I would like to describe a light

which is being born in me

but I know it does not resemble

any star

for it is not so bright

not so pure

and is uncertain

--from "I Would Like to Describe" by Zbigniew Herbert, trans. Alissa Valles

What crazies we writers are,

our heads full of language like buckets of minnows

            standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray

was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his

            poems are good, most of them, and they made me

cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,

            me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool

because all old men are fools, they have to be,

            shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie

into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes

            onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles

shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I

            ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

--from "Ray" by Hayden Carruth

Before I got my eye put out

I liked as well to see—

As other Creatures, that have Eyes

And know no other way—

--from Poem 327 by Emily Dickinson

we let him out

we let him in

we let him out again

--from "Hound Song" by Donald Finkel

As we go round and round like a horse in a mill, we perceive that we are thus clogged with sound because we are reading what we should be hearing.

--from "Strange Elizabethans" by Virginia Woolf

Bright-eyed Athena sent them a swift following wind

rippling out of the west, ruffling over the wine-dark sea 

as Telemachus shouted out commands to all his shipmates: 

“All lay hands to tackle!” They sprang to orders, 

hoisting the pinewood mast, they stepped it firm 

in its block amidships, lashed it fast with the stays 

and with braided rawhide halyards hauled the white sails high. 

Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out 

and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow, 

sang out loud and strong as the ship made way, 

skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.

--from The Odyssey by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles

This door you might not open, and you did;

          So enter now, and see for what slight thing

You are betrayed.

--from "Bluebeard" by Edna St. Vincent Millay