In Italy, on the day of the dead, 
they ring bells,
from every church and village in every direction.
At the usual times, the regular bells of the hour—
eleven strokes, twelve.  Oar strokes
laid over the bottomless water and air.
But the others?  Tuneless, keyless,  
rhythm of wings at the door of the hive 
when the entrance is suddenly shuttered
and the bees, returned heavy, see
that the world of flowering and pollen is over.
There can be no instruction  
to make this.  Undimensioned
the tongues of the bells,
the ropes of the bells, their big iron bodies unholy.
Barred from form. Barred from bars, 
from relation.  The beauty—unspeakable—
was beauty.  I drank it and thirsted, 
I stopped.  I ran.  Wanted closer in every direction.
Each bell stroke released without memory  
or judgment, unviolent, untender.  Uncaring.
And yet: existent.  Something trembling.
I— who have not known bombardment—
have never heard so naked a claim
of the dead on the living, to know them.

~ from The Beauty (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

If someone asks
My abode
I reply:
"The east edge of
The Milky Way."

Like a drifting cloud,
Bound by nothing:
I just let go
Giving myself up
To the whim of the wind
	
      translated by John Stevens

~ from Art and Wonder, An Illustrated Anthology of Visionary Poetry (Bullfinch Press, 1996)

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.
As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won't shut.
These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you're climbing out of yourself.
If you're going to smash into the sky.

Many times I've gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking upward,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor:
small plants and swans bending
into their grave.
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
birds to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand:
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something —
some useful door —
somewhere —
up there.

~ from The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin, 1975)

(translated by Jane Kenyon)  

Though this land is not my own
I will never forget it,
or the waters of its ocean,
fresh and delicately icy.

Sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine.
Late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pine trees.

And the sun goes down in waves of ether
in such a way that I can't tell
if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.

~ from Art and Wonder; An Illustrated Anthology of Visionary Poetry (Bullfinch Press, 1996)

Committee Meeting.       Burden of Proof.
              The Simple Truth.      Trying To Be Nice.
 Honestly.   I Could Have Died.      I Almost Cried.
          It's Only a Cold Sore.
    It's My Night.     Trust Me.    Dead Serious.
 I Have Everything All Under Control.
             I'm Famous For My Honesty.
       I'm Simply Beside Myself.      We're On The Same Page. 
            Let's Not Reinvent The Wheel.
 For The Time Being.   There Is That.
                  I'm Not Just Saying That.
    I Just Couldn't Help Myself.          I Mean It.

~ from Ecstatic (Allbook Books, 2007)

The fields look empty, 
landing strips for light.
Primed for plurality, for excess, 
we beg for more, hungry
for the shiver of light and dark.
It’s what the world teaches: 
a hundred excuses
for beauty, our minds oiled
with gorgeousness, the fields
not really empty
but so full they seem so: 
wheat rustles on wheat.

~ from Mortal Arguments (Brick Books, 2007)

 for George Whalley 

An hour after the storm on Birch Lake 
the island bristles. Rock. Leaves still falling. 
At this time, in the hour after lightning 
we release the canoes. 
Silence of water 
purer than the silence of rock. 
A paddle touches itself. We move 
over blind mercury, feel the muscle 
within the river, the blade 
weave in dark water. 

Now each casual word is precisely chosen 
passed from bow to stern, as if 
leaning back to pass a canteen. 
There are echoes, repercussions of water. 
We are in absolute landscape, 
among names that fold in onto themselves. 

To circle the island means witnessing 
the blue grey dust of a heron 
released out of the trees. 
So the dialogue slides 
nothing more than friendship 
an old song we break into 
not needing all the words. 

We are past naming the country. 
The reflections are never there 
without us, without the exhaustion 
of water and trees after storm.

~from The Cinnamon Peeler (Vintage International, 1997)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

I never lived far from my country.
However I suffer from farness.
In my childhood my mother had the illness.
She was the one who gave it to me.
Later my father went to work at a place
that gave this illness to people.
It was a place without a name or neighbors.
People said it was the nail on the toe at the end of the world.
We grew up without any other houses nearby.
A place that offered only birds, trees, a river and its fish.
There were unbridled horses in the scrub grass,
their backs covered with butterflies.
The rest was only distance.
Distance was an empty thing we carried in the eye,
what my father called exile.

~ from Birds for a Demolition,  translated from the 
Portuguese by Idra Novey.  (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

~ from Daily Horoscopes (Graywolf Press, 1986)

A man walks through his life
as he did when he was a boy,
taking a pear here, an apple there,
three peaches.

It is easy. They are there, by the roadside.

I want to say to him, stop.
I want to say to him, where is the plum tree you planted?

But how can I say this?
I suck on the pit of my own question,
I who also eat daily the labor of others.

~ from After (HarperCollins, 2006)

The calm days of September with their sun. 
It’s time to harvest.
There are still clumps 
of cranberries in the woods, reddening rosehips 
by the stone walls, hazelnuts coming loose, 
and clusters of blackberries shine in the bushes; 
thrushes look around for the last currents 
and wasps fasten on to the sweetening plums.
I set a ladder aside at dusk, and hang 
my basket up in the shed.  The glaciers
all have a thin sprinkling of new snow.  In bed
I hear the brisling fishermen start their motors 
and go out.  They’ll pass the whole night
gliding over the fjord behind their powerful searchlights.

~ from The Winged Energy of Delight, Selected Translations 
by Robert Bly (Perennial, 2004)

The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderline of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.

~from The Winged Energy of Delight, poems from Europe, Asia and the Americas, translated by Robert Bly (HarperCollins, 2004)

It isn’t winter that brings it 
out, my cowardice,
but the thickening summer I wallow in
right now, stinking of lilacs, green 
with worms & stamens duplicating themselves 
each one the same

I squat among rows of seeds and impostors 
and snout my hand into the juicy dirt: 
charred chicken bones, rusted nails, 
dogbones, stones, stove ashes.
Down there is another hand, yours, hopeless,  
down there is a future
in which you’re a white white picture
with a name I forgot to write 
underneath, and no date,

in which you’re a suit
hanging with its stubs of sleeves
in a cupboard in a house
in a city I’ve never entered,

a missed beat in space
which nevertheless unrolls itself
as usual.  As usual:
that’s why I don’t want to go on with this.

(I’ll want to make a hole in the earth 
the size of an implosion, a leaf, a dwarf
star, a cave
in time that opens back and back into
absolute darkness and at last
into a small pale moon of light
the size of a hand,
I’ll want to call you out of the grave 
in the form of anything at all)		

~ from Poetry by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Your friend is coming, I say 
to Percy and name a name

and he runs to the door, his
wide mouth in its laugh-shape,

and waves, since he has one, his tail.
Emerson, I am trying to live, 

as you said we must, the examined life.
But there are days I wish  

there was less in my head to examine,
not to speak of the busy heart.  How

would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not
thinking, not weighting anything, just running forward.

~  from Dog Songs (The Penguin Press, 2013)

Walk as far as you can,
then farther, past
the chain-link barring the road, 
tire tracks deep as the rut of your mind, 
the place you always get stuck.
Wanting more, or wanting
less, to be rid of the word 
called wanting. Boulders, 
tall grass, shrubs you can't name, 
birds you can't name,
the ocean. Being a stranger sneaks you through 
the latch of language — briefly. Bottles, you know.
Condoms, you know. And the weight 
of being human where other humans have been. 
Back of the sea like one line of thought, 
slight variation of foam at the shore 
where artifice gives itself up. Farther out, 
a ledge in the rock 
as though attention might help. Turning 
for home, hands in your pockets, night mists in 
like animal breath, the black-brown shapes 
of gathering mammals
bending to drink at the silent pool 
of mind submerged in the mind. 
If a gap in awareness exists, it's there 
you might have slipped through.

~ from Breathing Fire 2 (Nightwood Editions 2004)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

The dead end that I dreaded
confronts me in this
true statement!

It’s apt, manageable, but 
valid only in its locked cabinet.
There’s no finality out here: a sphere 
too vast, too growthful, too
mischievous’ subject as well to swellings, violent
combustion, whizzings off
along the light-years.

There’s too much 
of us for us to know.
But closing heart, and ear 
is a terminus I 
fear, too.
	We slam 
into it, often, though knowing is a peril 
almost as terrible as 
never being sure
where
the dead end will
appear.

~ from Concrete and Wild Carrot (Brick Books, 2005)

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.

  

I like the domesticity of addition—
 
add two cups of milk and stir—
 
the sense of plenty: six plums
 
on the ground, three more
 
falling from the tree.
  


And multiplication's school
 
of fish times fish,
 
whose silver bodies breed
 
beneath the shadow
 
of a boat.

  

Even subtraction is never loss,
 
just addition somewhere else:
 
five sparrows take away two,
 
the two in someone else's
 
garden now.

  

There's an amplitude to long division,
 
as it opens Chinese take-out
 
box by paper box, 
inside every folded cookie
 
a new fortune.

  

And I never fail to be surprised 
 
by the gift of an odd remainder,
 
footloose at the end:
 
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
 
with three remaining.

  

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
 
two Italians off to the sea,
 
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.  

~ from Red Studio (Oberlin College Press, 2007)

The frog half fearful jumps across the path, 
And little mouse that leaves its hole at eve 
Nimbles with timid dread beneath the swath; 
My rustling steps awhile their joys deceive, 
Till past,—and then the cricket sings more strong, 
And grasshoppers in merry moods still wear 
The short night weary with their fretting song. 
Up from behind the molehill jumps the hare, 
Cheat of his chosen bed, and from the bank 
The yellowhammer flutters in short fears 
From off its nest hid in the grasses rank, 
And drops again when no more noise it hears.
 
Thus nature's human link and endless thrall,
 
Proud man, still seems the enemy of all.  

~ from Poems (Ulan Press, 2012)