The Niagara River
By Kay Ryan
As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.
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The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it a lip —
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
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and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
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Adolescence II
by Rita Dove
Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.
Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,
One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,
Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.
"Well, maybe next time." And they rise,
Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,
And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes
They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.
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Fame is a Fickle Food
By Emily Dickinson
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set.
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the Farmer's Corn –
Men eat of it and die.
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Hope is a Thing with Feathers
By Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
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Aubade1
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Nothing to love or link with,
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
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The anaesthetic from which none come round.
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Making all thought impossible but how
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
And where and when I shall myself die.
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
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Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
—The good not done, the love not given, time
People or drink. Courage is no good:
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
It means not scaring others. Being brave
An only life can take so long to climb
Lets no one off the grave.
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
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Death is no different whined at than withstood.
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But at the total emptiness for ever,
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
The sure extinction that we travel to
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
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Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
This is a special way of being afraid
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Created to pretend we never die,
Work has to be done.
And specious stuff that says No rational being
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Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
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An aubade is, typically, a poem about lovers separating at dawn. The classic type of poem is delivered by a speaker (usually male)
standing in a doorway, looking at their sleeping lover.