Poems

Choose two poems from Snyder, Oliver or below. Print or copy them on a single sheet of paper and carefully mark the poem. Consider marking sections, poetic devices (like symbols, simile, metaphor, color imagery), speaker's voice, and key words or details. All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied Specks to range on window-sills at home, On shelves at school, and wait and watch until The fattening dots burst into nimble- Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how The daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too For they were yellow in the sun and brown In rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it. Maxine Kumin, from // Nurture. //
 * The Death Of A Naturalist **
 * Seamus Heaney || ||
 * In the Park **

You have forty-nine days between death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist. Even the smallest soul could swim the English Channel in that time or climb, like a ten-month-old child, every step of the Washington Monument to travel across, up, down, over or through –you won't know till you get there which to do.

// He laid on me for a few seconds // said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell about his skirmish with a grizzly bear in Glacier Park. // He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart // beating against my heart. Never mind lie and lay, the whole world confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament. In it God talks to Moses, Noah, Samuel, and they answer. People confer with angels. Certain animals converse with humans. It's a simple world, full of crossovers. Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God has a nasty temper when provoked, but if there is a Hell, little is made of it. No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as. When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

Carolyn Kizer That formed over his steaming sores, Hugged his agues, loved his lust, But damned to hell the out-of-doors
 * || ** The Ungrateful Garden ** || ||
 * ||  || || Midas watched the golden crust

Where blazing motes of sun impaled The serrid roses, metal-bright. "Those famous flowers," Midas wailed, "Have scorched my retina with light."

This gift, he'd thought, would gild his joys, Silt up the waters of his grief; His lawns a wilderness of noise, The heavy clang of leaf on leaf.

Within, the golden cup is good To lift, to sip the yellow mead. Outside, in summer's rage, the rude Gold thorn has made his fingers bleed.

"I strolled my halls in golden shift, As ruddy as a lion s meat. Then I rushed out to share my gift, And golden stubble cut my feet."

Dazzled with wounds, he limped away To climb into his golden bed, Roses, roses can betray. "Nature is evil," Midas said || || Barbara Crooker from // Radiance //. ** All That Is Glorious Around Us ** // (title of an exhibit on The Hudson River School) // is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled overlooks, towering clouds, but doing errands on a day of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car, 160,000 miles, still running just fine. Or later, sitting in a café warmed by the steam from white chicken chili, two cups of dark coffee, watching the red and gold leaves race down the street, confetti from autumn's bright parade. And I think of how my mother struggles to breathe, how few good days she has now, how we never think about the glories of breath, oxygen cascading down our throats to the lungs, simple as the journey of water over a rock. It is the nature of stone / to be satisfied / writes Mary Oliver, It is the nature of water / to want to be somewhere else, rushing down a rocky tor or high escarpment, the panoramic landscape boundless behind it. But everything glorious is around us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain's bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement, where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening street, this radiant world.

Howard Nemerov, from // The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov //.
 * Dandelions **

These golden heads, these common suns Only less multitudinous Than grass itself that gluts The market of the world with green, They shine as lovely as they're mean, Fine as the daughters of the poor Who go proudly in spangles of brass; Light-headed, then headless, stalked for a salad.

Inside a week they will be seen Stricken and old, ghosts in the field To be picked up at the lightest breath, With brazen tops all shrunken in And swollen green gone withered white. You'll say it's nature's price for beauty That goes cheap; that being light Is justly what makes girls grow heavy; And that the wind, bearing their death, Whispers the second kingdom come. — You'll say, the fool of piety, By resignations hanging on Until, still justified, you drop. But surely the thing is sorrowful, At evening when the light goes out Slowly, to see those ruined spinsters, All down the field their ghostly hair, Dry sinners waiting in the valley For the last word and the next life And the liberation from the lion's mouth.

Candlelight
by [|Tony Hoagland] Crossing the porch in the hazy dusk to worship the moon rising like a yellow filling-station sign on the black horizon,

you feel the faint grit of ants beneath your shoes, but keep on walking because in this world

you have to decide what you're willing to kill. Saving your marriage might mean dinner for two

by candlelight on steak raised on pasture chopped out of rain forest whose absence might mean

an atmospheric thinness fifty years from now above the vulnerable head of your bald grandson on vacation

as the cells of his scalp sautéed by solar radiation break down like suspects under questioning.

Still you slice the sirloin into pieces and feed each other on silver forks

under the approving gaze of a waiter whose purchased attention and French name

are a kind of candlelight themselves, while in the background the fingertips of the pianist float over the tusks of the slaughtered elephant without a care, as if the elephant had granted its permission.


 * LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE**

I consistently confuse the marsh frog with the purple pitcher plant. Maybe it's because each alike makes a smooth spine of light, a rounded knot of forbearance from mud.

And which is blackbird? which prairie thistle? They both latch on, glean, mind their futures with numerous sharp nails and beaks.

Falling rain and water fleas are obviously synonyms, both meaning countless curling pocks of pond motion. And aren't seeding cottonwood laces and orb weavers clearly the same--clever opportunists with silk?

I call field stars and field crickets one and the other, because they're both scattered in thousands of notches throughout the night. And today I mistook a blue creekside of lupine for generosity, the way it held nothing back. O reed canary grasses and grace--someone tell me the difference again.

Write this down: my voice and a leaf of aspen winding in the wind--we find the sun from many spinning sides.

Pattiann Rogers