The Buddha Rat

Nostos
—Louise Glück

There was an apple tree in the yard—
this would have been
forty years ago—behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts—
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Hair Poem
—Bill Knott

Hair is heaven's water flowing eerily over us
Often a someone drifts off down their long hair and is lost

Natural History
—E. B. White

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unwinds a thread of his devising;
A thin, premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all the journey down through space,
In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,
He builds a ladder to the place
From which he started.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken strand to you
For my returning.

Smart
—Bruce Bennett

like the fox
who grabs a stick
and wades
into the water

deep and deeper
till only his muzzle's
above it
his fleas

leap
up and up
onto his head
out onto the stick

which he lets go

off it floats
as he swims back
and shakes himself dry

Complete Destruction
—William Carlos Williams

It was an icy day.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set match to it

in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.

History
—Rita Dove

Everything's a metaphor, some wise
guy said, and his woman nodded, wisely.
Why was this such a discovery
to him? Why did history happen
only on the outside?
She'd watched an embryo track an arc
across her swollen belly from the inside
and knew she'd best
think knee, not tumor or burrowing mole, lest
it emerge a monster. Each craving marks
the soul: splashed white upon a temple the dish
of ice cream, coveted, broken in a wink,
or the pickle duplicated just behind the ear. Every wish
will find its symbol, the woman thinks.

On a Painting by Wang the Clerk of Yen Ling
—Su Tung P'o (trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

The slender bamboo is like a hermit.
The simple flower is like a maiden.
The sparrow tilts on the branch.
A gust of rain sprinkles the flowers.
He spreads his wings to fly
And shakes all the leaves.
The bees gathering honey
Are trapped in the nectar.
What a wonderful talent
That can create an entire Spring
With a brush and a sheet of paper.
If he would try poetry
I know he would be a master of words.

Utterance
—W. S. Merwin

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence

Each Happiness Ringed by Lions
—Jane Hirshfield

Sometimes when
I take you into my body
I can almost see them—patient, circling.
Almost glimpse the moving shadow of the tail,
almost hear the hushed pad of retracted claws.
It is the moment—of this I am certain—
when they themselves are least sure.
It is the moment they could almost let us go free.

When I Buy Pictures
—Marianne Moore

or what is closer to the truth,
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as
               the imaginary possessor,
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average

               moments:
the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible

than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite—the old thing, the medieval decorated
               hat-box
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the
               waist of the hour-glass,
and deer and birds and seated people;
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal
               biography perhaps,
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged
                hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking
                Adam by the wrist.
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that
               detracts from one's enjoyment.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved
                triumph easily be honored—
that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grandparents
—Donald Justice

          Our diaries squatted, toad-like,
          On dark closet ledges.
          Forget-me-not and thistle
          Decalcomaned the pages.
          But where, where are they now,
                    All the sad squalors
          Of those between-wars parlors?—
Cut flowers; and the sunlight spilt like soda
          On torporous rugs; the photo
          Albums all outspread . . .
                              The dead
Don't get around much anymore.