Category Archives: poem

Goodbye, Iowa
by Richard Hugo

Once more you’ve degraded yourself on the road.
The freeway turned you back in on yourself
and you found nothing, not even a good false name.
The waitress mocked you and you paid your bill
sweating in her glare. You tried to tell her
how many lovers you’ve had. Only a croak came out.
Your hand shook when she put hot coins in it.
Your face was hot and you ran face down to the car.

Miles you hated her. Then you remembered what
the doctor said: really a hatred of self. Where
in flashes of past, the gravestone
you looked for years and never found, was there
a dignified time? Only when alone,
those solitary times with sky gray as a freeway

And now you are alone. The waitress
will never see you again. You often pretend
you don’t remember people you do. You joke back
spasms of shame from a night long ago.
Splintered glass. Bewildering blue swirl
of police. Light in your eyes. Hard questions.
Your car is cruising. You cross with ease
at 80 the state line and the state you are entering
always treated you well.

from What Thou Lovest Well Remains American
(W.W. Norton & Company, 1975)

Autumn Refain
by Wallace Stevens

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

from Ideas of Order
(The Alcestis Press, 1935)

Avery County
by Sarah Stickney

The evening before leaving
I shot Eric’s 12 gauge
out the back of his shack
into the flourishing green
of the big, June woods.
My first time with a gun—
there is no promise but lots
of intimacy like Ashbery says
of the sea. A buzzard slopes over
the highway. Who knew
this rural fix for east-coast neurosis
was waiting for me with its dogwoods,
its poor possum roadkill,
and the high, evening clouds
that bring shy wild turkeys
up the hillside. Hegel says
the wounds of the spirit heal,
and leave no scars. But time
is just like the rest of us
and wants more drinks
when it starts having drinks at the bar.

from the journal The Carolina Quarterly

Alternate Fates
by Bill Knott

What if right
in the middle of a battle
across the battlefield the wind
blew thousands of
lottery tickets, what then?

from I Am Flying Int0 Myself: Selected Poem 1960–2014
(Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017)

Prose Poem
by Ron Padgett

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It’s something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there’s something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear’s por- ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn’t understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it’s good that Mama Bear isn’t there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.

from Collected Poems
(Coffee House Press, 2013)

Spring
by Linda Pastan

Just as we lose hope
she ambles in,
a late guest
dragging her hem
of wildflowers,
her torn
veil of mist,
of light rain,
blowing
her dandelion
breath
in our ears;
and we forgive her,
turning from
chilly winter
ways,
we throw off
our faithful
sweaters
and open
our arms.

from Heroes in Disguise
(W.W. Norton, 1991)

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
by Gary Snyder

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, 50th Anniv. ed.
(Counterpoint Press, 2010)

Do Not Be Ashamed
by Wendell Berry

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.