1
The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
Mending Wall/ Robert Frost
2
There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust.
The Prose Poem/ Campbell BcGrath
3
Our relationship to you is the same as
that between abstraction and metaphor,
between the idea of a clear lake
and the citing of the lake to describe
the clear idea,
In the deep all these questions sink away,
and only the swimming matters: water
sliding around the head and heart and hip,
arms cresting and curving, with not against;
carried along on the roll and the rush
Swimming/ Sarah Arvio
4
Breathe. As in
hale assuming
exhale.
Breathe. As in. (shadow)/ Rosamond S. King
5
A clatter of jackhammers.
A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.
Morningside Heights, July/ William Matthews
6
You don’t get to be the grass
Bees in the lilac tree have something to say and say it without giving
away the ending
An earful of leaf blowers
I think the day knows exactly what it’s doing
Their names whispered through an intercom in the evergreens
The ground looks up and then returns to whatever it was doing
before
Meanwhile the river looks up and then goes back to whatever it was
doing before
Lakes Rivers Streams/ Michael Dickman
7
How many times have I sat above that water, walked beside it
and wondered about its history all
the while taking for granted
I could spell its name.
Somewhere some river is always running
In a canoe, my daughter and a teacher
slowly sliced our way across its green gray skin
we three floating in history
water to some, blood to others
a part of everything
belonging to no one
A poem from Bao Phi
8
You think you know them,
these creatures robed
in your parents’ skins. Well,
you don’t. Any more than you know
what the pines want from the wind,
if the lake’s content with this pale
smear of sunset, if the loon calls
for its mate, or for another.
At the Lake House/ Jon Loomis
9
No surface is allowed to be bare,
& nothing to stand still.
I saw the wind moving on a meadow
& the meadows moving under wind—
lifting, settling & accumulating.
Summer/Ronald Johnson
10
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.
Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.
Ah, Ah/ Joy Harjo
11
this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound
hour
in the morning is worth three in the evening
What I love is one foot in front of another
Dart/ Alice Oswald
12
Surely birds would love to peck
at the dozens of donuts adorning
my arms and legs: the glazed, the jellied,
the vanilla frosted scalloped at the edges
Lounging on the Couch on my 39th Birthday in Pink Flannel Pajamas/ Julie Danho
13
loons on the lake
geese in the air
moose in the woods
aware awake
the roaming moose
the rooms lit up
the woods awake
in the loony light
Song/ Lloyd Schwartz
14
winter, unsentimental sleet
So what
if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the first time
in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I mean.
The Rules/ Leila Chatti
15
Once all these other ways of getting
To four is understood, it’s not really four
You’re after. Anyone can get to four. And
You know this. Maybe it’s the certainty of
Four. That you can always get to it.
Theory of Writing/ Souvankham Thammavongsa
16
frost
remakes the lawn as frozen spines.
I’m stepping on small bones.
I’m leashed to a small companion
who leads me from one message to another,
17
For a few days: frost/ jeanne subrow
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
No Apology: A Poemiesto/ Carmen Smith Giménez
18
she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her
hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant
I’m great! I’m great!
The Month of June: 13 1/2/ Sharon Olds