DPF / Ryan

For these best clouds ever, which we rarely see here, from poetryfoundation.org. And, this one’s for the magical Kay Ryan, who I met in Lancaster, California, when she read at her community college alma mater, and later in Key West, when she read and spoke and paneled at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar.

from Cloud / by Kay Ryan

From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees

 

DPF / Marvell

For mind and imagination, from the imaginative mind of one of my teachers at UF, Dr. Justice, from Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts on Prosody, by Donald Justice, edited by David Koehn & Alan Soldofsky.

from The Garden / by Andrew Marvell

Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

DPF / Sexton

For a woman who lived the dark in a fairytale and couldn’t unearth her way out, from Transformations.

from One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes / by Anne Sexton

The next morning they all saw
a great tree with leaves of silver
glittering like tinfoil
and apples made of fourteen carat gold.

DPF / Walcott

For Derek Walcott, the Nobel-prize winning poet we lost Friday on one of our last days of winter, from poetryfoundation.org. I sat next to him at dinner after a poetry workshop which William Logan had arranged for our class. Walcott carried his island with him and seemed like a man thoroughly at home anywhere.

from The Season of Phantasmal Peace / by Derek Walcott

there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever

DPF / Tate

For dreams and other oddities, from Memoir of the Hawk.

from Hanging By a Thread / by James Tate

They looked puzzled, what did
we mean? They had gone to bed early and slept
well. They knew nothing about sledding at
midnight, nothing at all.

DPF / Heaney

For how could I forget Heaney on St. Patrick’s Day? This one’s a favorite from North.

from The Grauballe Man / by Seamus Heaney

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

DPF / Neruda

For things that overflow, like grief sometimes does, from The House in the Sand.

from The Sea / by Pablo Neruda, translated by Dennis Maloney and Clark Zlotchew

The Pacific Ocean was overflowing the borders of the map. There was no place to put it. It was so large, wild and blue that it didn’t fit anywhere. That’s why it was left in front of my window.

DPF / Hughes

For fate or random chance, whichever side you fall on, from Birthday Letters.

from Fulbright Scholars / by Ted Hughes

For some reason I noticed it.
A picture of that year’s intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving —
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them?

DPF / Milne

For my sister’s birthday today, from https://allpoetry.com/A.A.-Milne. 

from Us Two / by A.A. Milne

‘I wasn’t afraid,’ said Pooh, said he,
‘I’m never afraid with you.’

DPF / Akhmatova

For one place to look for muses is here, in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Juidth Hemschemeyer and edited by Roberta Reeder.

from The White House / by Anna Akhmatova

But someone has carried it off,
Taken it to another town,
Or torn from my memory forever
The road that leads there…

The sound of the bagpipes dies down,
Snow flies, like cherry blossoms…
And it’s obvious nobody knows
That the white house is gone.