Mark Strand Poems

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
...

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.
...

The huge doll of my body
refuses to rise.
I am the toy of women.
My mother
...

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
...

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
...

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling
the old self become the older self, imagining
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.
You think that silence is the extra page,
...

For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
...

Tonight I walked,
lost in my own meditation,
and was afraid,
not of the labyrinth
...

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
...

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
...