It’s Like Wyoming
At sunset you have piled the empties and
come to the edge, where the wind kicks up
outside of town. A scatter of rain
rakes the desert. All this year’s weather
whistles at once through the fence.
This land so wide, so gray, so still that
it carries you free—no one here need bother
except for their own breathing. You touch
a fencepost and the world steadies onward:
barbed wire, field, you, night.
William Stafford
A Scale Weighs the Outer World in Pounds and Ounces
A winch,
with its drag drum and hoist drum, is strong.
Grief is stronger,
yet weighs no more than the pattern
of leaf and sun on the bark of a tree.
Joy, too, is strong,
yet changes no more than the cloth of a curtain
pulled open rather than closed.
Emotion—handless and eyeless—
runs through the body like current through copper wire.
Equally innocent of its ends, equally voracious
A scale weighs the outer world in pounds and ounces.
The sum does not alter,
whatever happens within and between us.
One will feel this as a blessing, another as horror.
Jane Hirshfield
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~ Li-Young Lee ~
Warning
When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples' gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
~ Jenny Joseph ~
