DPF / Walcott

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For home, from The Arkansas Testament, a signed copy. This one isn’t signed to me, but I think I have one that is signed that is mine from Florida, from some time between 1987 and 1988 when, after the reading, our UF creative writing class got to sit down to dinner with Mr. Walcott.

from The Light of the World / by Derek Walcott

I was afraid I might suddenly start sobbing
on the public transport with the Marley going,
and a small boy peering over the shoulders
of the driver and me at the lights coming,
at the rush of the road in the country darkness,
with lamps in the houses on the small hills,
and thickets of stars

DPF / Petersen

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For beauty from anywhere, from poetryfoundation.org. 
from Autobiographical Fragment / by Katie Petersen

In those days I began to see light under every
bushel basket

DPF / Hugo

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For small towns, fragments, and returns, from What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American.

from Reading at the Old Federal Courts Building, St. Paul / by Richard Hugo

That girl who laughed,
first trial, is teaching high school and she
didn’t know me when she said she loved my poems,
was using them in class to demonstrate how
worlds are put together, one fragment at a time.

DPF / Akhmatova

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For fairytales, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. 

from Lullaby / by Anna Akhmatova

Far off in the enormous forest,
Near the dark blue river,
There lived in a dark hut with his children
A poor woodcutter.

DPF / Berryman

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For work, from The Dream Songs.

from Dream Song #30 / by John Berryman

As a little boy I always thought
“I’m an archaeologist”; who
could be more respected peaceful serious than that?

DPF / Mark

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For forever and never, from a favorite woman and her book-a-favorite book, Tsim Tsum.

from The Oldest Animal Writes a Letter Home / by Sabrina Orah Mark

May it is not impossibled the arms wave gloryisplea in the wynds for me? I ask the sheeps. The sheeps say everything is not impossibled. I knowed those arms is not That Mutter’s arms. I clopse my eyes and pretend.

DPF / Rivera

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PIA: from August 30, 2015. I don’t know that simple things exist after all; the more simple a thing appears at first glance, the more it lends itself to infinite camera angles, infinite thoughts, reflections, and points of view.

For light, from Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women, edited by Forrest Gander.

from Untitlted / by Silvia Tomasa Rivera (b. El Higo, Veracruz, 3.7.1956), translated by Janet Rodney

It’s something much simpler,
like opening a window and touching that luminous spot
bursting in the cup of your hands.

DPF / Hugo

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For the sky, from The Right Madness on Skye. Each day, the world is a completely different world, changed, as it is every day, by the people who are lost that day and by those who are born; the sky, in its never-exactly-the-sameness, teaches and reteaches this. Its singular fingerprint lives its whole swirling life in a day.

from The Clouds of Uig / by Richard Hugo

They never slow down and they never run out.
When one sky leaves, taking with it the rain
that couldn’t make anyone wet or leave grass
dry very long, another sky follows close behind

DPF / Collins

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PIA: from August 15, 2015.

For carrying infants through the house, from Poetry 180, edited by Billy Collins.

from White Towels / by Richard Jones

I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life

DPF / Harjo

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For ocean and crows and souls, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Ah, Ah / by Joy Harjo

Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by
on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.