Das waren Tage Michelangelo by Ranier Maria Rilke

Once I read in foreign books
of the time of Michelangelo.
That was a man beyond measure--a giant--
who forgot what the immeasurable was.

He was the kind of man who turns
to bring forth the meaning of an age
that wants to end.
He lifts its whole weight
and heaves it into the chasm of his heart.

The anguish and yearning of all those before him
become in his hands raw matter
for him to compress into one great work.

Only God escapes his will-- a God
he loves with a high hatred
for being so out of reach.

I,29 from the Book of Hours; Love Poems to God trns. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

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

Quarrel by Grace Paley

Bob and I
    in different rooms
    talking to ourselves

carrying on
    last nights
    hard conversation

convinced
    the other one
    the life companion
    wasn't listening

My Moses, by Carl Dennis from Meetings with Time

My Moses
by Carl Dennis from Meetings with Time

Time to praise the other Moses, the one who concludes
That the bush isn't really burning, as he first supposed,
Just backlit in red by the setting sun,
Magnified by the need of a runaway to be pardoned,
To pull his shoes off and receive a vision.
The Moses who, when he lifts his staff,
Can't part the waters, who has to wade in
At low tide and hope for the best.
Nobody drowns. Nobody's following. The twelve tribes,
Sluggish after a hard day in the quarries,
Didn't find his lecture on the virtues inspiring.
And Pharoah was willing to see him go.
Good riddance, what with his praise of creation
That gouged the work month with holidays.
Now he's wringing his clothes out on the other side,
Relieved it hasn't taken him any longer to realize
He isn't much of a prophet, that he hasn't the gift.
Free now of the journey to the Promised Land
And the wars with the natives, he can settle down at once
Whenever he pleases, and be happy even here
In the country that disappointed Columbus,
That wasn't the hoped-for shortcut to spices.
Happy even on this block of mine, my neighbor,
A civics teacher at the high school,
Who leaves the gate to his yard unlocked
So the neighborhood children can pick the berries
Before the frost comes and leaf smoke rises
From small, mute fires he's lit himself.