It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us. 

~ from Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977)

Evening and it is always like this:  
half-answered prayers offered up again
in a new light, disappointment magnified 
through repetition.  There is a photo of you

outdoors looking skyward, jaw softened    
with shadow, silhouette of fir trees across
your chest, you in a window, you always
behind something, eyes cast up, that search.

I want to tell you it is not beyond,    
that thin plate of glass is bullshit armor.
I want to smash it because this love    
turned into a mission when I wasn’t looking.

I want destruction to make something good happen    
once and for all, to say look down, outward,

find me.

~ from Going Around with Bachelors (Brick Books, 2007)

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've sought out corner bars, lived in corner houses;    
  like everyone else I've reserved  
corner tables, thinking they'd be sufficient.     
  I've met at corners  
perceived as crossroads, loved to find love     
  leaning against a lamp post  
but have known the abruptness of corners too, 
  the pivot, the silence.  
I've sat in corners at parties hoping for someone     
  who knew the virtue  
of both distance and close quarters, someone with a     
  corner person's taste  for intimacy, hard won, rising out of 
shyness  and desire.  
  And I've turned corners there was no going back to,     
corners  in the middle of a room that led     
  to Spain or solitude.  
And always the thin line between corner     
  and cornered,  
the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies     
  that permit no repose,  
the places we retreat to, the places we can't bear     
  to be found.  

~ from New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994  
(W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)

All the curtains     

are gone: moonlight

drifts across the floor

like a loose band-aid.

The corners of rooms  

are angels with walls

for wings wearing halos

made by spiders.

There are empty clothes

hangers hanging in the closet

bobbing gently in place

like ducks sleeping on water.

~from Breathing Fire, edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane

(Nightwood Editions, 2004)

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one-
not knowing even
that was what he did-
in the blowing
sounds in he dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

~ from The Lives of the Heart (Harper Perrenial, 1997)

I kiss a book sometimes    
like a bride or the gospel
or the land, after wild seas
grant me a man again.

The things we love!
women, the truth, planets—

like flowers through ruins
like brides through deserts
like shore through murderous mist

out of wreckage and rancor.  Somehow!

~ from Poetry Magazine, (October, 1967)

Tapping me on the back, the night says,
“Don’t stay home.
Go look for what you lost yesterday.”
What I lost yesterday
resembles what I had lost the day before yesterday,
and what I lost the day before yesterday,
resembles what I had lost the day before that:

The backside of the board slipping down perpetually;
something that vanishes each time I go looking for it;
the nightly thirst while I’m walking along roads full of chuckholes
carrying an empty bag.

Perhaps it is something small.
Perhaps it is visible, perhaps invisible.
Perhaps it is something like a right.

I dream that the bag is too heavy for me to carry,
and when weightless morning comes I do it all over again.
Today I found
an utter stranger looking
for the same article that I had lost.

~ from What Have You Lost, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye (HarperCollins, 1999)

Sometimes
In the tangled boughs
Of the jasmine tree
And sometimes
On the green emerald floor
A nightingale sings
The poignant melodies
Of love.
From the vast treeless plains
Carried by the evening’s dust-clouds
Come the joyous sounds
Of people returning home.
Mustard fields stretch
Towards the horizon.
Wild roses and green swaying wheat.
The cacophony of birds
On the ancestral tree
In my courtyard.
The houses and their inmates
Stand amazed.
The village-wilderness
Turns into a perfumed garden.

(translated by Daud Kamal)
~from This Same Sky, Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye 
(Aladdin Paperbacks, 1996)

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’ve come back to the country where I was happy 
changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now. 
I wonder what will take the place of desire. 
I could be the ghost of my own life returning 
to the places I lived best. Walking here and there, 
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply. 
Now I’m in my house listening to the owls calling 
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again.

~ from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996)

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never 
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea, 
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

~ from 180 more,  Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, selected by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005)

All was taken away from you: white dresses, 
wings, even existence. 
Yet I believe you, 
messengers. 

There, where the world is turned inside out, 
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts, 
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams. 

Short is your stay here: 
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear, 
in a melody repeated by a bird, 
or in the smell of apples at close of day 
when the light makes the orchards magic. 

They say somebody has invented you 
but to me this does not sound convincing 
for the humans invented themselves as well. 

The voice— no doubt it is a valid proof, 
as it can belong only to radiant creatures, 
weightless and winged (after all, why not?), 
girdled with the lightening. 

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep 
and, what is strange, I understood more or less 
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue: 

day draw near 
another one 
do what you can. 

~ from New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 (Ecco HarperCollins 1988)

Duped by the moon    
a woman walks into snow and knows
at once what she once was.
Feathers return to the hollow   
above her shoulder blades, 
gravity swoops from the earth
into the sky
and she soars upward
head turning like an owl’s,
eyes big enough to see a vole 
sleeping in it’s soft
sarcophagus of snow;
when she swerves
to look at what’s behind
she glimpses
through the farmhouse window
her daughter, her white-haired
husband and the old 
amnesiac who is her father
dumbly waiting at the table
she had set,
their empty plates
shining from this height
as if the moon itself
had been sliced like a winter turnip
and could serve no better purpose
than to hold what they would eat.

~ from The Wrong Cat (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)

Merely to name them is the prose 
Of diarists, to make you a name 
For readers who like travellers praise 
Their beds and beaches as the same; 
But islands can only exist 
If we have loved them. I seek, 
As climate seeks its style, to write 
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, 
Cold as the curved wave, ordinary 
As a tumbler of island water; 
Yet, like a diarist, thereafter 
I savour their salt-hunted rooms 
(Your body stirring the creased sea 
Of crumpled sheets), whose mirrors lose 
Our huddled, sleeping images, 
Like words which love had hoped to use 
Erased with the surf's pages. 

So, like a diarist in sand, 
I mark the peace with which you graced 
Particular islands, descending 
A narrow stair to light the lamps 
Against the night surf's noises, shielding 
A leaping mantle with one hand, 
Or simply scaling fish for supper, 
Onions, jack-fish, bread, red snapper; 
And on each kiss the harsh sea-taste, 
And how by moonlight you were made 
To study most the surf's unyielding 
Patience though it seems a waste.

~ from Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

Idling in traffic, bass jacked 
all the way up, the car shuddering, 
the driver pretending not to notice,
his friends nodding to the beat—how easy
it is to hate them when you’re standing
out in the sun on the sidewalk, or some
country road in early spring.  And then
you’re the one in the car.
A song takes you back, let’s you touch 
what you couldn’t reach in silence.
Which means the song should be played    

again and louder, as if that were the way 
to live with disappointment.  Perhaps
the soul is divided like this,
half desiring to hear itself listening,
half needing to be seized
and overwhelmed.  And each remains fearful
of the other, the one who might
at any moment do something foolish—
the way a man suddenly drives
his car off the road, while someone else
just stands there, and watches it happen.

~ from The History of Forgetting (Penguin Books, 2009)

Saturday evening grows
darker as the teapot
whistles. I get a mug,
humming, and breathe
the ancient scent,
faintly familiar.

Every summer we
gathered the young
jasmine leaves, while I sang
songs that I learned in school.
On sunny days, she spread
the leaves out in the back
yard where I sat and dreamt
the scent of long winter
nights beside the hot stove.
Immense warmth calms my throat

as I hear
what’s not there anymore.
Mama’s dead: someone else
is picking the leaves,
drinking my tea
in nights of winter.

~ translated by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from This Same Sky, A Collection of Poems from around the World, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

Oh, the dream!  The dream!
My sturdy gilded wagon
has collapsed,
its wheels have scattered like gypsies.
One night I dreamt of spring
and when I woke
flowers covered my pillow.
I dreamt once of the sea.
In the morning my bed was rich
with shells and fins.
But when I dreamt of freedom
spears surrounded my neck
with morning’s halo.

From now on you will not find me
at ports or among trains
but in public libraries
sleeping head down on the maps of the world
as the orphan sleeps on pavement
where my lips will touch more than one river
and my tears stream from continent 
to continent.

~ translated by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from This Same Sky, A Collection of Poems from around the World, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

fallen willow warrior guardian of the bay and sky torqued by water and winter a prayer scrawled on the wind weed trees— willows don’t last they glory pollarded and scarred living to shelter and dance wild in storm and light old wounds grown over cored in earth and heartwood until the fall reflection shatters and after— sinking, out beyond the shore a sprawl of dying branches witness shoots birthing digging in the green bank hungry to root and soar. ~from Still Dances (2015)

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression, jotting down little things, noticing a leaf being carried down a stream, then wondering what will become of me, and finally to work alone under a lamp as if everything depended on this, groping blindly down a page, like someone lost in a forest. And to think it all began one night on the steps of a nunnery where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket, which was doubling for a proper baby carrier, staring into the turbulent winter sky, too young to wonder about anything including my recent abandonment— but it was there that I committed my first act of self-expression, sticking out my infant tongue and receiving in return (I can see it now) a large, pristine snowflake much like any other. ~ from Aimless Love, New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013)