All Poems
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The Silver Swan
© Pierre Reverdy
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
“Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”
The Chinaman
© Anonymous
What brings you here, John Chinaman,
Why come to New South Wales?
Why do you sail when breezes fan
The north side of your sails?
Viewing Cac-Co Cavern
© Ho Xuan Huong
Heaven and earth brought forth this rocky mass
its face cut by a deep crevasse
The Pool
© Robert Creeley
My embarrassment at his nakedness,
at the pool’s edge,
and my wife, with his,
standing, watching—
Lenton Communion
© Katharine Tynan
Rest in a friend's house, Dear, I pray:
The way is long to Good Friday,
And very chill and grey the way.
Little Air
© Stéphane Mallarme
Any solitude
Without a swan or quai
Mirrors its disuse
In the look I abdicate
Height In Depth
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
HE turned his face apart, and gave a sigh
And a strange whimpersuch a pitiful thing
Weltende Variation #I
© Bill Knott
(homage Jacob van Hoddis)
The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick
"Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant"
© André Breton
Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Memorandum
© William Stanley Merwin
Save these words for a while because
of something they remind you of
although you cannot remember
what that is a sense that is part
dust and part the light of morning
Plain Language From Truthful James
© Francis Bret Harte
Which I wish to remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,
Which the same I would rise to explain.
from “An Attempt at Jealousy”
© Marina Tsvetaeva
How is your life with that other one?
Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars
and a long coastline—
and the memory of me
She Does Not Remember
© Anna Swirszczynska
She was an evil stepmother.
In her old age she is slowly dying
in an empty hovel.
