She could always make
the most beautiful sandwich.
Laced swiss cheese:  sliced
crossways, folded once.
Ham in rolls like sleeping bags.
Turkey piled like shirts.
Tarragon, Oregano, Pepper.
Herb dill mayonnaise the color of
skin.  On top: the thin, wandering line of
mustard
like a contour on a map
in a think, flat drawer.
Or a single lost vein.
The poppyseeds hold on,
for now.

Placed on a plate like isolated
driftwood
or a large, solemn head.
The spilled chips in yellow piles
are like the strange coins
of tall, awkward islanders.
The thin dill pickle: their boat
slides into
the green-sour sea.

--  Brad Ricca
    from "American Mastodon" 2011

I asked them to take a poem
And hold it up to the light
Like a colored slide

Or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
And watch him probe his way out

Or walk inside a poem's room
And feel the walls for a light switch

I want them to water ski
Across the surface of a poem
Waving at the author's name on the shore

But all they want to do
Is tie the poem to a chair with rope
And torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.

--  Billy Collins

To remember you're alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you've made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone's inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard,
as it must.

Now to home without looking back,
enough is enough.
En route buy the best wine
you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and begin sweeping.
Sweep until the walls are
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
until the floor disappears.
Finish the wine in this field of air,
return to the cemetery in the evening
and wind through the stones
a slow dance of your name
visible only to birds.

--  Jim Harrison
     from "Songs of Unreason" 2011

You are made of almost nothing
But of enough
To be great eyes
And diaphanous double vans;
To be ceaseless movement,
Unending hunger,
Grappling love.

Link between water and air,
Earth repels you.
Light touches you only to shift into iridescence
Upon your body and wings.

Twice-born, predator,
You split into the heat.
Swift beyond calculation or capture
You dart into the shadow
Which consumes you.

You rocket into the day.
But at last, when the wind flattens the grasses,
For you, the design and purpose stop.

And you fall
With the other husks of summer.

-- Louise Bogan
   from "The Blue Estuaries:  Poems 1923 - 1968

These cancer cells -- these singular lonely aggressive universes -- divide yet again tonight amongst a close friend.  How can one instruct them to peacefully co-exist with their neighboring galaxies?  

You know that moment in the summer dusk
when the sunbathers have all gone home to mix drinks
and you are alone on the beach

when the wave began to nibble
on the abandoned sand castles-
And further out, over the erupted face

of the water stained almost pink
there are a few clouds that hold
entire rooms inside of them - rooms where no one lives -

in the hair
of the light that soon will go
grey and then black.  It is the moment

when even the man who mops the floor
in the execution room of the prison
stops to look up into the silence

that grows like smoke or the dusk itself.
And your mind becomes almost visible
and you know there is nothing

that is not mysterious.  And that no moment
is less important than this moment.
And that imprisonment is not possible.

--  Malena Morling
    from "Ocean Avenue" 1999

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

--  Ellen Bass
    from "Mules of Love"

It's the artists of the world
the feelers and the thinkers
who will ultimately save us
who can articulate, educate, defy, insist
sing and shout about the big dreams.

Only the artists can turn
the "Not Yet " into reality...
And there's no time to lose.

You've got to work fast
but not be in a hurry.
You've got to be patient
but not passive.
You've got to recognize the hope
that exists in you
but not let impatience turn into despair.

And out of this paradox
you will have to produce the brilliant synthesis.
It is you who must produce it
with your new atomic minds
your flaming angry hope
and your secret weapon art.

--  Leonard Bernstein

Turn the knob.  The burner ticks
then exhales flame in a swift up burst,
its dim roar like the surf.  Your kitchen burns white,
lamplight on enamel, warm with the promise
of bread and soup.  Outside the night rains ink.
To a stranger bracing his umbrella,
think how your lit window must seem
both warm and cold, a kiss withheld,
lights strung above a distant patio.
Think how your bare arm, glimpsed
as you chop celery or grate a carrot
glows like one link in a necklace.
How the clink of silverware on porcelain
carries to the street.  As you unfold your napkin,
book spread beside your plate, consider
the ticking of the rain against the pavement,
the stoplight red and steady as flame.

--  April Lindner
    from "Skin" 2002

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

--  Kaylin Haught
     from "The Palm of Your Hand"

Now I become myself.
It's taken time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
worn other people's faces,
run madly, as if Time were there,
terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before..."
(What? Before you reach the morning?
or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,
feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
is my hand; the shadow of the word
as thought shapes the shaper
falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place
from wish to action, word to silence,
my work, my love, my time, my face,
gathered into one intense
gesture of growing like a plant.

As slowly as the ripening fruit
fertile, detached, and always spent,
falls but does not exhaust the root,
so all the poem is, can give,
grows in me to become the song,
made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
all of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ram,
stand still, stand still, and stop the sun.

--  May Sarton
    from "Collected Poems 1930-1993"