JANE KENYON
I am the blossom pressed in a book
found again after two hundred years...
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper...
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me...
I am food on the prisoner's plate...
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills...
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden...
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge...
I am the heart contracted by joy...
the longest hair, white
before the rest...
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow...
I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fernon the boggy summit...
I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name...
LINDA PASTAN
What we want is never simple
We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book
And these things bear out our names - -
Now they want us.
But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past, holding out our arms
and in the morning our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day as an animal is there under the table,
as the stars are there even in full sun
When I taught you at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day.
Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.
None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! My last, or next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master
I lost two cities, lovely ones
And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
- - Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan't have lied.
It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.
