(Poem #43)Windows is Shutting Down Windows is shutting down, and grammar are On their last leg. So what am we to do? A letter of complaint go just so far, Proving the only one in step are you. Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes. A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad Before they gets to where you doesnt knows The meaning what it must of meant to had. The meteor have hit. Extinction spread, But evolution do not stop for that. A mutant languages rise from the dead And all them rules is suddenly old hat. Too bad for we, us what has had so long The best seat from the only game in town. But there it am, and whom can say its wrong? Those are the break. Windows is shutting down. |
Windows is Shutting Down -- Clive James
Sleep -- Wesley McNair
(Poem #42)Sleep The young dog would like to know why we sit so long in one place intent on a box that makes the same noises and has no smell whatever. Get out! Get out! we tell him when he asks us by licking the back of our hand, which has small hairs, almost like his. Other times he finds us motionless with papers in our lap, or at a desk looking into a humming square of light. Soon the dog understands we are not looking, exactly, but sleeping with our eyes open, then goes to sleep himself. Is it us he cries out to, moving his legs somewhere beyond the rooms where we spend our lives? We don't think to ask, upset as we are in the end with the dog, who has begun throwing the old, shabby coat of himself down on every floor or rug in the apartment, sleep, we say, all that damn dog does is sleep. |
For the Man Who Taught Tricks to Owls -- David Wagoner
(Poem #41)For the Man Who Taught Tricks to Owls You say they were slow to learn. The brains of owls
Went down in your opinion through long hours
Of unresponsive staring
While you showed them how to act out minor parts
In the world of Harry Potter. Come with me now
Into the night, perch motionless, balanced
On a branch above a thicket, where every choice
Of a flight path is more narrow
Than your broad wing-span, more jagged
And crooked than patterns of interrupted moonlight
On twigs and fallen leaves, where what you take
In silence with claws and beak to stay alive
Knows everything about you except your tricks,
Except where you're going to be in the next instant
And how you got there without anyone's help
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It is Marvellous to Wake Up Together -- Elizabeth Bishop
(Poem #40)It is Marvellous to Wake Up Together It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lighting struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one's back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking. |
Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles -- Billy Collins
(Poem #37)Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles It seems these poets have nothing up their ample sleeves they turn over so many cards so early, telling us before the first line whether it is wet or dry, night or day, the season the man is standing in, even how much he has had to drink. Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow. Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name. "Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's. "Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea" is another one, or just "On a Boat, Awake at Night." And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with "In a Boat on a Summer Evening I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird. It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying My Woman Is Cruel--Moved, I Wrote This Poem." There is no iron turnstile to push against here as with headings like "Vortex on a String," "The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever. No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over. Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall" is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders. And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors" is a servant who shows me into the room where a poet with a thin beard is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine whispering something about clouds and cold wind, about sickness and the loss of friends. How easy he has made it for me to enter here, to sit down in a corner, cross my legs like his, and listen. |