Denise Levertov – In California: Morning, Evening, Late January

“Who can utter the praise of such generosity or the shame?”

Vincente Aleixandre – The Hands

“Look at your hand, how slowly it moves, transparent, tangible, laid over with light, beautiful, alive, almost human in the night”

Brandon D. Johnson – Standing by a Shelf

“The damned fine few who know Try not to lose the memories, Talk as if each was there For the other, laughter supplants tears.”

George Oppen – Psalm

“In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there!”

Elizabeth Bishop – The Fish

“They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light.”

Stanley Kunitz – The Wellfleet Whale

“as you swung your blind head toward us and laboriously opened a bloodshot, glistening eye, in which we swam with terror and recognition.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins – God’s Grandeur

“And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”

William Shakespeare – Sonnet 60

“Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end”

William E. Stafford – The Well Rising

“I place my feet with care in such a world.”

Shirley Kaufman – Jacaranda

“because our lives are sagging with marvels ready to fail us, clusters of faces drifting away”

Audre Lorde – Recreation

“but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting we cut the leash”

Carol Ann Duffy – Valentine

“Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love.”