In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The star exploding in the body;
The creeping thing, growing in the brain or bone;
The hectic cannibal, the obscene mouth.

The mouths along the meridian sought him.
Soft as moths, many a moon and sun,
Until one
In a pale fleeing dream caught him.

Waking, he did not know himself undone.
Nor walking, smiling, reading that the news was good.
The star exploding in his blood.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…

The time of the year for the mystics.
October sky and the Cloud of Unknowing.
The routes of eternity beckoning.
Sign and enigma in the humblest of things.

Master cobbler Jakob Boehme
Sat in our kitchen all morning.
He sipped tea and warned of the quiet
To which the wise must school themselves.

The young woman paid no attention.
Hair fallen over her eyes,
Breasts loose and damp in her robe,
Stubbornly scrubbing a difficult stain.

Then the dog’s bark brought us all outdoors.
And that wasn’t just geese honking
But Dame Julian of Norwich herself discoursing
On the marvelous courtesy and homeliness of the Maker.

There was a child’s Sunday suit
Pinned to a tailor’s dummy
In a dusty store window.
The store looked closed for years.

I lost my way there once
In a Sunday kind of quiet,
Sunday kind of afternoon light
On a street of red-brick tenements.

How do you like that?
I said to no one.
How do you like that?
I said again today upon waking?

That street went on forever
And all along I could feel the pins
In my back prickling
The dark and heavy cloth.

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn’t.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own 
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn’t leave her room much.

The sun pointed to one or two 
Things that had survived
The long night intact,
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People describe as “perfect.”

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins? A hand-mirror?
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn’t it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light,
And the trees waiting for the night.

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years.
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

With the wind gusting so wildly,
So unpredictably,
I’m willing to bet one or two ants
May have tumbled on their backs
As we sit here on the porch.

Their feet are pedaling
Imaginary bicycles.
It’s a battle of wits against
Various physical laws,
Plus Fate, plus—
So-what-else-is-new?

Wondering if anyone’s coming to their aid
Bringing cake crumbs,
Miniature editions of the Bible,
A lost thread or two
Cleverly tied end to end.

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.

Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning wind-up monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

By Charles Simic

It’s just a boarded-up shack with a steeple
Under the blazing summer sky
On a back road seldom traveled
Where the shadows of tall trees
Graze peacefully like a row of gallows,
And crows with no carrion in sight
Caw to each other of better days.

The congregation may still be at prayer.
Farm folk from flyspecked photos
Standing in rows with their heads bowed
As if listening to your approaching steps.
So slow they are, you must be asking yourself
How come we are here one minute
And in the very next gone forever?

That’s what the leaves are telling us tonight.
Hear them frighten and be struck dumb
So that we sit up listening to nothing,
Which is always more worrisome than something.

The minutes crawl like dog fleas up our legs.
We must wait for whatever it is to identify itself
In some as-yet-unspecified way
As the trees are rushing to warn us again.

The branches beat against the house to be let in,
And then change their minds abruptly.
Think how many leaves are holding still in the woods
With no wish to add to their troubles.

With something so large closing upon us?
It makes one feel vaguely heroic
Sitting so late with no light in the house
And the night dark and starless out there.

Psst, psst, psst,
Is what the snow is saying
To the quiet woods,
With the night falling.

Something pressing,
That can’t wait,
On a path that went nowhere,
Where I found myself

Overtaken by snow flakes
With so much to confide,
The bare twigs pricked their ears—
Great God!

What did they say?
What did they say?
I went badgering
Every tree and bush.

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                         Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

     Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing.

     Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water, and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                          The soul shrinks.

     From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
             “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

     Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

     “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
                        Keeping their difficult balance.”

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated
     from fresh excrement
and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft intentionality that makes
     them seem to think,
materializes just above my desk, then vanishes, his dense, abrasive buzz
     sucked in after him.

I wait, imagine him, hidden somewhere, waiting, too, then think, who knows
     why, of you—
don’t laugh—that he’s a messenger from you, or that you yourself (you’d howl 
     at this),
ten years afterwards have let yourself be incarnated as this pestering
     anti-angel.

Now he, or you, abruptly reappears, with a weightless pounce alighting near
     my hand.
I lean down close, and though he has to sense my looming presence, he
     patiently attends,
as though my study of him had become an element of his own observations—
     maybe it is you!

Joy! To be together, even for a time! Yes, tilt your fuselage, turn it towards the 
     light,
aim the thousand lenses of your eyes back up at me: how I’ve missed the
     layers of your attention,
how often been bereft without your gift for sniffing out pretentiousness and
     moral sham.

Why would you come back, though? Was that other radiance not intricate
     enough to parse?
Did you find yourself in some monotonous century hovering down the tidy
     queue of creatures
waiting to experience again the eternally unlikely bliss of being matter ad
     extension?

You lift, you land—you’re rushed. I know; the interval in all our terminals is
     much too short.
Now you hurl against the window, skid and jitter on the pane: I open it and 
     step aside
and follow for one final moment of felicity your brilliant ardent atom swerving
     through.

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign is Solitude!
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre—Hermit
Deep in the bosom of Wilderness;
Votary (in vast Cathedral, where no foot
Is treading and other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayer; or Watchman on the top
Of Lighthouse beaten by Atlantic Waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless Wastes.

Bobbing on the breeze blown waves
Blowing to the tide
Hyacinth rises and falls

Falling but not felled
By flotsam, twigs, leaves
She ducks, bobs and weaves.

Ducks, ducks by the score
Jolting, quacking and more
She spins through—

Spinning, swamped, slimed, sunk
She rises, resolute
Still crowned by petals.