a little out of my range

We've been studying Louise Glück (pronounced "glick") all week in CAP. I must admit, she is a hard poet for me to engage. She uses nature imagery as symbolic for her own life, and after 40 poems it gets a little old. Nonetheless, here is one that I can stand more than the others, mainly because the last three lines are fascinating to me:

Spring Snow

Love at the night sky:
I have two selves, two kinds of power.

I am here with you, at the window,
watching you react. Yesterday
the moon rose over moist earth in the lower garden.
Now the earth glitters like the moon,
like dead matter crusted with light.

You can close your eyes now.
I have heard your cries, and cries before yours,
and the demand behind them.
I have shown you what you want:
not belief, but capitulation
to authority, which depends on violence.

breathtaking, or at least a little slice of delightful

Little Blues

There is no pain. A cracked
teacup rose says hover
in this fracture, your lips
like bees that love

the too ripe pear
nearby. Mist's in the air. Jerry
is filling his pipe again.
There's that song.

-Christopher Howell (a professor at Eastern Washington University, in fact).

My note: If you don't read this one aloud, you just don't get it. Seriously.

i like this one

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

--Robert Hayden