“An early afterlife” by Linda Pastan Why don’t we say good-bye right now In the fallacy of perfect health before whatever is going to happen happens. We could perfect our parting, like those characters in On the Beach who said farewell in the shadow of the bomb as we sat watching, young and holding hands at […]

Ithanka by Constantine Cavafy As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as […]

Prodigy BY CHARLES SIMIC I grew up bent over a chessboard. I loved the word endgame. All my cousins looked worried. It was a small house near a Roman graveyard. Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes. A retired professor of astronomy taught me how to play. That must have been in 1944. In the set we were […]

Old Couple BY CHARLES SIMIC They’re waiting to be murdered, Or evicted. Soon They expect to have nothing to eat. In the meantime, they sit. A violent pain is coming, they think. It will start in the heart And climb into the mouth. They’ll be carried off in stretchers, howling. Tonight they watch the window Without […]

Charon’s Cosmology BY CHARLES SIMIC With only his dim lantern To tell him where he is And every time a mountain Of fresh corpses to load up Take them to the other side Where there are plenty more I’d say by now he must be confused As to which side is which I’d say it doesn’t […]

My Brain and Heart Divorced by John Roedel my brain andheart divorced a decade ago over who was to blame abouthow big of a messI have become eventually, they couldn’t bein the same roomwith each other now my head and heartshare custody of me I stay with my brainduring the week and my heartgets me […]

The Old Age of Nostalgia Mark Strand Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with […]

At Sixty-Five Henri Cole It was all so different than he expected.For years he’d been agnostic; now he meditated.For years he’d dreamed of being an artist living abroad;now he reread Baudelaire, Emerson, Bishop.He’d never considered marriage . . .Still, a force through green did fuse.Yes, he wore his pants looser.No, he didn’t do crosswords in bed.No, he […]

TREES by W. S. Merwin I am looking at trees they may be one of the things I will miss most from the earth though many of the ones I have seen already I cannot remember and though I seldom embrace the ones I see and have never been able to speak with one I […]

LATE SPRING by W. S. Merwin Coming into the high room again after years after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies after losses and feet on stairs after looking and mistakes and forgetting turning there thinking to find no one except those I knew finally I saw you sitting in white […]