Two years ago, my father
Died. What love we had
Hidden under misery,
Weighed down with years
Of silence.
 
And now,
Maybe the poem can free
Us, maybe the poem can express
The love and let the rest
Slide to the earth as the snow
Does now, freeing the tree
Of its burden. 

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but . . .
 
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music? 

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.
 
And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.
 
No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.

~ from Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Light, so low upon earth, 
   You send a flash to the sun. 
Here is the golden close of love, 
   All my wooing is done. 
O all the woods and the meadows, 
   Woods where we hid from the wet, 
Stiles where we stay’d to be kind, 
   Meadows in which we met! 
Light, so low in the vale 
   You flash and lighten afar:
For this is the golden morning of love, 
   And you are his morning star. 
Flash, I am coming, I come, 
   By meadow and stile and wood:
Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, 
   Into my heart and my blood! 
Heart, are you great enough 
   For a love that never tires? 
O heart, are you great enough for love? 
   I have heard of thorns and briers. 
Over the thorns and briers,  
   Over the meadows and stiles, 
Over the world to the end of it 
   Flash of a million miles. 

~ This poem is in the public domain

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

~ Preface to Leaves of Grass, Public Domain.

In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive. 
That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth. 
That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire. 
When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.
That the searching of our minds 
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
glimmering in fugitive light. 

~from To Bless The Space Between Us (Harmony, 2008)

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer's smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

~ from Al Que Quiere! A Book of Poems 

Light, so low upon earth, 
   You send a flash to the sun. 
Here is the golden close of love, 
   All my wooing is done. 
O all the woods and the meadows, 
   Woods where we hid from the wet, 
Stiles where we stay’d to be kind, 
   Meadows in which we met! 
Light, so low in the vale 
   You flash and lighten afar:
For this is the golden morning of love, 
   And you are his morning star. 
Flash, I am coming, I come, 
   By meadow and stile and wood:
Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, 
   Into my heart and my blood! 
Heart, are you great enough 
   For a love that never tires? 
O heart, are you great enough for love? 
   I have heard of thorns and briers. 
Over the thorns and briers,  
   Over the meadows and stiles, 
Over the world to the end of it 
   Flash of a million miles. 

~ This poem is in the public domain

One of the women greeted me. 
I love you, she said. She didn’t 
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache 
Rolled over in my chest, 
Like in a room where the drapes 
Have been swept back. I love you, 
I love you, as she continued 
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly 
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every 
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring. 
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song 
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you, 
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past 
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—
O Miraculous Many Gone—
O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—
Is this love the trouble you promised? 

~from The New Yorker, June 5 &12, 2017 issue (book “Wade in the Water” to be published in 2018

I’m sure you will be very happy with this bra, Madam,	
she said, her manicure seriously red as she tapped the till.
Of course I did not ask her how she knew.

Who is rude enough to challenge the clairvoyant,	
the diagnostician, the prognosticator?
But she was right.  As soon as she folded up		

the lacy garment—its ticket swinging insouciantly—
and handed it across the counter
in its raspberry-pink bag, my spirits rose.

Outside, traffic parted for me like the red Sea:	
the sun appeared and gilded passers-by
who nervously returned y random smiles.

The days, the weeks, wore on in a numinous haze	
of goodwill.  Who knows why?  Be cynical if you must:
I only record the sequence of events.

~ from Choosing to be a Swan (Bloodaxe Books, 1994)

Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers,
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

~from Morning Poems (HarperCollins, 1997)

Forget 
the long, smouldering 
afternoon. It is 

this moment 
when the ball scoots 
off the edge 

of the bat; upwards, 
backwards, falling 
seemingly 

beyond him 
yet he reaches 
and picks it 

out 
of its loop 
like 

an apple
from a branch, 
the first of the season. 

~from Heaven on Earth, edited by Wendy Cope (Faber and Faber, 2001)

I can be alone,
I know how to be alone.

There is a tacit understanding
between my pencils
and the trees outside;
between the rain
and my luminous hair.

The tea is boiling:
my golden zone,
my pure burning amber.

I can be alone,
I know how to be alone.
By tea-light
I write

(translated from the Romanian by Eva Feller and Nina Cassian)

~from Heaven on Earth, edited by Wendy Cope (Faber and Faber, 2001)

It is time
We stand like children
On the silent beach
And calmly wait for the moon
Nothing has been lost on the moon today
A banana kazoo
Sucked between the lips of night
Is no longer blowing out of tune

Crisscrossed boughs set up an easel
The moon wearing a pure white suncap
Slowly comes over like a shy boy
Holding a transparent nylon net
With which to scavenge the ocean
Of it’s many broken hearts
Bobbing on the sea to the horizon

~ translated by Edward Morin and Dennis Ding, from This Same Sky, Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye (Aladdin Paperbacks, 1996

the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm   
comforting silence around
us and read separate books

i remember the first time
i consciously saw her
we were living in a three room   
apartment on burns avenue

mommy always sat in the dark
i don’t know how i knew that but she did

that night i stumbled into the kitchen
maybe because i’ve always been
a night person or perhaps because i had wet
the bed
she was sitting on a chair
the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through   
  tiny window panes   
she may have been smoking but maybe not
her hair was three-quarters her height
which made me a strong believer in the samson myth   
and very black

i’m sure i just hung there by the door
i remember thinking: what a beautiful lady
she was very deliberately waiting
perhaps for my father to come home   
from his night job or maybe for a dream
that had promised to come by   
“come here” she said “i’ll teach you   
a poem: i see the moon
               the moon sees me
               god bless the moon
               and god bless me”   
i taught it to my son
who recited it for her
just to say we must learn   
to bear the pleasures
as we have borne the pains

~ from Love Poems (William Morrow and Co, 1997)

The storm is over; too bad I say.
   At least storms are clear	
about their dangerous intent.

Ordinary days are what I fear, 	
   the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun

shining while a government darkens
   a decade, or a man
falls out of love.  I fear the solace

of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.
   Someone is singing	
in Portugal.  Here the mockingbird

is a crow and a grackle, then a cat.
   So many things	
happening at once.  If I decide

to turn over my desk, go privately wild,
   trash the house,
no one across town will know.

I must insist how disturbing this is—	
   the necessity 
of going public, of being a fool.

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

after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
after boarding up all the windows and doors;

after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
after building my house on the rock of no,
inaccessible to flattery and fear;

after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
after hurling handfuls of silence 
and monosyllable of scorn at my loves;

after forgetting my name;
and the name of my birthplace;
and the name of my race;

after judging and sentencing myself
to perpetual waiting,
and perpetual loneliness, I heard
against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms,

the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.

~ from Teaching With Fire; Sam Intrator, Megan Scribner, editors (Jossey-Bass, 2003)

Women standing
drawn in their dailiness
the steam from the iron
flowing towards the horizon
Women of the family
faces stiffened into an inherited
sweetness in the portrait
where the artist paces
painting the calm water of their eyes
eyes of the maiden
or the silent mother
blessed by the sound of white sheets
flapping in the emptiness of a sharp breeze.
Women fixed forever by a wise eye
as wise as their hands that invent a happiness
that life itself would deny them.

~ from Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 81, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2010, 183-185

I lie in the palm of its hand. I wake in the quiet	
separate from the air that’s moving the trees outside.
I walk on its path, fall asleep in it’s darkness.
Loud sounds produce this silence.  One of the markers	
of the unknown, a thing in itself.  To say
When I was in love gives birth to something else.
I walk on it’s path.  the food I put in my mouth.
The girl I was riding her horse is not a memory	
of desire.  It is the place where the unknown 
was hovering.  The shadow in the cleavage	
where two mountains met.  The dark trees
and the shade and moving shadows there
where the top of the mountain stops and meets
the light much bigger than it is.
Its weight against all the light.  A birthplace	
of the unknown, the quick, the invisible.
I would get off my horse and lie down there,	
let the wind from the ocean blow the high grass over
my body, be hidden with it, be one of its secrets.

~from All of It Singing  (Graywolf Press, 2008)

So here I am again hanging out clothes
as the sun goes down.  I always mis-time that last laundry load
so I’m sending it out on the line into the dark.  
I look like a crazy woman doing this.  
People hang clothes in the morning.
I know this.

But alone on the back porch hanging up clothes in the dark,
I reason with myself out loud:
What can happen to clothes in the dark air 
that we are afraid to leave them overnight?
Will they be gone in the morning 
because we let the dark have them?
Will the dark cling to our clothes like vapors, 
making us do unpredictable things when we wear them?

I decide I’m past the worrying point.
I’m standing here in the dark hanging up clothes, 
talking to myself about whether hanging up clothes
in the dark is going to make me do insane things.

I look at all the things I’ve hung up so far, and figure 
they could be made whiter than white with the light
from the stars.  But why waste all that darkness?
I have a blue shirt that faded a bit 
the last time it was washed.  I hang it up last.
I figure it will soak up a little midnight 
and be really stunning by the time the sun comes up.

~from The Spirits Need To Eat (Nine-Patch Press, 1999)

why
is what i ask myself
maybe it is the afrikan in me
still trying to get home
after all these years
but when i wake to the heat of morning
galloping down the highway of my life
something hopeful rises in me
rises and runs me out into the road
and i lob my fierce thigh high
over the rump of the day and honey
i ride i ride 

~ from Blessing the Boats, New and Selected Poems 
1988-2000 (BOA Editions, Ltd, 2000)

The beautiful boy with rain in his voice	
could do it.  Put it all into three lines.		
Then he would sing it, and pieces	
of mystery would suddenly shift,
reveal themselves over guitar strings.
So, too, should the poet be able.  Call		
up Orpheus, make him do his little jig
for you.  Three lines to sum up your life.
Your whole world through your back		
window.  Grind of the 11 Bus going by.
That hour in the morning when the left	
foot of a dream steps into your daylight.
But what they really want is Korea, what	
it means to you.  
Easier to describe wind	
down a hallway.  How it marries the dark
smell of nighttime, the yellow purr of your 
desk lamp.  There.  There is place in that
and meaning.  Those words alone must do.

~ from The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home (Holy Cow Press, 2013)