More details over at ambermoggie’s blog and at branches up. (The poems I’ve posted in previous years: 2006, 2007, 2008.)

This poem by John Ashbery (1988) is the inscription on Siah Armajani’s Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (Walker Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis).

And now I cannot remember how I would
have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.

“That was nice, Mom.” -Chaos

Today is the Third Annual Bloggers’ (Silent) Poetry Reading for the Feast of St. Brigid. (Year One; Year Two)

A Smell of Cordwood
Pablo Neruda

Later, when stars
opened out to the cold,
I opened the door
Night:
on an ocean
of galloping hooves.

Then from the dark
of the house, like a hand,
that savage
aroma
of wood on the woodpile.

An odor
that lives
like a tree,
a visible odor.
As if cordwood pulsed like a tree.

Vesture
made visible

A visible
breaking of branches.

I turned back
to
the house
in the circle
of darkening
balsam.
Beyond,
a sparkle
of motes in the sky,
like lodestones.
But the wood-smell
took hold of
my heart,
like a hand and its fingers,
like jasmine,
like a memory cherished.

Not harrowing
pine-odor,
not that way,
not slashed
eucalyptus,
not like
the green
exhalation of arbors —
but
something more recondite,
a fragrance
that gives itself
once, and once
only,
among all things visible,
a world
or a house, a night
by the wintering water;
that awaited me there,
occult in the smell,
of the rose,
an earth-heart plucked out,
dominion
that struck like a wave,
a sundered
duration,
and was lost in my blood
when I opened the door
of the night.

More details at Grace’s Poppies – with thanks to my friend Deb, who introduced me to this poem through the gift of a small but lovely book she made for me…

The Weight of Sweetness by Li-Young Lee

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory.

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy’s face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak as he labors
under the weight of peaches.