poem endings

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, 
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) 
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look 
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, 
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, 
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself #2

The day is a woman who loves you.  Open.
Deer drink close to the road and magpies
spray from your car.  Miles from any town
your radio comes in strong, unlikely
Mozart from Belgrade rock and roll
from Butte.  Whatever the next number
you want to hear it.  Never has your Buick
found this forward a gear.  Even
the tuna salad in Reedpoint is good.

Towns arrive ahead of imagined schedule
Absorakee at one.  Or arrive so late—
Silesia at nine—you recreate the day.
Where did you stop along the road
and have fun?  Was there a runaway horse?
Did you park at that house, the one
alone in a void of grain, white with green
trim and red fence, where you know you lived
once?  You remembered the ringing creek,
the soft brown forms of far off bison.
You must have stayed hours, then drove on.
In the motel you know you’d never seen it before.

Tomorrow will open again, the sky wide
as the mouth of a wild girl, friable
clouds you lose yourself to.  You are lost
in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams. 
                                    —Richard Hugo, Driving Montana
  

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 
Though much is taken, much abides; and though 
We are not now that strength which in old days 
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—- 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

in Just-spring       
when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles       far       and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far       and       wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

 from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
     the
             goat-footed

balloonMan       

whistles
far
and
wee

e.e. cummings

At night I sleep poorly. When I dream 
of your face, the papery cotton sheets 
go cool as your hand used to be. 
Downstairs, you are there, in the box 
I will not look at. 
The world is askew without you, 
like a lock jimmied by a thief. 
When together now, four of us, not five, 
we eat quickly, nibbling the corn to the husk. 
Even the dogs have gotten quiet 
in your absence. The other morning, 
I sat in your chair reading. 
Next door the mower started up. 
I startled at the noise. 
Nothing should be growing.

- Meghan O’Rourke

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark’s Place too, beneath a white moon.
I’ll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
will be too; but
I’ll be shattered by then
But now I’m not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941—
I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.

- Ted Berrigan

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what is is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.

- Adrienne Rich, Dreamwood

R.I.P.