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“... before the storm isthe storm. Our waiting tunnelling outward, chewing at the as-yet-not-here, wild,& in it thenot-yet,that phantom, hovering, scribbling hints in the dusty airshafts where weawait rain whichonce again will not come, though something we think of as the stormwill. Steeped in no-colour colour. Smothering hopes with falsepromises, as wind comes up and we feel our soul turn franticin us, craning this way and that, yes the soul can twist, can winch itself into knots,why not, there is light but no warmth, we are alone yetnot, no trace but the feeling oftrace, who wouldn’t be a child again,teach me how to work, how to be kind, teach me ignorance, sweet ignorance,the roads lie down in us, all the roads taken, they knot up,they went nowhere, cld that be true,they made a shapeless burden we carried around calling it lived-experience ...”

“... It is entirely in my hands now as it returns like blood to remind me – the chains so soft from wear, in my right, in my left – the first time I, trying for perfection, of balance, of symmetry, strap your twenty-two pounds of eyes, blood, hair, bone – so recently inside me – into the swing – and the sun still in the sky though it being so late as I look up to see where this small package is to go sent up by these two hands into the evening that won’t stop won’t lower as it should into the gloam is it going to last forever, and the grace that I feel at the centre of my palms as if my hands were leaves and light were coursing through some hole in their grasp, the machine of time coming in, as chlorophyll could – I was not yet so tired of believing – I was still in the very beginning of being human, the thing no one can tell another – he didn’t find what he searched for, she didn’t understand what she desired – the style of the story being the very wind which comes up now as I glide down the chains to the canvas bucket to pull you to me, eyes closed as your eyes close, and for the first time in this lifetime lift you back and up as far as I can, as high as I can, then let you collapse so suddenly as I push you away from me, with more force than gravity as I summon from within what I try to feel is an accurate amount, a right fraction, of my strength, not too much promise, not too much greed or ambition or sense of beginning or capacity for dream – no – just the amount to push you by that corresponds to pity, who knows how to calculate that strong firm force, as if I were sending a message forth that has to be delivered and the claimant expects it, one of so many, accompanied by my prayer that you be spared from anything at all, from everything, and of course also its opposite, that everything happen to you in large sheets of experience as I tug back the chain-ends and push you out telling you to put out your legs and pump although you do not know what I am saying as you have not yet spoken your first word, not yet on that day that seems even now it will never end as you come back to me and I catch you and this time of course as I am human I push a little harder as if the news I was shouting-out had not quite been heard, as if the next push were the real one the one that asks for the miracle – will I live or die if I pick this fruit as it is sent back to my waiting hands and this time it’s stronger, the yes is taking over, your yes and my yes and our greed to overcome what, into this first-ever solstice with you in the born world, let no one dare pick this fruit I think as I cast the roundness of you up again now so high into a mouth of sky agape yet without wonder as if it eats everything and anything and does not know what day is or time – this is our time – or that this next-on meal is being fed it, as just under you the oval puddle from the recent rain lies in the worn declivity where each one before you has dug in her feet to push off or to stop – and in it you flash as you go by giving me for that instant an eye you its iris blinking, the crucible of a blink in the large unflinching eye, eye opened by the hundreds of small hopes taking on gravity at push-off, and then the fatigue when for all the pumping and rising, and how you could see over the tops of the houses up and over to where your own house is down there – and the housing development, and the millions of leaves, and the slower children                           lagging behind on the small road beneath – until the world stills, and you alone are life, a huge bloom, a new force entering – how then – even then – the sensation of enough swarms, and thought or something like it, resumes, and your mind is again in your hard grip on the chains which had been until then as if unknown to your body during what might have been the interglacial lull, or the period during which the original ooze grew single-cell organisms, which grew small claws and feet and then had to have eyes, till your hands become again hard, heavy, and all the yearning re-enters you as lifetime, and your feet learn to brake by scratching the ground a bit more each time – and that is where the eye comes from, the final oscillations, the desire to be done with vision, what this morning’s rain reminds us is still there beneath us in an earth that will only swallow us entire no matter what we push into it as here you and I again and again redo the moment nine months ago you first began to push and cry-out into the visible world ...”

“... Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would say screen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry. In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just cried eyes. Cried now now ...”

“... Praying (Attempt of 6 June ’03) I wake and one of them is still there, still talking, sudden jolts of hand as if to slap open the air, garbage waiting at the curb, myself a slave, still, yes, I check, a slave, mist on the hedgerows, stubblefields between. A slave. Beyond, the village still asleep. That I can say the word village. Thorns disappearing now under the last of the blossoming ...”

“... The Complex Mechanism of the Break From here, ten to fourteen rows of folding and branching. Up close, the laving in overlappings that pool sideways as well as suck back. Filamentary green-trims where the temporary furthest coming-forward is lost. Suctions in three or four different directions back from pinnacle-point. Encounter of back-suck by the foremost, low-breaking, upstitching really, arrivals, where it seems pebblings of sandbits ruffle up and are ruffled back into the foam of the breakwater browning it ...”

“... James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts all her chosen subjects into writers of lyric poetry ...”

“... The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it touches, almost affectionately, the zodiacal globe it is about to spin. Although the star-gazer cannot make physical contact with his remote field of vision, the caressing way his finger lies on the surface of the globe suggests his intense intimacy with the sky ...”

“... of image, knew, if people take your projections seriously they will probably take you seriously. Jorie Graham, who is by no means a reticent ironist, takes poetry very seriously and, given that The Dream of the Unified Field has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, clearly that’s how many people take her. We often expect poems with grand titles to be ...”