After a Month of Rain | Linda Pastan

Everything I thought I wanted
is right here,
particularly when the sun
is making such a comeback,

and the lilac engorged
with purple has recovered
from its severe pruning,
and you will be back soon

to dispel whatever it is
that overtakes me like leaf blight,
even on a day like this. I can still
hear remnants of the rain

in the swollen stream
behind the house, in the faint
dripping under the eaves,
persistent as memory.

And all the things I didn’t think
I wanted, cut like the lilac back
to the root, push up again
from underground.

The Laws of Primogeniture | Linda Pastan

My grandson has my father’s mouth
with its salty sayings
and my grandfather’s crooked ear
that heard the soldiers coming.

He has the pale eyes of the Cossack
who saw my great-great-grandmother
in the woods, then wouldn’t stop looking.

And see him now, pushing
his bright red fire truck towards
a future he thinks he’s inventing
all by himself.

Danse Manhattanique | Stephen Dunn

Let us know each other by this
dance, barefoot, over bits of glass.
Let our arms
discover what’s in the air
around us, how much resistance,
what passages, our fingertips alive
to high frequencies, doubts, jazz.
Let’s move
to the jugular pulse of our lives,
shake our asses
to the sound of petty crime,
a cash register opening,
a libido humming
in a nearby room.
And when we return to our chairs,
the dance floor
arid with our absence,
let’s invent the brawl
that starts at the bar—two men, say,
who need the exercise,
let’s conjure the bloodbeat,
the contagion of violence,
and slip out into the street
with such things behind us,
having done and survived them.
Let’s then (for a moment,
in our minds) take the Thruway upstate
and arrive at a place
where good days slide so easily
into the bad they deprive us
of grand gestures.
Let there be trees. Vacancies
for belief. The sky, perhaps,
as it once was.

Before | Carl Adamshick


I always thought death would be like traveling
in a car, moving through the desert,
the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon,
that your life would settle like the end of a day
and you would think of everyone you ever met,
that you would be the invisible passenger,
quiet in the car, moving through the night,
forever, with the beautiful thought of home.

Heraclitus on Rivers | Derek Mahon

Nobody steps into the same river twice.
The same river is never the same
Because that is the nature of water.
Similarly your changing metabolism
Means that you are no longer you.
The cells die, and the precise
Configuration of the heavenly bodies
When she told you she loved you
Will not come again in this lifetime.

You will tell me that you have executed
A monument more lasting than bronze;
But even bronze is perishable.
Your best poem, you know the one I mean,
The very language in which the poem
Was written, and the idea of language,
All these things will pass away in time.