Clear Morning

--Louise Glück

I've watched you long enough,

I can speak to you any way I like--

I've submitted to your preferences, observing patiently

the things you love, speaking

through vehicles only, in

details of earth, as you prefer,

tendrils

of blue clematis, light,

of early evening--

you would never accept

a voice like mine, indifferent

to the objects you busily name,

your mouths 

smal circles of awe--

All this time

I indulged your limitation, thinking

you would cast it aside yourselves sooner or later,

thinking matter could not absorb your gaze forever--

obstacle of the clematis painting

blue flowers on the porch window--

I cannot go on

restricting myself to images

because you think it is your right

to dispute my meaning:

I am prepared now to force

clarity upon you.

 

Matins

--Louise Glück

The sun shines; by the mailbox, leaves

of the divided birch tree folded, pleated like fins.

Underneath, hollow stems of the white daffodils, Ice Wings,

........Cantatrice; dark

leaves of the wild violet. Noah says

depressives hate the spring, imbalance

between the inner and the outer world. I make

another case — being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately

attached to the living tree, my body

actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace, in the evening rain

almost able to feel

sap frothing and rising: Noah says this is

an error of depressives, identifying

with a tree, whereas the happy heart

wanders the garden like a falling leaf, a figure for

the part, not the whole.

 

Snowdrops

--Louise Glück

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn't expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

 

[ Apple Blossoms ; Octav Bancila ]

 

 

Were the endlessly dead

to awaken some symbol,

within us, to indicate

themselves, they might

point to the catkins

dangling from the leafless

branches of the Hazel trees.

Or speak in drops of rain

falling to dark earth

in early spring.

Then we,

who have known joy

only as it escapes us,

rising to the sky,

would receive the

overwhelming benediction

of happiness descending.

--from Tenth Duino Elegy; Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Hunter)

 

 

 ......even the most visible

of joys cannot be seen

until transformed-within.

Nowhere, beloved, does any

world exist save that within.

Life spends itself in

the act of transformation,

dissolving, bit by bit,

the world as it appeared.

Where stood a solid house

now stands a mental construct,

entirely conceptual, as though

its rafters supported a

rooftop in the very brain.

The spirit of our time has raised

storehouses of infernal powers,

edifices shapeless as the primal force

he wrenches from creation.

Temples are unknown to him.

It is we who try in secret

to perpetuate such wasteful

luxuriance of the heart.

Yes, if one thing survives

before which we genuflected,

which we served or worshiped,

it passes intact into the invisible.

Many, perceiving it no more,

fail to seize the chance to

build it up anew, with greater

pillars and more commanding statues

than in days of yore-within!

--from Seventh Duino Elegy; Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Robert Hunter)

 

Who are these rambling acrobats,

less secure than even we;

twisted since childhood

(for benefit of whom?)

by an unappeasable will?

A will which wrings, bends,

swings, twists and catapults,

catching them when they fall

through slick and polished air

to a threadbare carpet worn

ever thinner by their leaping:

lost carpet of the great beyond,

stuck like a bandage to an earth

bruised by suburban skies.

--from Fifth Duino Elegy; Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Robert Hunter)

 

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke; from The Selected Poetry Of Rainer Maria Rilke: Bilingual Edition [trans. by Stephen Mitchell]

[ Spring Call ; Xu Beihong (1938) ]

 

 

Haiku- Winter 2025/2026

that freight train driving

an obliviousness through

clouds of icy cold

what's brighter than all

the holiday christmas lights,

December's full moon

slowly oh slowly

the garbage can is filling

fresh with white snowfall

my mom's birthday--

all those branches holding strong

the weight of the snow

 

    Let It Be Song

As It Can Be Known

Outside With Yesterday

Snow as a rhythm

of color for the cold,

pale blue tone

that rests the ground 

of a prior time

that had a path

that is now blown

pointless direction,

side-to-side waiver, 

is such a dance, bound

to downward matter.

 

Inside With Today

Every word, each song

to a moment, flutters

this sheltered place 

with fabric emotion

from the cubbyholed

heart and its beating

codes of expression

which, being exaggerated,

also is all awhile waiting

upon a simplification

of silent starlight.

 

A Future With Tomorrow

Leave it to glow slowly

crepuscular, matutinal

and vespertine both,

a depth measured

not by numbers but

abundant light years

fathomed widely as

murmuring sounds,

applaused by shadows,

a distant forever 

timed in with color.

 

[ Melting ; Laszlo Mednyanszky ]

The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog

--Robert Bly

I never intended to have this life, believe me—

It just happened. You know how dogs turn up

At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.

It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice

Your face has become deranged trying to adjust

To it. Your face thought your life would look

Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.

That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.

Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,

Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.

You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,

But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.

Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,

Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.

 

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

and the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,

changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

and then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

--for Guy Davenport; Wendell Berry

 

II. Cardinals

--Kevin Young

Today I do not know

       what the trees will do—

barely believe tomorrow

they will bloom

       whites & blues, the dogwood

winking at you.

Reed about

       my waist. Tomorrow

something will give way—

green will crowd

       the winter out—

but today all brown, the sky

& ground devour

       each other, swallow

us down. What lives

in the buffeting

       must bend.

The cedar out-

lasting winter—

       how it leans, sheds

limbs like a soldier.

 

Intimacy

-Jen Levitt

On the morning of the new Q train, we passed

a woman’s body slumped against a wall. 

White liquid poured from her mouth like snow, 

until the paramedics showed up, for which 

everyone was grateful. In my mind I was busy

riding a Palomino through a forest, solving 

an equation in air. My thoughts hard & soft, 

a terrain. All week I wanted to talk to you 

about this small sad thing, the woman’s purse 

at her side, hands trembling like my horse

at the stream while we looked & kept walking, 

these details, which make up a poem, a life, 

& could help you know me. All this time, 

I wanted you to understand the emptying in me, 

below the earth, where someone was singing.

 

[ Ten P.M. ; Jennifer Bartlett (1992) ]

 

Love in A Flat

--Lauren K. Alleyne

 

after Dean Young

Dean in a story about Coltrane:

how one time in a recording, he hit

a wrong note—a real clam.

In the second take, he hit it again,

this time harder, longer.

The third time, it became the heart—

the sound all the other notes wrap themselves around,

a different understanding of the melody—

the song beneath the song: the stubborn beat

holding up the heaviness of flesh.

 

 

Everything Changes

--Bertolt Brecht (tr. John Willett)

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

 

 

In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.

— from “Winter Hours”; Mary Oliver

 

[ Winter Landscape ; Valerius de Saedeleer ]

 

I Saw Winter's Witches

--Tricia Knoll

More than one, those scraggly black locusts

lining the gravel road to the white farmhouse

and a collapsing barn. Barren: winter unveils

twisted fingers of eerie malaise

planted for fenceposts rumored to

last longer than stone. Suckering up

as toxic clones that scratch wicked

turns of withered phrases on pewter sky.

That fence hems the pasture, last

effort to contain the emptiness

of a low sun setting on fallow pasture. If

winter witch seems too fanciful, 

thorns too cruel, wind too stiff to break,

remember locusts’ white droops

beguile honeybees in soft seasons –

witches hide in green leaf-ery. 

 

 

ice and lights

drawing cards

of mid-winter shuffle

--Tricia Knoll

 

Walking on Water

 --Tricia Knoll

      

Wait for ice to paralyze

the pond, for the crackling

thinness to thicken

so the under-water moans.

Scuffle through rice-snow

where slush went solid

around someone else's boot.

Hike around the hockey rink

and the men and children ice fishing

beside coolers of beer and chips.

Let the lake lure you

away from the eyes of cabins,

from smoke signals

fanning from chimneys.

January's water strider,

as small as the lake makes you

hidden in a hooded coat.

 

 

[ Hope ; George Frederick Watts (1886) ]

 

4

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

--from Mayakovsky; Frank O'Hara

 

Thrilling Conclusion

--Robert Wood Lynn

And when the end came it came silent but clear like bird prints on snow

and no one was surprised to see it arrive

and still friends lingered in doorways letting goodbyes go bad

and chirping cats were fed a second time just to be sure

and the family dogs formed a congress in the woods with the coyotes

and someone was careful to leave bubble wrap for children to burst

and the night watchman pretended his glasses fogged over as we passed

and it turned out the trees were unmemorable

and the government a trick of the light

and it was sorry, the ending, but it didn’t know what for

and it was okay at least as much as we were

and we swam with it in whatever we had on under

and we kissed so hard we clanged teeth

and we ate without speaking

and then at last spoke all at once like an unkinked hose

and then it began, the ending, the way all creatures do, small

and angry at its own misunderstandings.

 

I Hate

--C. K. Williams

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,

nor either that other tangle of recall, regret   

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh   

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,

not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,   

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,   

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,

on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,

mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,

cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,

and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,   

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

 

[ Crystal Gradation ; Paul Klee (1921) ]

 

Of all the people born on earth,

only a thin fraction are alive now. So today and everyday

is international ghost day.

When the dirt whispers,

it is simply your mother

calling in the grey light of dawn, tugging you out

from the soft but insistent hands

of a dream that holds you

in the way light is held

by the icicle.

--from My Body Tells Me What to Do; Michael Bazzett