I sat on a rock by the water, and read. All afternoon. Sometimes I watched birds float on the air or  butterflies careen in the current above the stream. Not a single worry flowed through my mind. The only hurry in my day were the bubbles I watched cross the rocks and collide into foam.

Never go to bed with a poet, you won’t sleep.

The long twin inches of my hands take the
whole night to ski the two pineapple halves
of you; brown baklava pieced over a caramel
cooler of skin.  The monsoon is early.

Nikky Finney, Excerpt From Orangerie in Head Off & Split

First Monday on Sabbatical

For nearly an hour this morning,
I listen to the steady rain
as it beads along the eaves
and patters to the walk
in detonations small, irregular,
that language has no word for.

These lavish seepings that 
soak the tree hydrangea to its roots,
that ping the bucket blue,
free us from the human drive 
to measure things, to fit 
the ( Read more... )

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out on all sides.
I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.

Language but no words.
                                   TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

Utterance

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence

W.S. Merwin