“The Coal Fire” by Donald Hall

A coal fire burned in a basket grate.
We lay in front of it
while ash collected on the firebrick
like snow.
I looked at you, in the small light
of the coal fire: back
delicate, yet with the form of the skeleton,
cheekbones and chin
carved, mouth full,
and breasts like hills of flowers.

The fire was tight and small an endured
when we added a chunk every hour.
The new piece blazed at first
from the bulky shadow of fire,
turning us bright and dark.
Old coals red at the center
warmed us all night.
If we watched all night
we could not tell the new coal
when it flaked into ash.

“Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

“Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

“Poem of Jealousy” by Sappho, Trans. William Carlos Williams

That man is peer of the gods, who
face to face sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely

laughter.

It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue

is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears

thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow
paler than grass and lack little

of dying.

“At a Hasty Wedding” by Thomas Hardy

(Triolet)

If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire
By bonds of every bond the best,
If hours be years. The twain are blest
Do eastern stars slope never west,
Nor pallid ashes follow fire:
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire.

“A Sign-Seeker” by Thomas Hardy

I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,

The noontides many-shaped and hued;

I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.

I view the evening bonfires of the sun.

On hills where morning rains have hissed;

The eyeless countenance of the mist
Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.

I have seen the lightning blade, the leaping star,

The cauldrons of the sea in storm,

Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm,
And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.

I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,

The coming of eccentric orbs;

To mete the dust the sky absorbs,
To weigh the sun, and fix each hour the planet dips.

I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;

Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;

Death’s sudden finger, sorrow’s smart;
- All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.

But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense –

Those sights of which of prophets tell,

Those signs the general word so well
As vouchsafed their unheed, denied my long suspense.

In graveyard green, where his pale dust lies pent

To glimpse a phantom parent, friend.

Wearing his smile, and ‘Not the end!’
Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment;

Or, if a dead Love’s lips, whom dreams reveal

When midnight imps of King Decay

Delve sly to solve me back to clay,
Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;

Or, when Earth’s frail lie bleeding of her Strong,

If some Recorder, as in Writ,

Near to the weary scene should flit
And drop on plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong.

There are who, rapt to heights of trancelike trust,

These tokens claim to feel and see,

Read radiant hints of times to be -
Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.

Such scope is granted not to lives like mine . . .

I have lain in dead men’s beds, have walked

The tombs of those with whom I had talked,
Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,

And panted for response. But none replies;

No warnings loom, nor whisperings

To open out my limitings,
And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.

“Neutral Tones” by Thomas Hardy

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of long ago;
And some words played between us to and fro

On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your face was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby

Like an ominous bird awing . . . .

Since then, keen lessons that love decieves,
And wrings with wrong have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

“Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother” by A.E. Stallings

First – hell is not so far underground -
My hair gets tangled in the roots of trees
& I can just make out the crunch of footsteps,
The pop of acorns falling, or the chime
Of a shovel squaring a fresh grave or turning
Up the tulip bulbs for separation.
Day & night, creatures with no legs
Or too many, journey to hell and back.
Alas, the burrowing animals have dim eyesight.
They are useless for news of the upper world.
They say the light is “loud” (their figures of speech
All come from sound; their hearing is acute).

The dead are just as dull as you would imagine.
They evolve like the burrowing animals – losing their sight.
They may roam abroad sometimes – but just at night -
They can only tell me if there was a moon.
Again and again, moth-like, they are duped
By any beckoning flame – lamps and candles.
They come back startled & singed, sucking their fingers,
Happy the dirt is cool and dense and blind.
They are silly & grateful and don’t remember anything.
I have tried to tell them stories, but they cannot attend.
They pester you like children for the wrong details -
How long were his fingernails? Did she wear shoes?
How much did they eat for breakfast? What is snow?
And then they pay no attention to the answers.

My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.
But here there is no fodder for small talk.
The weather is always the same. Nothing happens.
(Though at times I feel the trees, rocking in place
Like grief, clenching the dirt with torturous toes.)
There is nothing to eat here but raw beets & turnips.
There is nothing to drink but mud-filtered rain.
Of course, no one goes hungry or toils, however many -
(The dead breed like the bulbs of daffodils -
Without sex or seed – all underground -
Yet no race has such increase. Worse than insects!)

I miss you and think about you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Though I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same thing as mushrooms.
Yet no dog is so loyal as the dead,
Who have no wives or children and no lives,
No motives, secret or bare, to disobey.
Plus, my husband is a kind, kind master;
He asks nothing of us, nothing at all -
Thus fall changes to winter, winter to fall,
While we learn idleness, a difficult lesson.

He does not fully understand why I write letters.
He says that you will never get them. True -
Mulched-leaf paper sticks together, then rots;
No ink but blood, and it turns brown like the leaves.
He found my stash of letters, for I had hid it,
Thinking he’d be angry. But he never angers.
He took my hands in his hands, my shredded fingers
Which I have sliced for ink, thin paper cuts.
My effort is futile, he says, and doesn’t forbid it.

“Artifact” by Claudia Emerson

For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still on the brush.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed -
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.

“A Bird in the House” by Claudia Emerson

I thought that could be what it was

to die, my body gone from you,

my voice, even my face, if alone

in a quiet room you tried to recall it.

I was erased, but a stronger

absence than death – even my name

disallowed, your new wife chasing

it out, a bird in your house, something

you didn’t quite want to kill – but would.