"Nature loves our vacuum, blesses us with a bounty..."

Not of This World by Sheri Hostetler

I am like none of you. You must recognize
deep in me how different I am. you're all
Wonder Bread and drive-ins. I am fertile
fields, head coverings, memories of martyrdom
like yesterday, hymns without organ. The
Bible whispers in my ear at night, it will
not keep still.

But my people do. Die Stille em Lande. We
never talk. Quietly we move, quietly the
fields are plowed, in quiet are the dishes
washed, the sheets pulled taut, silently the
hay flung high atop the wagons. Our horses
clip clop in a virtual vacuum. All around
us pins drop, and, still, we are still.

Nature loves our vacuum, blesses us with a
bounty you cannot imagine. Look at our barns,
they are filled with sweet hay, hay without
end, stacked fragrant, stacked sweet. We
do not talk but we smell the sweetness of
hay everyday, oh stranger, you know not what
you are not.

I am not like you. I talk with you, laugh
with you, make love with you, break bread
with you, I will even die with you. And my soul
will rest atop a haymow on Weaver Ridge while yours
goes to heaven.

more Billy Collins

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins

Kismet by Diane Ackerman

                            "What can't be said can't be said,
                                  and can't be whistled either."
                                                   ~Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was wrong: when lovers kiss
they whistle into each other's mouth
a truth old and sayable as the sun,
for flesh is palace, aurora borealis,
and the world is all subtraction in the end.

The world is all subtraction in the end,
yet, in a small vaulted room at the azimuth
of desire, even our awkward numbers sum. 
Love's syllogism only love can test.

But who would quarrel with its sprawling proof?
The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest.
Love speaks in tongues, its natural idiom.
Tingling, your lips drift down the xylophone
of my ribs, and I close my eyes and chime. 

Stopping by Fields on a Snowy Afternoon by Jane Rohrer

Stopping by Fields on a Snowy Afternoon

You've obviously been here
   since my last visit.
    and I like what you've done
But is it landscape
   or is it art?
It's all so confusing
   with you coming from the other side.

Calligraphy, there on the contours of the field,
   scribbling in stalks and stacks
   left from the fall,
   are visible in the distant upper levels
   of the canvas,
If it is a canvas.
But, it's the wash of thin white,
   just a sift of snow,
   (or is it white,)
   that erases the visual samsara
   and beckons to me from beyond the pale.
But I can't.
I am per pale.

We've been split like a schist.
Here I am and there you are,
   parallel.

http://tinyfarmblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/win07_snowy_field_january1.jpg

http://www.ntoddblog.org/photos/winter/shadowsonthehille.html

While Eating a Pear, by Billy Collins

After we have finished here,
the world will continue its quiet turning,

and the days and months will pass
without the names of Norse and Roman gods.
*
Time will go by the way it did
before history, pure and unnoticed,
a mystery that arose between the sun and moon
before there was a word
for dawn or noon or midnight,
*
before there were names for the earth's
uncountable things,
when fruit hung anonymously
from scattered groves of trees,
light on the smooth green side,
shadow on the other.

Sweet Talk by Billy Collins

You are not the Mona Lisa
with that relentless look.
Or Venus borne over the froth
of waves on a pink half shell.
Or an odalisque by Delacroix,
veils lapping at your nakedness.

You are more like the sunlight
of Edward Hopper,
especially when it slants
against the eastern side
of a white clapboard house
in the early hours of the morning,
with no figure standing
at a window in a violet bathrobe,
just the sunlight,
the columns of the front porch,
and the long shadows
they throw down
upon the dark green lawn, baby.

http://www.hermes-press.com/collins2.htm

Days by Billy Collins

DAYS

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

- Billy Collins