Conch

Hold a baby to your ear
As you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby’s code?
And which is the older –
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder? 

A Cradle Song

The angels are stooping
Above your bed;
They are weary of trooping
With the whimpering dead.

God’s laughing in Heaven
To see you so good;
The Sailing Seven
Are gay with His mood. 

I sigh that kiss you,
For I must own
That I shall miss you
When you have grown.

~William Butler Yeats

Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face 

how did this happen
well that’s who I wanted to be 

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that’s my old man across the yard
he’s talking to the meter reader
he’s telling him the world’s sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute i
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips. 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

Snow 

A heavy snow, and men my age

all over the city
are having heart attacks in their driveways,

dropping their nice new shovels
with the ergonomic handles
that finally did them no good.

Gray-headed men who meant no harm,
who abided by the rules and worked hard
for modest rewards, are slipping

softly from their mortgages,
falling out of their marriages.
How gracefully they swoon—

that lovely, old-fashioned word—
from dinner parties, grandkids,
vacations in Florida.

They should have known better
than to shovel snow at their age.
If only they'd heeded

the sensible advice of their wives
and hired a snow-removal service.
But there's more to life

than merely being sensible. Sometimes
a man must take up his shovel
and head out alone into the snow.

~George Bilgere

A Telephone Call

Please, God, let him telephone me now.
Dear God, let him call me now.

Tender is the Night

“Yes.” He lowered the megaphone
and then raised it stubbornly.
I want to give a really bad party.

Excerpted from
Tender is the Night
~F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Firefly

The firefly’s flame
Is something for which science has no name
I can think of nothing eerier
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a
person’s posteerier. 

What do you do when you say
“to hell with it” and leave your work? 

When a poem I’m writing
stalls and goes nowhere,
I use that as an excuse
to turn off the desk lamp
and slip out the back door
to stand among long shadows
in moonlight, a shadow leaning
against the woodpile, slowly
breathing drafts of cold air,
gazing into the sky where
numberless stars have died
and where in endless night
new stars – like poems –
from emptiness are conceived. 

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off – they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand. 

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face; 

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. 

Witness

This slave cemetery has no
headstones, iron fence, or gate.
No witness but
pine needle,
brilliant cardinal,
pink columbine,
salvation light
on a quiet leaf,
and now me,
listening. 

A Woman Meets An Old Lover

He with whom I ran hand in hand
kicking the leathery leaves down Oak Hill Path
thirty years ago 

appeared before me with anxious face, pale,
almost unrecognized, hesitant,
lame. 

He whom I cannot remember hearing laugh out loud
but see in mind’s eye smiling, self-approving,
wept on my shoulder. 

He who seemed always
to take and not give, who took me
so long to forget, 
remembered everything I had so long forgotten.

Song of the Wonderful Surprise

Start with the fact of space; fill it up
with snow. There will be snow in the sky,
snow on the ground, snow in the mysterious courtyards.
You taste snow’s tang, smell snow, feel snow on your face.
If you walk forever, you will not come to a place with no snow,
but one day, looking around, you will find
a green apple hanging from a spray of snow.