A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Untitled (Crickets) by Izumi Shikibu

Although
the cricket’s song
has no words,
still,
it sounds like sorrow.

A Lament on the Evanescence of Life by Yamanoue no Okura

What we must accept
  as we journey through the world
Is that time will pass
  like the waters of a stream;
in countless numbers,
in relentless succession,
it will besiege us
  with assaults we must endure.
They would not detain
  the period of their bloom
when, as maidens will,
they who were then maidens
  encircled their wrists
    with gemmed bracelets from Cathay,
and took their pleasure
  frolicking hand in hand
    with their youthful friends.
So the months and years went by,
and when did it fall –
that sprinkling of wintry frost
  on glistening hair
    as black as leopard flower seeds?
And whence did they come –
those wrinkles that settled in,
marring the smoothness
  of blushing pink faces?
Was it forever,
the kind of life those others led –
those stalwart men,
who, as fine young men will do,
girded at their waists
  sharp swords, keen-bladed weapons,
took up hunting bows,
clasped them tight in their clenched fists,
placed on red horses
  saddles fashioned of striped hemp,
climbed onto their steeds,
and rode gaily here and there?
they were not many,
those nights when the fine young men
  pushed open the doors,
the plank doors of the chamber
  where the maidens slept,
groped their way close to their loves,
and slept with their arms
  intertwined with gemlike arms.
Yet already now
  those who were maidens and youths
    must use walking sticks,
and when they walk over there,
others avoid them,
and when they walk over here,
others show distaste.
Such is life, it seems, for the old.
Precious though life is,
it is beyond our power
  to stay the passing of time.

There is No Word by Tony Hoagland

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

Spellbound by Emily Bronte

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

 Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

Pastoral by William Carlos Wiliams

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.

                        No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

Late Echo by John Ashberry

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary

As Real as Life by Ruth Stone

Say to the mild melancholy of regret
That seizes the Sunday afternoon,
I will not let your charm be sullied
By those tears that wet
The first ten years from June.
June was my birthday, likely from then
Until I can remember, Sunday was slow
Like a praying mantis climbing an oak
And tears, like tea, had formal cause to flow.
I will not regret the stereoptic world
Seen through Sunday windows
Baffled by depths that overlapped dismay.
But I will say, I have seen many a photograph, 
As real as life, and I have saved
A clipping about mountaineers who froze

Into the Day by JH Prynne

What swims in the eye
is mortal dread, solar
flare. The ear spins
with sharp cries, there
is shear at the flowline.
Honour thy father,
anguish as the sign
deflects through water,
into port. The shell
crossing is sport,
they are childlike
and their limbs intact.

Love by JH Prynne

Noble in the sound which
marks the pale ease
of their dreams, they ride
the bel canto of our time: the patient en-
circlement of Narcissus &
as he pines I too
am wan with fever,
have fears which set
the vanished child above
reproach. Cry as you
will, take what you
need, the night is young
and limitless our greed.

Dream Song 100: How this woman came by the courage by John Berryman

How this woman came by the courage, how she got
the courage, Henry bemused himself in a frantic hot
night of the eight of July,
where it came from, did once the Lord frown down
upon her ancient cradle thinking 'This one
will do before she die

for two and seventy years of chipped indignities
at least,' and with his thunder clapped a promise?
In that far away town
who looked upon my mother with shame & rage
that any should endure such pilgrimage,
growled Henry sweating, grown

but not grown used to the goodness of this woman
in her great strength, in her hope superhuman,
no, no, not used at all.
I declare a mystery, he mumbled to himself,
of love, and took the bourbon from the shelf
and drank her a tall one, tall.

Futility by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Regarding Wave by Gary Snyder

The voice of the Dharma
       the voice
          now

A shimmering bell
       through all.

Every hill,    still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes  flow.
       old woods, new seedlings,
       tall grasses plumes.

Dark hollows;  peaks of light.
  wind stirs    the cool side
Each leaf living.
       All the hills.

         The Voice
         is a wife
            to

         

         him still.

two english poems by jorge luis borges

                         I
   
   The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
      corner; I have outlived the night.
   Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
      laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
      things unlikely and desirable.
   Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
      of things half given away, half withheld,
      of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
      that way, I tell you.
   The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds
      and odd ends: some hated friends to chat
      with, music for dreams, and the smoking of
      bitter ashes.  The things my hungry heart
      has no use for.
   The big wave brought you.
   Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily
      and incessantly beautiful.  We talked and you
      have forgotten the words.
   The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street
      of my city.
   Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
      make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
      these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
   I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find
      them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and
      to the few stray stars of the dawn.
   Your dark rich life ... 
   I must get at you, somehow; I put away those 
      illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
      hidden look, your real smile -- that lonely,
      mocking smile your cool mirror knows.
   
                       II
   
   What can I hold you with?
   I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
      moon of the jagged suburbs.
   I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
      long and long at the lonely moon.
   I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
      that living men have honoured in bronze:
      my father's father killed in the frontier of
      Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
      bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
      the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
      --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
      three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
      vanished horses.
   I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, 
      whatever manliness or humour my life.
   I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
      been loyal.
   I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
      somehow --the central heart that deals not
      in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
      untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
   I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
      sunset, years before you were born.
   I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
      yourself, authentic and surprising news of 
      yourself.
   I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
      hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you 
      with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat