I was Asked to Make a List

86º ~ conditions near the same, cloud cover breaking up in the south

Earlier this week, some friends and I agreed to each make a packet containing approx. 10 poems that we love.  These are friends with whom I've talked of poetry casually, but they are not writers of poetry and so I do not know their aesthetic. 

Of course I had a terrible time creating my list, mostly in narrowing.  Eventually, I gave up and just went with the poems that floated most quickly to the top of my head.  I am sure there are others equally deserving.

Here's my list (in no particular order) and an excerpt for each poem.

Traci Brimhall ~ "Aubade with a Broken Neck"

The first night you don't come home
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough 


James Wright ~ "A Blessing"

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

Li-Young Lee ~ "Persimmons"

Finally understanding   

he was going blind,

my father sat up all one night   

waiting for a song, a ghost.   

Elizabeth Bishop ~ "One Art"

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Mary Oliver ~ "In Blackwater Woods"

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,


Pablo Neruda ~ "Sonnet XVII" ~ trans. Stephen Mitchell

and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.


Quan Barry ~ "Child of the Enemy"

from "IX. Napalm"

.......  Like all effective incendiaries,

I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.

Charles Wright ~ "1975"

Year of the Half-Hinged Mouth and the Hollow Bones,

Year of the Thorn,

Anne Sexton ~ "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife"

She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.


Maurice Manning ~ "Seven Chimeras"

The way Booth makes an orchid:

combine one bluebird with nine fencerow

pokeberries; crush together and hang

thirty yards away in half-light.

Lucie Brock-Broido ~ "Also, None of Us Has Seen God"

Old as a prehistoric furrow horse abed in awe & sediment,

Curled on his runic side, in the shape of an O broken.


Well, there you go, I went to 11.