Some summer nights you
can hear them getting all
worked up over this idea
of cheerfulness and song.

Deep in the grasses where
they hide, there is a need
to be heard in the darkness,
even if their voices are

so small they sound
like a door creaking on
its hinge, or the squeak
a drawer makes when

it opens up at last.
It seems as if the damp
air and dew are trying
to hold their song down

out of sheer gravity,
but neither dampness nor
darkness makes them stop.
In fact, the crickets like

to show off their song,
to let it lift up off
the earth the way that
all notes rise to the stars,

and float up through the
thick night, as if their
joy itself were the only light
we needed to follow.
 
~ from The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999 (Louisiana State University Press, 1999

Low wail of night and its unseen chitterings, sweeps of tail 
        on dead leaves, slow
rustle and creep of ferns.

The dark on it’s own terms and us	
        racked out in a room
reeked with cedar and shaved wood, this handmade cabin.
	Two windows, the pitch		

of hot night, the creaky lean of spruce and fir.  We’re restless,	
        years stacked behind like kindling.
Where have we left to go, together?

	Two shrieks pack the dark; bird call, a human
timbre and panic.  The night endures, slips onward, becomes all sound,
	slick of stream-burrowed branches, rivulets tunnelling
thin-skinned trucks; drip, slide—

	still outside’s parched and brittle, holds its breath,
waiting for rain.

At light, under the rattle and gab of waxwings and crows,	
        we find the river’s source in swells of sawdust
like sugar on the russet floor; carpenter ants, their constant fluid chewing.
	Glossy heads big as thumbnails.

Morning expounds this	
        mystery— but what of those other walls
	        we’ll lean an arm through—

~ from Cityscapes in Mating Season (Signature Editions, 2017)

You want there to be a separate god for owls, for the barred, the burrowing, the saw whet, the spotted, the great-horned, the barn owl whose gaze draws your gaze to his wide face and you see yourself, pale, uncanny. You want this god to keep the owls from harm so the night will be lavishly feathered. Their wings in flight will row through the waters of your sleep and you’ll sense the dip and rise of them, the sky riddled with eyes. You want this god to instruct them not to scoop a cat into the sky, or a family’s only chicken. You want the slow unrolling of the owls’ vowels to slip into your speaking. So much, so little they have to say. You want the owls’ silence to be this god’s silence, one that doesn’t mean there’s no one there, but a refined and honed attention, a keen listening high above you, and a steady looking down.

~ from God of Shadows (McClelland and Stewart, 2018)

I was sitting cross-legged one morning         

in our sunny new meditation room

wondering if it would be okay

to invite our out-of-town guest

to Frank’s dinner party next weekend

when it occurred to me

that I wasn’t really meditating at all.

In fact, I had never meditated            

in our sunny new meditation room.

I had just sat cross-legged     

now and then for 15 or 20 minutes

worrying about one thing or another,

how the world will end

or what to get Alice for her birthday.

It would make more sense                 

to rename the meditation room

our new exercise room

and to replace all the candles,

incense holders, and the little statues

with two ten-pound hand weights

and a towel in case I broke a sweat.

Then I pictured the new room
with nothing in it but a folded white towel,
and a pair of numbered hand weights –
an image of such simplicity
that the sustaining of it
as I sat cross-legged under a tall window,
my palms open weightlessly on my bare knees,

made me wonder if I wasn’t actually,
meditating for a moment then and there
in our former meditation room,

where the sun seemed to be brightening

as it suffused with light the grain

in the planks of that room’s gleaming floor.

~ from The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016)

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

~from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1998)

It begins at the Chinese place
on Spring Street,
our first date.
Though the dish looks good,
I cannot eat.
He scrapes my leftovers
to the sidewalk
for his patient old Lab,
waiting by the restaurant door.
I have that queasy, excited feeling,
when you know something
is about to happen.
 
~ from Night Ringing (Headmistress Press, 2016)

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

~ from In Praise of Mortality, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29;
(Riverhead Books, 2005) translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

I have stopped being the heroine	
of my bad dreams.  The melodramas		
of betrayal and narrow escapes
from which I wake up grateful
for an unexciting life
are starring my troubled young friend
or one of my daughters.  I’m not the one
who swims too far out to sea;
I am the one who waves from shore		
vainly and in despair.
Life is what happens to someone else;
I stand on the sidelines and wring my hands.
Strange that my dreams should have accepted	
the minor role I’ve been cast in
by stories since stories began.
Does that mean I have solved my life?
I’m still afraid in my dreams, but not for myself.
Fear gets rededicated	
with a new stone that bears a needier name.

~ from Alive Together  (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

~ from The Healing Time: Finally On My Way to Yes  
(Pudding House Publications, 2008)

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,  
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek 
across the sky made me think about my life, the places 
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief 
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling, 
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place. 
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold 
for a brief while, then lose it all each November. 
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst 
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves 
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields, 
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds. 
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find 
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks. 
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can. 
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

~ from Radiance (Word Press, 2005)

If you put your hands on this oar with me, 
they will never harm another, and they will come to find 
they hold everything you want. 

If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer 
lift anything to your 
mouth that might wound your precious land – 
that sacred earth that is your body. 

If you put your soul against this oar with me, 
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew 
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm 
that lives in us. 

Exuberant is existence, time a husk. 
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space; 
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give. 

Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and the future? 
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities 
will find no rest. 

Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies. 
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. 
You will come to see that all evolves us. 

~from Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East 
and West by Daniel Ladinsky (Penguin Books, 2002)

If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

~from Against Which  (CavanKerry Press Ltd. 2006)

Dreaming the dead back to life: pleasure & gentleness.
Grateful for this miracle, this bubble of reunion.

Harps bounce & hum there in the firmament.
The fundament. Coining likenesses. Did you say something?

Bricks crumb, bones powder: this helps make potting soil.
Clay reproduces! Ploughs heal the fields they wound.

Today we trim the rabbit’s nails upside the hutch,
Nail up the bat-house, baptize each other with the hose.

I’m flame. A flag going up a flagpole. I’m
The beetle dropped by the mother bird, picked up again.

The heart’s a tomato with lips. Woodpeckers tap hosannas.
Sleepy blips & explosions fleck love's radar screen.

Something rises. Something drops. Elastic days!
Tonight the window’s black with possibility.

~ from Field of Light and Shadow (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, 2010)

You began to love in times of disgust.
Close at hand there was no tree, no sign 	
of a living stem or flower, and when there was no 
  reason to sing
it was your laughter, jubilant, rousing, saying: There 
  is someone here
alive—joyful!  And many, so many, then were lying curled 
  up and fearful
in grimy shadow and you began to love without dousing the 
  light of the carbide
and went down to the boat that threatened to break up at sea, 
  and you conceived
against doctor’s orders.  Unannounced, you strode the dead streets,
marching—all forty-five kilos of you!—as if on a victory parade
of life flowing beneath the surface of all
the words, like a fountain flowing, cascading
with confidence, telling no lies.

~  from SLOAN-KETTERING, translated by Eddie Levenston, Schocken Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York, 2002)

Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
these feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
the red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
drunkenly around in the kitchen . . .
put it all in,
make use.

~ from A New Path To The Waterfall (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989)

My beard is thick, my eyelids half cover
My eyes, as with those who know the value
Of visible things. I keep quiet as is proper
For a man who has learned that the human heart
Holds more than speech does. I have left behind
My native land, home, and public office.
Not that I looked for profit or adventure.
I am no foreigner on board a ship.
My plain face, the face of a tax-collector,
Merchant, or soldier, makes me one of the crowd.
Nor do I refuse to pay due homage
To local gods. And I eat what others eat.
About myself, this much will suffice.

~Selected Poems 1931-2004 (HarperCollins, 2006)

The sick wife stayed in the car
while he bought a few groceries.
Not yet fifty,
she had learned what it’s like
not to be able to button a button.

It was the middle of the day—
and so only mothers with small children
and retired couples
stepped through the muddy parking lot.

Dry cleaning swung and gleamed on hangers
in the cars of the prosperous.
How easily they moved—
with such freedom,
even the old and relatively infirm.

The windows began to steam up.
The cars on either side of her
pulled away so briskly
that it made her sick at heart.

~ from Collected Poems (Greywolf Press, 2005)

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

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

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

~ From Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins 2001)

Some days the words pass us,	
cars loaded with vacationers.
We are not going where they are going.
Soon as they top the hill	
we’ll be on the lost road again,
shouting once, then listening,
kicking a stone towards
anything like a tree.

Then the first language crawls back	
into the ears, humming.
A twig scratches two words	
in damp red earth:
NO   THOUGHT.
I’m looking for cedar stumps,	
a black calf in a blue field,
anything to report
that has nothing to do with my life.

I’m looking for the rusted skillet	
hunters left hanging on a branch.
Years after they sighed in firelight	
the tree claims their old iron
as another natural arm.

~ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems 
(Far Corner Books, 1995)