W. S. Merwin

To the Hand

What the eye sees is a dream of sight
what it wakes to
is a dream of sight

and in the dream
for every real lock
there is only one real key
and it’s in some other dream
now invisible

it’s the key to the one real door
it opens the water and the sky both at once
it’s already in the downward river
with my hand on it
my real hand

and I am saying to the hand
turn

open the river

Robert Lowell

Seesaw

The night dark before its hour—
heavily, steadily,
the rain lashes and sprinkles
to complete its task—
as if assisting
the encroachments of our bodies
we occupy but cannot cure.

Sufferer, how can you help me,
if I use your sickness
to increase my own?

Will we always be
one up, the other down,
one hitting bottom, the other
flying through the trees—
seesaw inseparables?

Robert Frost

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Robert Browning

Meeting at Night

1

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

2

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each.

Robert Penn Warren

The World is a Parable

I must hurry, I must go somewhere
Where you are not, where you
Will never be, I
Must go somewhere where
Nothing is real, for only
Nothingness is real and is
A sea of light. The world
Is a parable and we are
The meaning. The traffic
Begins to move, and meaning
In my guts blooms like
A begonia, I dare not
Pronounce its name—Oh, driver!
For God’s sake catch that light, for

There comes a time for us all when we want to begin a new life.

All mythologies recognize this fact.