Coming to This

                      - Mark Strand

We have done what we wanted.

We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry   

of each other, and we have welcomed grief

and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.

The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.   

The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.   

The wine waits.

Coming to this

has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.   

We have no heart or saving grace,

no place to go, no reason to remain.

Father's Old Blue Cardigan
                                                           - Anne Carson

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chari where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face --
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

&I'm told you might be waiting by the sun.

"Oh I know how large the spaces are
between reach and grasp, and how hard it is
to escape oneself, but I'd like you to believe
I've learned to sing a different song." - Stephen Dunn.

&Tell me what's / Tell me what's your favourite colour.

Maybe I just want to know you for the sake of knowing you.

&All the wise blood / poured from little cuts / down into the sink.

Failing and Flying

                               -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.

&Freedom beckons.