Our eyes seeing the same, our ears hearing the same,
Our touch making and unmaking the same world.Not one, divided in two, not two, united in one:
The second I, so that I may be conscious of myself.
June 18
Cool morning rain on the cusp
of summer, on cobblestones
and chairs and tables,
water beading up on the laquer.
So welcome sometimes,
the dissenting voice–
a change, a sea change,
for better or worse
it arrives like an empty
plaza, this is the setting,
the play can begin
summer song
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?
William Carlos Williams, Summer Song
the colors of horses
I want him to know the colors of horses,
to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds
fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as thoughthe little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,
rising slightly and just out of reach.
Oliver de la Paz, In Defense of Small Towns
questions of travel
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
June 14
You’d never know, even
if it sat right next to you–
plenty of things have seasons,
even ice insisting I’m ice,
I’m ice, I’m ice.
Tener frío, tener calor,
sometimes translation
is an easy enough thing
but most of the time
it is not.
June 13
Morning arrives like an unwelcome guest,
I have no place for it.
Colder than I thought, caught
in sudden rain and the tyranny
of the parking lot attendant.
What sort of medium for this
sort of canvas? Nothing indelible,
even my footsteps echoing
in the cavernous garage seem
too bold a statement.
old streams
“old streams from which the water’s
vanished are interesting, I mean thatkind of tale,
water, like spirit, jostling hard stuff around
to make speech into one if its realest expressions”
A.R. Ammons, If anything will level you water will
June 12
Woke late to frank sun
dry hills teeming
with passerines
and one hoarse quail
panting out its love.
How foreign, to let it go
unspoken, not
to sing out
from break of dawn
as if your very heart
were bursting—
In the shade
a dove’s cool notes,
cicadas starting up,
even the breeze
in the sagebrush
discontented
until it too is heard
ausencia
“Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air”sonnet XCIV, Pablo Neruda
OPTIONAL POETRY 