That Will to Divest

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning: once
you've swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you've begun.

~Kay Ryan

Possible Answers to Prayer

Your petitions—though they continue to bear

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent

entertainment value—nonetheless serve

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly

righteous indignation toward the many

whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

~Scott Cairns

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

~Robert Frost

Sands

1

Dry. The wind is parched by the wind.

The stars are machines whose needlepoints

Stab through the throat. Crazed by thirst,

That dog must be killed. Don't cry. Please don't.

It's a waste of water. Yes, I know

The sand is hotter than you can stand,

But, surely, since we have come this far. . . .

2

You'd be surprised

How the body endures

Suffering. What else can it do?

Oh, the mind. That's different. Close your eyes,

And just keep going. Did I ever tell

You stories of Cortez, Ghenghis Khan,

And Hannibal--quite ordinary men?

If we stop now, it will be hard in

The morning. Think of the risk of sun.

3

I'm sorry I said that. Concentrate

On images and dreams, on wanted things

Like streams, springs, and rivulets. . . .

It makes it worse? Think of nothing, then,

But the blood that flows from head to foot

And back, of the brain's banked oxygen,

Of how footfall must follow tread,

If you will it to. You can stand the pain.

Do it for my sake. I ask again.

4

I think the path has become obscure.

The map's inaccurate. I cannot read

The compass because the flashlight's failed,

And we're out of matches. Besides, I think

It was off last time. It's hard to be sure.

Have faith in me. Have faith in me.

Think of all those who have gone before.

5

There must be a country somewhere right now

Of rain, of snow, of golden wind

Where in the rushes, all that play

of watery hazards takes the mind.

And that must be the country of joy,

That country that we will never find.

Or perhaps we will. Now we must rest,

Before the sand makes us blind.

6

Only so many miles to go,

And ages in which to do it. So

I like to think. The dog is dead.

I swear

There should be water soon.

We must wait. And wait. The sun's too high.

We'll begin again at the end of day.

7

My darling,

Not to have made it is

To kill, and kill,

And be killed again.

Now, only your body lies

In my bodiless arms,

So dead, so still,

And there is the oasis, up ahead.

~Howard Moss

Burning Love Letters

1

Fire that cancels all that is

Devours paper and pen,

And makes of the heart's histories

A cold hearth warm again.

It could as well consume a branch,

Blank paper or black coal

That now, in ashy avalanche,

Scatters the heart whole.

2

What words led to the end of words?

Coldly, all separate sighs

Shiver in flame, flying upwards,

Merged into burnt lies.

In somersaults of light, words burn

To nothingness, then roll

In dead scrolls, delicate as fern,

Or hiss like a waterfall.

3

From partial feast to total fast,

From object to mirage,

An animal that cannot last

Appears in fire's cage:

Love's crazy dog in a cold sweat,

Far from its neighborhood,

Circles the puzzle of regret,

On fire in the wood.

4

Love's ashes lie and will not rise

As fire dies to a black sun

And makes of the heart's histories

A warm hearth cold again.

Cremation's scattered dust confronts

Dead vision, and in these

Ashes I write your name once,

Bending on cold knees.

~Howard Moss

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

~Robert Lowell

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
~Robert Frost