A Man In His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there's time for everything.

by Yehuda Amichai

A Life-Lesson

There! little girl; don't cry!
They have broken your doll, I know;
And your tea-set blue,
And your play-house, too,
Are things of the long ago;
But childish troubles will soon pass by. --
There! little girl; don't cry!

There! little girl; don't cry!
They have broken your slate, I know;
And the glad, wild ways
Of your schoolgirl days
Are things of the long ago;
But life and love will soon come by. --
There! little girl; don't cry!

There! little girl; don't cry!
They have broken your heart I know;
And the rainbow gleams
Of your youthful dreams
Are things of the long ago;
But Heaven holds all for which you sigh. --
There! little girl; don't cry!

by James Whitcomb Riley

A Life

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

by Sylvia Plath

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

by Sylvia Plath

A Former Life

LONG since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,
By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,
Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,
Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.

The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies
Mingled its music, turbulent and rich,
Solemn and mystic, with the colours which
The setting sun reflected in my eyes.

And there I lived amid voluptuous calms,
In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave,
Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave,

Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms.
They were my slaves--the only care they had
To know what secret grief had made me sad.

by Charles Baudelaire

A Country Life

A bird that I don't know,

Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,

Looks sideways out into the wheat

The wind waves under the waves of heat.

The field is yellow as egg-bread dough

Except where (just as though they'd let

It live for looks) a locust billows

In leaf-green and shade-violet,

A standing mercy.

The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";

Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."

If someone came by I could ask,

Around here all of them must know --

And why they live so and die so --

Or why, for once, the lagging heron

Flaps from the little creek's parched cresses

Across the harsh-grassed, gullied meadow

To the black, rowed evergreens below.

They know and they don't know.

To ask, a man must be a stranger --

And asking, much more answering, is dangerous;

Asked about it, who would not repent

Of all he ever did and never meant,

And think a life and its distresses,

Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,

The circumstances of an accident?

The farthest farmer in a field,

A gaunt plant grown, for seed, by farmers,

Has felt a longing, lorn urbanity

Jailed in his breast; and, just as I,

Has grunted, in his old perplexity,

A standing plea.

From the tar of the blazing square

The eyes shift, in their taciturn

And unavowing, unavailable sorrow.

Yet the intonation of a name confesses

Some secrets that they never meant

To let out to a soul; and what words would not dim

The bowed and weathered heads above the denim

Or the once-too-often washed wash dresses?

They are subdued to their own element.

One day

The red, clay face

Is lowered to the naked clay;

After some words, the body is forsaken

The shadows lengthen, and a dreaming hope

Breathes, from the vague mound, Life;

From the grove under the spire

Stars shine, and a wandering light

Is kindled for the mourner, man.

The angel kneeling with the wreath

Sees, in the moonlight, graves.

by Randall Jarrell