lace makes boils. This is not true.