Riding the Elevator into the Sky by Anne Sexton

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them
As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won't shut.
There are warning
that you must forget
if you're climbing out of yourself.
If you're going to smash into the sky.
Many times I've gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking upwards,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor:
small plants and swans bending
into their grave.
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
bird to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand:
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something -
some useful door -
somewhere -
up there.

since feeling is first by e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

A haiku by Kikaku

Above the boat
bellies
of wild geese.

A haiku by Kikaku
from A Book of Luminous Things ed. Czeslaw Milosz