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I found out about Poem on Your Blog Day via this Metafilter thread, one of whose contributors has made me very happy by posting Frank O’Hara’s "Having a Coke with You." I find it all but impossible to pick just one poem, but for some reason I thought of this one:

But I Can’t

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

— W. H. Auden

See also this article from the UK Guardian on Auden and song.

(Elsewhere, Dorothea posts the entirety of A. D. Godley’s wonderful macaronic poem "Motor Bus," the first four lines of which got lodged in my head, inconveniently without any recollection of who wrote them, after I saw them quoted in some book or other I read years ago. And this is also happy-making.)

First, Andrew Marvell. I have a hard time choosing favorite seventeenth-century poets, but at any given point, Marvell’s likely to be among my top three.

The Mower to the Glo-Worms

Ye living Lamps, by whose dear light
The Nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the Summer-night,
Her matchless Songs does meditate;

Ye Country Comets, that portend
No War, nor Princes funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Then to presage the Grasses fall;

Ye Glo-worms, whose officious Flame
To wandring Mowers shows the way,
That in the Night have lost their aim,
And after foolish Fires do stray;

Your courteous Lights in vain you wast,
Since Juliana here is come,
For She my Mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

— Andrew Marvell (via the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center)

Marvell’s Mower, who appears in several of Marvell’s other poems, is a strange figure, sometimes angry, sometimes comic. This poem is one of the calmer ones, deliberately keeping its distance from the larger world in which wars and princes’ funerals figure. Juliana, the Mower’s always unavailable beloved, doesn’t appear until the last stanza. I find those last two lines stunning: Marvell seems to articulate something essential about the experience of being crazily in love with someone and suddenly having the entire world look unfamiliar. It reminds me somewhat of Freud’s "uncanny," the unheimlich or un-home-like. (Also of a bit from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: "I walk back and forth in my room: the various objects — whose familiarity usually comforts me — the gray roofs, the noises of the city, everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunderstruck.")

And secondly, glow-worms. It occurred to me that I didn’t know precisely what a glow-worm (or, in the earlier spelling, which I love, "glo-worm") was; I had a vague idea of their being sort of like fireflies. However, thanks to the UK Glow worm survey, I now know that they’re a type of beetle, that they’re related to fireflies but don’t flash, and that people organize glow-worm walks to look at them. If I ever visit the UK (and I hope I will at some point), I shall add glow-worm watching to the agenda.

Eyesight

It was May before my
attention came
to spring and

my word I said
to the southern slopes
I’ve

missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:

don’t worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if

you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain

it’s not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone

— A. R. Ammons

I love the inversion of "my / attention came / to spring" instead of the more expected "spring came to my attention." My own attention is trained minutely if not steadily on spring. The students have taken to wearing flip-flops and lobbying to have class outside, I’ve been seeing croci and violets and even daffodils, and the trees outside the building where my office is have red buds, which make them look from a distance as if a warmly-colored mist has settled on their branches.

Loren Webster writes about Ammons as well. I refer you to his entry on "Eyesight," and to Modern American Poetry’s A. R. Ammons site.

Oh, heck, one more:

Chiseled Clouds

A single
cemetery
wipes out
most
of my
people,
skinny old
slabs
leaning this
way
and that
as
in stray
winds,
holding names:

still, enough
silver
cathedrals fill
this
afternoon sky
to
house everyone
ever
lost from
the
light’s returning.