Caught In A Net – Vachel Lindsay

Upon her breast her hands and hair
Were tangled all together.
The moon of June forbade me not—
The golden night time weather
In balmy sighs commanded me
To kiss them like a feather.

Her looming hair, her burning hands,
Were tangled black and white.
My face I buried there. I pray—
So far from her to-night—
For grace, to dream I kiss her soul
Amid the black and white.

To – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Faces – Sara Teasdale

People that I meet and pass
In the city’s broken roar,
Faces that I lose so soon
And have never found before,

Do you know how much you tell
In the meeting of our eyes,
How ashamed I am, and sad
To have pierced your poor disguise?

Secrets rushing without sound
Crying from your hiding places —
Let me go, I cannot bear
The sorrow of the passing faces.

— People in the restless street,
Can it be, oh can it be
In the meeting of our eyes
That you know as much of me?

Ways of Keeping – Finuala Dowling

I have kept my love for you
like an unloved dog,
chained up in the yard.

You have kept your love for me
pressed between
pages of a well-loved book.

With a diamond, secretly, you have
etched me into a glass pane,
showing me my hiding place
with a cupped hand.

I could teach the world to woo
but teach me to keep as you do.

The Jealous Gods – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

‘Oh life is wonderful,’ she said,
‘And all my world is bright;
Can Paradise show fairer skies,
Or more effulgent light?’
(Speak lower, lower, mortal heart,
The jealous gods may hear.)

She turned for answer; but his gaze
Cut past her like a lance,
And shone like flame on one who came
With radiant glance for glance.
(You spoke too loud, O mortal heart,
The jealous gods were near.)

They walked through green and sunlit ways;
And yet the earth seemed black,
For there were three, where two should be;
So runs the world, alack.
(The listening gods, the jealous gods,
They want no Edens here.)

The reason I like – David Mamet

The reason I like
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Is that her name.
Sounds like a basketball
Falling downstairs.
The reason I like
Walt Whitman
Is that his name
Sounds like
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Falling Downstairs.

Fault – Ron Koertge

In the airport bar, I tell my mother not to worry.
No one ever tripped and fell into the San Andreas
Fault. But as she dabs at her dry eyes, I remember
those old movies where the earth does open.

There’s always one blonde entomologist, four
deceitful explorers, and a pilot who’s good-looking
but not smart enough to take off his leather jacket
in the jungle.

Still, he and Dr. Cutie Bug are the only ones
who survive the spectacular quake because
they spent their time making plans to go back
to the Mid-West and live near his parents

while the others wanted to steal the gold and ivory
then move to Los Angeles where they would rarely
call their mothers and almost never fly home
and when they did for only a few days at a time.

‘Love bade me welcome’ – George Herbert

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.

To a Passer-by – Charles Baudelaire

Amid the deafening traffic of the town,
Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,
A woman passed, raising, with dignity
In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;

Graceful, noble, with a statue’s form.
And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,
From her eyes, ashen sky where the brooded storm,
The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.

A flash … the night! – O lovely fugitive,
I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance;
Shall I never see you till eternity?

Somewhere, far off! too late! never, perchance!
Neither knows where the other goes or lives;
We might have loved, and you knew this might be!

Transcendence – A.R. Ammons

Just because the transcendental
having digested all change into
a staying, promises foreverness,

it’s still no place to go, nothing
having survived there into life:
and here, this lost way, these

illusory hollyhocks and garages,
this is no place to settle: but
here is the grief, at least,

constant, that things and loves
go, and here the love that
never comes except as permanence.