Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry by Howard Nemerov, (1920 – 1991)

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn't tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

The Art of Disappearing by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don’t I know you? say no. When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone is telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply. If they say We should get together say why? It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store nod briefly and become a cabbage. When someone you haven’t seen in ten years appears at the door, don’t start singing him all your new songs. You will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time. Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)

The Wasted Years by Karin Gottshall

The wasted years were filled with movies, dreams about Venice, bread and raspberry jam. A hundred books that drifted by like laundry blown loose from the line, their pages unmarked and remembered only vaguely. I fell asleep reading. I listened to Verdi and whole afternoons were gone. I worked: boxing chocolate, sweeping floors, asking would you like whipped cream on that? There were dogs and cats: I looked into their faces. I thought if I’d been a painter I would have purpose now: I would paint saints, I would paint insects, I would paint the coffee shop filled with ghosts in the morning. I went to art supply stores and smelled the charcoal, bought myself thick blank books that were never filled. My shoes wore out and I found another pair just the same. My recipe for peace was a baked pear and my remedy for sorrow was a smoke. My friends called at regular intervals and we spoke about the past as though it were a puzzle we’d yet to solve. I lay in the sun and didn’t care what happened. Birdsong poured like sticky liquid from the trees and stuck one moment to the next, and I felt my life adhere and slide like syrup as I fell asleep under the thousand shades of green.

Return (For Ellen) -- Daniel Halpern

Come back again and again, the fields no longer hold their colors on limbs of light over the earth, under the sky, over the soft dicondra, the clover and weeds that spread, that pressed their dark root systems into the rich fields. The old neighbors have passed quietly into the earth. Your family has broken down and is traveling. Still, this is where your mouth in humor first closed over the mouth of the girl who lived behind you, where you learned to live poised on the edge of talking. Come back, the fields are gone and your friends are gone, the girl behind you has married into another city, the roads out of town are direct now and fast, and everyone you knew is gone, or no longer wants to know you. But you must return, back to the long stretch of main street reaching across the entire length of the valley, back to the mild, mid-winter days around Christmas, back to what is now only remembered because nothing is the same here anymore. There are no fields, nothing edible on the land anymore–only the traffic moving this way, then back again, then back again. The light is no longer reflected in the earth but you return because there is always something that survives: come back again to old friends living against dark fields, come back again, the family holding dinner for you, come back, come back again.

The Thing Is BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. Poem copyright ©2002 Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is," from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, (Grayson Books, 2017). Poem reprinted by permission of Ellen Bass and the publisher.

Secret of Life - Diana Der-Hovanessian

Once during the war on a bus going to Portsmouth a navy yard worker told me the secret of life. The secret of life, he said, can never be passed down one generation to the other. The secret of life, he said, is hunger. It makes an open hand. The secret of life is money. But only the small coins. The secret of life, he said, is love. You become what you lose. The secret of life, he said, is water. The world will end in flood. The secret of life, he said, is circumstance. If you catch the right bus at the right time you will sit next to the secret teller who will whisper it in your ear.

Antilamentation - Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.