All Poems

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Shore Scene

© John Logan

There were bees about. From the start I thought

The day was apt to hurt. There is a high

Amoretti LV: So oft as I her beauty do behold

Then needs another element inquire
Whereof she might be made; that is, the sky.
For to the heaven her haughty looks aspire,
And eke her love is pure immortal high.
Then since to heaven ye likened are the best,
Be like in mercy as in all the rest.

Numbers

© Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

The Jew and the Rooster Are One

© Gerald Stern

After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters

he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

© Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

Amoretti I: Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands

© Edmund Spenser

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,

Which hold my life in their dead doing might

Terminus

© Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is time to be old,

To take in sail:

Hands

© Robinson Jeffers

Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara

The vault of rock is painted with hands,

from The Bridge: The Dance

© Hart Crane

The swift red flesh, a winter king
Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?
She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;
She spouted arms; she rose with maizeto die.

How We Were Introduced

© Zbigniew Herbert

—for perfidious protectors
I was playing in the street
no one paid attention to me
as I made forms out of sand
mumbling Rimbaud under my breath

“How well do I recall that walk in state”

© James Fenton

from Sonnets, Third Series

V

Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

© William Shakespeare

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

Harvest Song

© Jean Toomer

My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields
of other harvesters.

Incantation Against Lilith

© Pierre Reverdy

Veiled in velvet, is she here?
Leave off, leave off:
You shall not enter,
you shall not emerge.
It is neither yours nor your share.

Sonnets from the Portuguese 1: I Thought how Theocritus

I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,

Four-Leaf Clover

I know a place where the sun is like gold,
And the cherry blooms burst with snow,
And down underneath is the loveliest nook,
Where the four-leaf clovers grow.

Moly

© Thom Gunn

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.

I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

On Gut

Gut eats all day and lechers all the night;
So all his meat he tasteth over twice;
And, striving so to double his delight,
He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice.
Thus in his belly can he change a sin:
Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in.