Spring

Open window.
Blue sun.
Green sun.

Last night
light rain fell
off and on. Thunder

rumbling nudged me…

By Li-Young Lee

   They had already sat down on the bed. Then the man
remembered the back door was still open. He groped…

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for…

That was the season I couldn’t think or write indoors,
the garrulous springtime every strophe,
every felicitous story’s pulse
could only be crafted in tranquil cloisters,
illuminating belvederes, or rambling villas.
Luckily, it was an unbridled spring,
all immoderate daisies and sunlit pediments,
a bustling April, May,...

Welcome children of the Spring,
   In your garbs of green and gold,
Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
   On the verdant plain and wold.

As a bright and joyous troop
   From the breast of earth ye came
Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
   With...

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives truth to the summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)
—when skies are hanged...

Side by side through the streets at midnight,
Roaming together,
Through the tumultuous night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.
 
Roaming together under the gaslight,
Day’s work over,
How the Spring calls to us, here in the city,
Calls to the heart from the heart of...

Waababaa                        As my eyes
inaabiyan                         search
mashkode                        the prairie
noongom igod ji-niibin   I feel the summer in the spring
 
 

Not tonight but tomorrow
when the light turns the peach
tree green and the Earth sprouts
its young leaves looking to repeat
the magical mystery tour of
photosynthetic conversion of light
and moisture into life—
Not tonight but tomorrow
when my body will have shed
its fear of turning...

of waves dropped into froth     Jellyfish a jar
of innards half-buried in sand     Dead nature     What are
these things and who are they for?     This blue rug
is its own genre     And these painted apples
round out the essence of what can be made
into...

This disease has come back
With frills and furbelows.

You must give your whole life to poetry
Only a few survive if that—

Poems I mean, paper crumpled
Shades of another water—

Far springs are what you long for,
Listening for the slow drip of chemicals

Through a...

So how will it end?
You want it straight?

He looked me in the eye:
You will lose weight,

Become more and more tired.
This kind will not enter your bones or brain.

I stared at him, ravished.
Could not pluck my eyes from his old man...

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
 

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
 
             fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
 
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
 
        beauty      how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
 
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
         (but
true
 
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
 
             thou answerest
 
 
them only with
 
                        ...

This is the time of year
when boys fifteen and seventeen
wear two horned lilac blossoms
in their caps — or over one ear
 
What is it that does this ?
 
It is a certain sort —
drivers for grocers or taxidrivers
white and colored —
 
fellows that...

The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already planted.
A cold wind ruffles the water
among the browned weeds.
On all sides
the world rolls coldly away :
black orchards
darkened by the March clouds...

                                  i
         The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of...

Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck
parked outside my apartment is somehow certain,
I have a hard time believing winter is somehow,
all of a sudden, over — the worst one of my life,
the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d...