Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Down by the Salley Gardens

by W.B. Yeats

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

This Be the Verse

by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle

by Mary Szybist

Are you sure this blue is the same as the blue over there? This wall’s like the bottom of a pool, its color I mean. I need a darker two-piece this summer, the kind with elastic at the waist so it actually fits. I can’t find her hands. Where does this gold go? It’s like the angel’s giving her a little piece of honeycomb to eat. I don’t see why God doesn’t just come down and kiss her himself. This is the red of that lipstick we saw at the mall. This piece of her neck could fit into the light part of the sky. I think this is a piece of water. What kind of queen? You mean right here? And are we supposed to believe she can suddenly talk angel? Who thought this stuff up? I wish I had a velvet bikini. That flower’s the color of the veins in my grandmother’s hands. I wish we could walk into that garden and pick an X-ray to float on. Yeah. I do too. I’d say a zillion yeses to anyone for that.

“The sky is low, the clouds are mean...”

by Emily Dickinson

The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A traveling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if it will go. A narrow wind complains all day How some one treated him; Nature, like us, is sometimes caught Without her diadem.

Affirmation

by Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

The Philosopher

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

And what are you that, wanting you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you, As many days as crawl I should be listening to the wind And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man And twenty men as kind, And what are you, that you should be The one man in my mind?

Yet women's ways are witless ways, As any sage will tell, — And what am I, that I should love So wisely and so well?

Imagination

by James Baldwin

Imagination creates the situation, and, then, the situation creates imagination.

It may, of course, be the other way around: Columbus was discovered by what he found.

The Dead Woman

by Michael Bazzett

Her teeth were blue. Not bright blue by any stretch. More like she’d been eating blueberries and her teeth had gotten stained, perhaps because her enamel had been rendered more porous due to the lemon curd, and then a team of experts had arrived, removing their jackets and rolling up their sleeves to use their tiny brushes to scrub her teeth with some kind of gritty paste, yet that blue tint had nonetheless hung on. Yes. It was more like something white remembering the idea of blue than blue itself. Other than that, she was perfectly normal. Her slightly heathered sweater, her jeans, the way her hair fell across her eyes and needed to be tucked in tendrils behind her ears, but then she’d smile and a slight chill would fall across the room.

This is how we knew she had already died at least once. Maybe twice. Yet she had no idea. She would hold her wine and toss her hair and smile and say, Maybe I’ll call my next book The Bible so I know my mother will read it! And we would laugh jovially while still feeling a slight whinge somewhere in our bodies, a place near the liver, under organs we could not possibly name.

Yet occasionally, if the night was cold and wine emptied easily from the bottle as we tore rough hunks from the baguette, she’d say things that made us wonder, like, “Sometimes I just get so sick of all this stuff, you know? I walk into a store to buy deodorant and eighty dollars later I’m holding all this stuff made by children in Malaysia or Guatemala and I think, What is the point?”

Or, “Yesterday, driving home from yoga, I passed this woman standing at a bus stop, completely resigned, and I thought, How long has it been since she’s felt totally alive? You know? Like when is the last time someone walked up behind her and traced his finger along her shoulder because he happened to think she was beautiful?” The blue of her teeth disappeared in these late-night ruminations, swallowed up by the dusky candlelight. It was possible to think she was just a young woman, her life still unfurling before her while the rest of us traded quiet glances, knowing all her tenderness had never really had a chance.

Two Things

by Langston Hughes

Two things possess the power, Two things deserve the name, Two things can reawaken Perpetually the flame. Two things are full of wonder, Two things cast off all shame.

One is known by the name of Death. And the other has no name Except the name each gives it — In no single mouth the same.

September

by Grace Paley

Then the flowers became very wild because it was early September and they had nothing to lose they tossed their colors every which way over the garden wall splattering the lawn shoving their wild orange red rain-disheveled faces into my window without shame

The Life You Could Be Living (if You Weren’t Living This One)

by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

The life you could be living aches in its compression, tires of being a spark, an asteroid, a falling raindrop bouncing when it hits. It’s wound tight between muscle and sinew, lodged in the happy gaps of a synapse. It’s fluid like flowers. It sounds like geese out of sight. It’s marvelous as falling asleep when exhausted, and it foreshadows your dreams like a stray piece of sunlight or an unnoticed icicle.

Pull apart the paper vignettes and subtle understandings. Find a favorite shoe lost decades ago, a line to an old song, and behind that, the melody that once made you lift your arms and twirl in your childhood bedroom after dark.

This life startles you with its foreign tongue of traumas and kisses, its vulnerable eyes staring into yours for mercy as it lies down beside you, tries to say — although it doesn’t know your language — that it’s okay how it turned out, that it’s still here, and despite its wish to be lived, it’s not going anywhere.

Celestial Music

by Louise Glück

I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god, she thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth, she's unusually competent. Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it. I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality. But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes. Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out according to nature. For my sake, she intervened, brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness -- My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person --

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking on the same road, except it's winter now; she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music: look up, she says. When I look up, nothing. Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees like brides leaping to a great height -- Then I'm afraid for her; I see her caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth --

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set; from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall. It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact that we're at ease with death, with solitude. My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move. She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image capable of life apart from her. We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering -- it's this stillness that we both love. The love of form is a love of endings.

The Rider

by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.

To the Light of September

by W.S. Merwin

When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later

you who fly with them

you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

A Sad Child

by Margaret Atwood

You’re sad because you’re sad. It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep.

Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. Take up dancing to forget.

Forget what? Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you the day of the lawn party when you came inside flushed with the sun, your mouth sulky with sugar, in your new dress with the ribbon and the ice-cream smear, and said to yourself in the bathroom, I am not the favorite child.

My darling, when it comes right down to it and the light fails and the fog rolls in and you’re trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or burning car,

and the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside you head or else the floor, or else the pillow, none of us is; or else we all are.

For a Five-Year-Old

by Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill into your room, after a night of rain. You call me in to see, and I explain that it would be unkind to leave it there: it might crawl to the floor; we must take care that no one squashes it. You understand, and carry it outside, with careful hand, to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails: your gentleness is moulded still by words from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds, from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed your closest relatives, and who purveyed the harshest kind of truth to many another. But that is how things are: I am your mother, and we are kind to snails.

Dust of Snow

by Robert Frost

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

Grief

by Raymond Carver

Woke up early this morning and from my bed looked far across the Strait to see a small boat moving through the choppy water, a single running light on. Remembered my friend who used to shout his dead wife’s name from the hilltops around Perugia. Who set a plate for her at his simple table long after she was gone. And opened the windows so she could have fresh air. Such display I found embarrassing. So did his other friends. I couldn’t see it. Not until this morning.