A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life,
He put that there.
Those he loved, those he didn't love,
The man put them on the table too.
Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;
He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.
So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!
He put on the table the pouring of that beer.
He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;
His hunger and his fullness he placed there.

Now that's what I call a table!
It didn't complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on. 

~from Dirty August (Talisman House, 2009)  Translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast

It is very deep to have a cup of tea 
Also coffee in a white cup 
with milk 
a hand to go around the cup 
and a mouth to open and take it in 
It is very deep and very good to have a heart 
Do not take the heart for granted 
it fills with blood and lets blood out
 
Good to have this chair to sit in 
with these feet on the floor 
while I drink this coffee 
in a white cup 
To have the air around us to be in 
To fill our lungs and empty them like weeping 
this roof to house us 
the sky to house the roof in endless blue 
To be in the Midwest 
with the Atlantic over there 
and the Pacific on our other side
 
It is good this cup of coffee 
the milk in it 
the cows who gave us this milk 
this 
simple as a long piece of grass 

~from Top of My Lungs (The Overlook Press, 2002)

It’s what she does and what her mother did.
It’s what I’d do if I were anything
like her mother’s mother—or if the times
demanded that I work in my garden,
planting rows of beans and carrots, weeding
the pickles and potatoes, picking worms
off the cabbages.
                         Today she's canning
tomatoes, which means there are baskets
of red Jubilees waiting on the porch
and she’s been in the cellar looking for jars.
There’s a box of lids and a heap of gold
rings on the counter. She gets the spices
out; she revs the engine of the old stove.

Now I declare her Master of Preserves!
I say that if there were degrees in canning
she would be summa cum laude—God knows
she’s spent as many hours at the sink peeling
the skins off hot tomatoes as I have
bent over a difficult text. I see
her at the window, filling up the jar,
packing a glass suitcase for the winter.

~ from First Words. (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010)

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail …

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome
and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the
companion that was so companionable as solitude …

If one advances confidently in the direction of his
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hour …

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.
So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and
took advantage of every accident that befell us. Sometimes, in
a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my
sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the
pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and
stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through
the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the
noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was
reminded of the lapse of time.

~ in the Public Domain

is an important aspect
of any class text.  Ask
your professor if you may 
say no way! to object, or
hey! to interject, in any essay
meant to earn respect.

You can’t say: this dude
Knows his shit.  Nor can you
Say: he’s full of it.  to argue
Your point, your joint
Gotta have vocab game.

However and nonetheless
Kick but’s ass.  They got
Up-in-the-front-of-the-class.
Address to impress.
Your convention hall pass.

The rules of tone are all    
unspoken.  One learns
the hard way
that they can be broken.

~ from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets (Mansfield Press, 2004)

Solo heron’s slow     
clear compass point
spans the seething highway.

Three swans travers    
a rutted county lane
a laboring triangle
white against steel cloud
pinions whistling
wingbeats shearing the air.

An osprey scopes the bay   
above the high shore road
mesmerizing fish
with godlike upward gyres
before the spearing dive.

A wood duck fusses her neat,    
queuing children to the verge,
retreats in panic
from the sudden squeal of tires.

In the ordinary light of day   
a small mad bird  
divebombs a gloating crow
away from it’s nesting tree
hidden by the roadside.

Epics glimpsed, speeding by,    
avian tragedy strikes swiftly,
moments in the mind’s sky, 
what we thing we see.

~from Still Dances (2015)

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Public Domain

... I eat an artichoke in front
of the Charles Street Laundromat
and watch the clouds bloom
into white flowers out of
the building across the way.
The bright air moves on my face
like the touch of someone who loves me.
Far overhead a dart-shaped plane softens
through membranes of vacancy. A ship,
riding the bright glissade of the Hudson, slips
past the end of the street. Colette's vagabond
says the sun belongs to the lizard
that warms in its light. I own these moments
when my skin like a drumhead stretches on the frame
of my bones, then swells, a bellows filled
with sacred breath seared by this flame, this happiness.
 
~from A Garden in Kentucky (Louisiana State University Press, 1995)

The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.

While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.

~ from A Thousand Mornings (Penguin, 2012)

O my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.

~ in the public domain

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother. 
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

~ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems 
(Far Corner Books, 1995)

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us. 

~ from Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977)

Evening and it is always like this:  
half-answered prayers offered up again
in a new light, disappointment magnified 
through repetition.  There is a photo of you

outdoors looking skyward, jaw softened    
with shadow, silhouette of fir trees across
your chest, you in a window, you always
behind something, eyes cast up, that search.

I want to tell you it is not beyond,    
that thin plate of glass is bullshit armor.
I want to smash it because this love    
turned into a mission when I wasn’t looking.

I want destruction to make something good happen    
once and for all, to say look down, outward,

find me.

~ from Going Around with Bachelors (Brick Books, 2007)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

I've sought out corner bars, lived in corner houses;    
  like everyone else I've reserved  
corner tables, thinking they'd be sufficient.     
  I've met at corners  
perceived as crossroads, loved to find love     
  leaning against a lamp post  
but have known the abruptness of corners too, 
  the pivot, the silence.  
I've sat in corners at parties hoping for someone     
  who knew the virtue  
of both distance and close quarters, someone with a     
  corner person's taste  for intimacy, hard won, rising out of 
shyness  and desire.  
  And I've turned corners there was no going back to,     
corners  in the middle of a room that led     
  to Spain or solitude.  
And always the thin line between corner     
  and cornered,  
the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies     
  that permit no repose,  
the places we retreat to, the places we can't bear     
  to be found.  

~ from New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994  
(W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)

All the curtains     

are gone: moonlight

drifts across the floor

like a loose band-aid.

The corners of rooms  

are angels with walls

for wings wearing halos

made by spiders.

There are empty clothes

hangers hanging in the closet

bobbing gently in place

like ducks sleeping on water.

~from Breathing Fire, edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane

(Nightwood Editions, 2004)

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one-
not knowing even
that was what he did-
in the blowing
sounds in he dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

~ from The Lives of the Heart (Harper Perrenial, 1997)

I kiss a book sometimes    
like a bride or the gospel
or the land, after wild seas
grant me a man again.

The things we love!
women, the truth, planets—

like flowers through ruins
like brides through deserts
like shore through murderous mist

out of wreckage and rancor.  Somehow!

~ from Poetry Magazine, (October, 1967)

Tapping me on the back, the night says,
“Don’t stay home.
Go look for what you lost yesterday.”
What I lost yesterday
resembles what I had lost the day before yesterday,
and what I lost the day before yesterday,
resembles what I had lost the day before that:

The backside of the board slipping down perpetually;
something that vanishes each time I go looking for it;
the nightly thirst while I’m walking along roads full of chuckholes
carrying an empty bag.

Perhaps it is something small.
Perhaps it is visible, perhaps invisible.
Perhaps it is something like a right.

I dream that the bag is too heavy for me to carry,
and when weightless morning comes I do it all over again.
Today I found
an utter stranger looking
for the same article that I had lost.

~ from What Have You Lost, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye (HarperCollins, 1999)

Sometimes
In the tangled boughs
Of the jasmine tree
And sometimes
On the green emerald floor
A nightingale sings
The poignant melodies
Of love.
From the vast treeless plains
Carried by the evening’s dust-clouds
Come the joyous sounds
Of people returning home.
Mustard fields stretch
Towards the horizon.
Wild roses and green swaying wheat.
The cacophony of birds
On the ancestral tree
In my courtyard.
The houses and their inmates
Stand amazed.
The village-wilderness
Turns into a perfumed garden.

(translated by Daud Kamal)
~from This Same Sky, Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye 
(Aladdin Paperbacks, 1996)