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Nancy Willard
For You, Who Didn’t Know by Nancy Willard At four A.M. I dreamed myself on that beach where we’ll take you after you’re born. I woke in a wave of blood. Lying in the back seat of a nervous Chevy I counted the traffic lights, lonely as planets. Starlings stirred in the robes of Justice…
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On Perillo
To My Big Nose from ‘Luck Is Luck’ by Lucia Perillo Hard to believe there were actual years when I planned to have you cut from my face— hard to imagine what the world would have looked like if not seen through your pink shadow. You who are built from random parts like a mythical…
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Forget it
Here are two poems on a related theme. If I have already put up the Bishop poem before, I apologize. First, Billy Collins: Forgetfulness by Billy Collins The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you…
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Nemerov’s Sweeper
The Sweeper of Ways by Howard Nemerov All day, a small mild Negro man with a broom Sweeps up the leaves that fall along the paths. He carries his head to one side, looking down At his leaves, at his broom like a windy beard Curled with the sweeping habit. Over him High haughty trees,…
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Two by Kooser
Anne by Ted Kooser Her body was the cellar under her life. The marks of the old floods rounded the walls. Everything that she’d had had been carried outside and burned on the lawn. There was nothing left but a few broken jars and some spiders, eating each other under the stairsteps. Everyone seemed to…
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Easter Egg Salad
Marginalia by Billy Collins Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other…
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Worms, Worms, Worms
The Early Bird by Ted Kooser Still dark, and raining hard on a cold May morning and yet the early bird is out there chirping, chirping its sweet-sour wooden-pulley notes, pleased, it would seem, to be given work, hauling the heavy bucket of dawn up from the darkness, note over note, and letting us drink.…
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For the Boys in March
Pinup by Billy Collins The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense That you cannot make out the calendar of pinup Drawings on the wall above a bench of tools. Your ears are ringing with the sound of The mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe, And as you look closer you notice that…
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That’s It.
A Life by Howard Nemerov Innocence? In a sense. In no sense! Was that it? Was that it? Was that it? That was it.
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Tuesday
Monday Morning by Billy Collins The complacency of this student, late for the final, who chews her pen for an hour, who sits in her sunny chair, with a container of coffee and an orange, a cockatoo swinging freely in her green mind as if on some drug dissolved, mingling to give her a wholly…