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Emerging Curves

Spot time conceals: wait long enough (for
how few things we have time to wait) the
face of the glacier splits off, the overhang

drops into sharp depth and comes up blue to
its proper bob (so much so fast the long
preparation blinks): or take wet snow clumps

sloped on a spirea bush's finework: how long
it takes thawing drops to drop at forty degrees:
but by afternoon or maybe the next morning, the

bush's risen way out of nodding: I'll never
know what becomes of this slope I live on:
I know the wind coming up's high farther down

where the slope sheds sharply but what the wind's
doing or what the brook's going the other way
are putting up or taking down the long sayings tell.

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Selected

Poems worth returning to

Vain boys make saucy …

Stephen Sandy

Before we would go out …

Philip Terman

The money of  the mind is attention, maybe. …

Joshua Bennett

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain. …

Ada Limón

Evolution settles for a while on various stable balances. …

Jennifer Michael Hecht

As I came by the town, the townsmen …

Josephine Miles

For H.T.M. …

H. B. Mallalieu

Splendid and terrible your love. …

Seumas O'Sullivan

The glossary

The language about poetry

From aubade to zuihitsu, 207 definitions of the forms, figures, and schools that shape the line.

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