Jared Carter

It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.

You do not really cut glass, you score its length
...

If you were fortunate enough to live
on a planet circling a sun-like star
in the Large Magellanic Cloud -
...

One of life's simplest moments: the approaching of the first few drops of a summer rain. That it was coming, all along, and had been predicted since mid-morning, by neighbors pointing to the dark western sky, and by the agitation of robins, and the unusual silence of cicadas - all that was conceded, and understood, while the rain itself would be welcomed, for it would cool the trees and the houses and the grass, and nourish the creatures of the earth in its invisible and lasting way.

Certainly it was expected, and yet as I sat there reading, being drawn into a faraway world, I had entirely forgotten the roof and the porch, and the parched streets, and even the increased tempo of the wind blowing through the trees - and suddenly there it was, that sound, those drops scattering, nothing overwhelming, just the announcement, the presence, of rain come at last.
...

In a cold empty room, down
in the basement, the janitor
had rigged up an old buffer
from the shoe factory - it was
...

Somewhere within the murmuring of things
that make no difference-aimlessly playing,
drifting in the wind-a loose door swings,
...

In the last glimmer of late afternoon,
burnished by the sun's oblique farewell,
a mirror shines, across an empty room,
...

Vous n'etes que les masques sur des faces masquees
- Apollinaire

Start, then, with a sense of beginning, of sleep
...

There is something about a trumpet blowing
at the end - the dead awakened, sitting up
in their coffins, reaching out through earth
become no more than a mist on their faces,
...

'The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in His Dreams'

is still around somewhere. Survived the smoke
and fires, the footsteps melting into stone,
...

By an unfortunate error a number of lines
were somehow left out of the preceding pages.
But the book's finished now, and the time
for making changes is past. In other ages
...

To clear the walk before the children start
for school, you rise and dress, and take the broom
beside the door, and go out into darkness
where the snow you sweep from side to side
...

Along the tightrope stretched across the falls,
above the torrents hammering the rocks,
she keeps her balance with a parasol
...

Philip Larkin,1922-1985

Poets, Larkin, some of us became
for no more reason than a face
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One of my father's oldest stories:
how when he was a boy growing up
in that town, there were no ponies.
Buggies were gone almost as soon
...

That we were taken early, yes,
that was a shame.
Shelley and Schubert; you may guess
the other names.
...

The two children - abruptly shoved off the platform into the path of an oncoming train - are not in that instant crushed by the wheels, but instead dissolved against the event horizon of a black hole suddenly materialized out of another galaxy.

Its unknowable surface accepts each of them. The girl becomes a dove caught by the softest, lightest of nets, the boy a silver fish motionless in a riverbank weir.
...

'It was a kind of rhythm, ' she said, stirring
ever so slightly in the porch swing, until
it creaked to a stop. I could not quite see her -
interval of first firefly, evening star.
...

We had driven all morning on the back roads,
my father and I, into those dense green hills,
all that way just to fix a leak on the roof
of the old lodge hall - the patched-up building
...

If you were lost, how would I find you,
what path take along dark streets, through
damp vaults, how untangle those choices
far underground, those myriad voices?
...

What is that calling on the wind
that never seems a moment still?
That moves in darkness like a hand
of many fingers taken chill?
...