Rain by Claribel Alegría (translated by Margaret S. Peden)

As the falling rain

trickles among the stones

memories come bubbling out.

It's as if the rain

had pierced my temples.

Streaming

streaming chaotically

come memories:

the reedy voice

of the servant

telling me tales

of ghosts.

They sat beside me

the ghosts

and the bed creaked

that purple-dark afternoon

when I learned you were leaving forever,

a gleaming pebble

from constant rubbing

becomes a comet.

Rain is falling

falling

and memories keep flooding by

they show me a senseless

world 

a voracious

world--abyss

ambush

whirlwind

spur

but I keep loving it

because I do

because of my five senses

because of my amazement

because every morning, 

because forever, I have loved it

without knowing why.

Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

A Cloud of Dusk by Michael Burkard

i can’t see anymore
i missed every Memphis angel
because of the because clauses—
one night sleeping with two cats
Big and Little
and i am serious about these names
i had a vision reading a John Irving book
i did not want to read never presumed i would read
more than a few pages
there were hallway lights and people’s voices
shivering through a downstairs window
i could not put the book down either
even though i literally wanted to put it down
sometimes—i hate that word—i went to a meeting
nearby and i was accidentally or coincidentally on this street
so much i began to think maybe i belong here
i kissed the back of someone’s hand
i kissed the hand when it turned back to me
i made sure no page was facing me when i read
and that no one would see what i saw or feel what i felt
i am on a drive where a mirror has collapsed
i want to ask someone else without sight

"Christ came down" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint

crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagon sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody's imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Words and the Diminution of All Things by Charles Wright

The brief secrets are still here,

                            and the light has come back.

The word remember touches my hand,

But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel

Against the occluded sky.

All of the little names sink down,

                           weighted with what is invisible,

But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair.


There isn't much time, in any case.

There isn't much left to talk about

                           as the year deflates.

There isn't a lot to add.

Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels

Wherever a thing appears,

Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable

                           in their mute and glittering garb.



All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us

                                     out of the

     Blue Ridge.

All afternoon the leaves have scuttled

Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.

And now the evening is over us,

Small slices of silence

                 running under a dark rain,

Wrapped in a larger.

Into the Park by Maxine Kumin

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
--you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park.  He laid on me not doing anything.  I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them.  For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels.  Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there's a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as. 
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot.  In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

Losing track by Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dreams drying.

My Life by Joe Wenderoth

Somehow it got into my room.
I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.
It was nothing more than a frightened animal.
Since then I raised it up.
I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,
kept it for its own good.
I named the animal, My Life.
I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.
I let it into my bed, let it breathe in my sleep.
And the animal, in my love, my constant care,
grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.
One day, quite recently,
I was running my hand over the animal's side
and I came to understand
that it could very easily kill me.
I realized, further, that it would kill me.
This is why it exists, why I raised it.
Since then I have not known what to do.
I stopped feeding it,
only to find that its growth
has nothing to do with food.
I stopped cleaning it
and found that it cleans itself.
I stopped singing it to sleep
and found that it falls asleep faster without my song.
I don't know what to do.
I no longer make My Life do tricks.
I leave the animal alone
and, for now, it leaves me alone, too.
I have nothing to say, nothing to do.
Between My Life and me,
a silence is coming.
Together, we will not get through this.

Unrelenting Flood by William Matthews

Black key. White key. No,
that's wrong. It's all tactile;
it's not the information
of each struck key we love,
but how the mind and leavened
heart travel by information.
Think how blind and near-
blind pianists range along
their keyboards by clambering
over notes a sighted man
would notice to leave out,
by stringing it all on one
longing, the way bee-fingered
blind, mountainous Art
Tatum did, the way we like
joy to arrive: in such
unrelenting flood the only
way we can describe it
is by music or another
beautiful abstraction,
like the ray of sunlight
in a child's drawing
running straight to a pig's ear,
tethering us all to our star.

Stopping at a Roadside Rest in Beach, North Dakota by Christine Jacox Kyle

"Thunder and the West indicate a highly sacred or powerful vision and signify revelation, introspection, and deep change" --Black Elk Speaks

This is no land I know from any map.
All day the air has bristled with thunder
and still there is no sign of oncoming
darkness in any quadrant of the sky.
Seven hundred miles ago, the gray cliffs
of St. Paul dropped down to a sheer prairie,
my car slipping through the arroyos and grasses:
Blue Earth, Humboldt, Kadoka, Interior,
beads on a map I've devoted the day
to learning. At the Missouri, a wound
in the heaving hills, a nighthawk tumbled
out of the brimming blue of the noon sky.

Am I always at the edge of something
about to crumble? Once, two thousand miles
from here, I belonged to the sea, the incessant
curling of waves. I crouched in the high dunes,
gathering beach palms, the delicate shells
of animals I could once name. I leapt
the pure line where the wavering grasses
etched each days wind in a new direction,
the wind tipping the dunes leeward each year.

A road sign points to a rest area:
I pull off and hear the trees beginning
to rustle, leaves in a light wind turning
toward the banks of the river. I get out
to read a sign nailed to a tree. It spells
this land's history: first, over bedrock
laid down six million years ago,
a broad swamp widened where the dawn
redwood flourished, the ginkgo, tall palm trees.
The water deepened to a sea. You still
may find, I read by the steady lash
of lightning now, fossils of gastropods,
the sturdy bivalve, squeezed between layers
of coal and shale. After the mountains rose,
the sea withdrew, leaving the rivers that etch
this land. I stumble down through wild plums
and reach the frothing river as thunder splits
the clouds. I shiver, slide out of my skin.

A seam of coal burns red within the sky.
Hail spatters the ground. Far off, a coyote
cries, the last voice from a mountainside.
Two kestrels eye upwind. I take a cup
from the wooden well. It's full of water
where the sky blazes still. I lift the cup
with both hands and drink as deeply as I can.

Hymn by A.R. Ammons

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
 over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
         where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
 into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
 coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
 far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves