Wallace Stevens

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground.
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

1916

Robert Frost

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin clothAssorted
characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' brothA
snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?-
If design govern in a thing so small.

1936 

The Cool Web

Robert Graves

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

1927

The Way of Things

Particulars slip by
like the sun past the moon
eclipsed
---
A thousand little pieces
fragmented then reconstructed
---
Insurmountable yet unnoticed
Pluck and grasp as they fly by

                                      Angie Reisch

Poems taken from my grandma's poetry book from 1886, "Representative Poems of Living Poets"

"Forgotten"
 Elizabeth Akers Allen

Present Yet Absent

they feel with their
hands yet fail to see
the absence and presence 
of what lies
---
in front
in back
below
beside
---
undiscovered worlds
microcosms of macrocosms

                                                 Angie Reisch

Punctured with a Needle

you and i
try to fit this world in my box
we pull colors off the wall
uproot textures hard and soft
cusp light and shadow in our hands
until they become warm and runny and
slip through the tiny cracks
that let light in

℘
      
i thread all these things
around us
puncture them with a needle
and
tie them to my finger
so i won't forget


                                                        Angie Reisch

THE DEATH OF A TOAD 

Richard Wilbur

A toad the power mower caught, 
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got 
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him 
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim, 
Low, and a final glade. 
The rare original heartsbleed goes, 
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows 
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies 
As still as if he would return to stone, 
And soundlessly attending, dies 
Toward some deep monotone, 
Toward misted and ebullient seas 
And cooling shores, toward lost 
Amphibias emperies. 
 Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone 
 In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear 
To watch, across the castrate lawn, 
 The haggard daylight steer.

We Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917 - 2000
THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. 

We real cool. We 
Left school. We 
Lurk late. We 
Strike straight. We 
Sing sin. We 
Thin gin. We 
Jazz June. We 
Die soon.