The Mill-Pond
by Edward Thomas

The sun blazed while the thunder yet
Added a boom:
A wagtail flickered bright over
The mill-pond's gloom:

Less than the cooing in the alder
Isles of the pool
Sounded the thunder through that plunge
Of waters cool.

Scared starlings on the aspen tip
Past the black mill
Outchattered the stream and the next roar
Far on the hill.

As my feet dangling teased the foam
That slid below
A girl came out.  "Take care!" she said --
Ages ago.

She startled me, standing quite close
Dressed all in white:
Ages ago I was angry till
She passed from sight.

Then the storm burst, and as I crouched
To shelter, how
Beautiful and kind, too, she seemed,
As she does now!

What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

The Silken Tent
by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

The Trees
by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?  No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Advice to the Old (Including Myself)
by Kay Boyle

Do not speak of yourself (for God's sake) even when asked.
Do not dwell on other times as different from the time
Whose air we breathe; or recall books with broken spines
Whose titles died with the old dreams.  Do not resort to
An alphabet of gnarled pain, but speak of the lark's wing
Unbroken, still fluent as the tongue.  Call out the names of stars
Until their metal clangs in the enormous dark.  Yodel your way
Through fields where the dew weeps, but not you, not you.
Have no communion with despair; and, at the end,
Take the old fury in your empty arms, sever its veins,
And beat it fiercely, fiercely to the wild beast's lair.

Catch
by Robert Francis

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, every hand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him
      stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as-possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.

Everything
by Mary Oliver

I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,
      what I mean, that don't go looking for the
laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves. I want to
      keep close and use often words like
heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish
      the question mark and her bold sister

the dash. I want to write with quiet hands. I
      want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daises and everlasting and the
      ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
      cup of astonishment; let them be

songs in which nothing is neglected,
      not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
      and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
      the gladness that says, without any words, everything.

Poetry
by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
                          beyond all this fiddle.
    Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
                          one discovers in
    it after all, a place for the genuine.
        Hands that can grasp, eyes
        that can dilate, hair that can rise
            if it must, these things are important not
                          because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but
                          because they are
    useful.  When they become so derivative as to become
                          unintelligible,
    the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
        do not admire what
        we cannot understand: the bat
            holding on upside down or in quest of
                          something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
                          wolf under
    a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a
                          horse that feels a flea, the base-
    ball fan, the statistician --
        nor is it valid
        to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important.  One
                          must make a distinction
    however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
                          the result is not poetry,
    nor till the poets among us can be
        "literalists of
        the imagination" -- above
            insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in
                          them', shall we have
    it.  In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
    the raw material of poetry in
        all its rawness and
        that which is on the other hand
            genuine, you are interested in poetry.

The Sniffle
by Ogden Nash 

In spite of her sniffle,
Isabel's chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel's chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then, to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle,
But when Isabel's snivelly
She's snivelly civilly,
And when she is snuffly
She's perfectly luffly.

Rooms
by August Kleinzahler

In the sleep that finally gives rest
I take the stairs slowly
out past the azalea dell and bison paddock,
out of view from the meadow,

and down through these rooms once more,
this endless house
under the lawns still wet from mist,
the root systems and mulch,

only to find you at a sales counter
arguing with a Russian woman.
Her English is rough but adequate,
your argument well-reasoned, controlled.

You will in the end prevail.
The salesclerk is charmed by the snatches of Russian
you mix into your conversation,
the garment exchanged for credit.

I seldom find you in these rooms anymore,
certainly not for months.
So when our eyes meet
you look momentarily bemused,

the shiver of surprise softening to pleasure.
You are lovely,
somewhat older than I remember,
business-like in a tailored suit.

Our conversation is courtly,
flirtatious in what we imagine an Old World way.
How strange to encounter you here
in this harsh light, the tableau

of a downtown department store with its cases
of perfumes, gels, and leather goods.
And how inexplicably refreshed I feel afterward
lying here alone,

awakened precisely as our commerce ended
by the shouts of children going to school.  

Tired of the Same Old Job?
by David Meuel 

Then consider a career in poetry.

We're POETEK, an acknowledged leader
in the burgeoning American poetry industry.
We excel in all the proven forms:
historical, pastoral, tragical, and lyrical.
And, if that's not your style, we're also
committed to producing the daring,
irreverent, and no-holds-barred.

We're looking for energetic self-starters,
people who can do as well as dream,
people, perhaps, like you.
We have immediate openings for poets
in our Heroic Couplet, Epic,
and Horatian Ode divisions.
And, to meet exploding customer demand,
we'll soon be staffing up
in our industry-leading Alienation Division.

We'll start you out at $90K,
review your salary every six months,
and give you a great benefits package.
If that isn't enough, we'll set you up
in your own office
with your own expense account
and your own company car.

Keats only dreamed
of soaring with his nightingale.
You can soar with us!


POETEK, an equal opportunity employer.  

True Solar Holiday
by Douglas Crase 

Out of the whim of data,
Out of binary contests driven and stored,
By the law of large numbers and subject to that law
Which in time will correct us like an event,
And from bounce and toss of things that aren't even things,
I've determined the trend I call "you" and know you are real,
Your unwillingness to appear
In all but the least likely worlds, as in this world
Here.  In spite of excursions, despite my expenditures
Ever more anxiously matrixed, ever baroque,
I can prove we have met and I've proved we can do it again
By each error I make where otherwise one couldn't be
Because only an actual randomness
Never admits a mistake.  It's for your sake,
Then (though the stars get lost from the bottle,
Though the bottle unwind), if I linger around in the wrong
Ringing up details, pixel by high bit by bit,
In hopes of you not as integer but at least as the sum
Of all my near misses, divisible,
Once there is time, to an average that poses you perfectly
Like a surprise, unaccidentally credible
Perfectly like a surprise.  Am I really too patient
When this is the only program from which you derive?
Not if you knew how beautiful you will be,
How important it is your discovery dawn on me,
How as long as I keep my attention trained
Then finally the days
Will bow every morning in your direction
As they do to the sun that hosannas upon that horizon
Of which I am witness and not the one farther on:
Set to let me elect you as if there were no other choice,
Choice made like temperature, trend I can actually feel.  

Assorted Chocolates
by Ogden Nash 

If some confectioner were willing
To let the shape announce the filling,
We'd encounter fewer assorted chocs,
Bitten into and returned to the box.