April 20, 2015
Eating Poetry by Mark Strand Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs […]
April 19, 2015
In Goya’s Greatest Scenes… by Lawrence Ferlinghetti In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’ They writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity
April 18, 2015
Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay 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 […]
April 17, 2015
The Revenant by Billy Collins I am the dog you put to sleep, as you like to call the needle of oblivion, come back to tell you this simple thing: I never liked you – not one bit. When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose. When I watched you toweling […]
April 16, 2015
A Box of Pastels by Ted Kooser I once held on my knees a simple wooden box in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken. It was a set of pastels that had years before belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt, and all of the colors she’d used in her work lay open before me. […]
April 15, 2015
Swimming By Night by James Merrill A light going out in the forehead Of the house by the ocean, Into warm black its feints of diamond fade. Without clothes, without caution Plunging past gravity– Wait! Where before Had been floating nothing, is a gradual body Half remembered, astral with phosphor, Yours, risen from its tomb […]
April 14, 2015
The Want of Peace by Wendell Berry All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman’s silence receiving the river’s grace, the gardener’s musing on rows. I lack the peace of simple things. I am […]
April 13, 2015
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. […]
April 12, 2015
Three for the Mona Lisa by John Stone 1 It is not what she did at 10 o’clock last evening accounts for the smile It is that she plans to do it again tonight.
April 11, 2015
The One Girl at the Boy’s Party by Sharon Olds When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. They will strip to their suits, her body hard and […]
