Emily Dickinson – It was not Death, for I stood up (Poem 355)

It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down -
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Siroccos - crawl -
Nor Fire - for just my marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool -

And yet, it tasted, like them all,
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial
Reminded me, of mine -

As if my life were shaven,
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like Midnight, some -

When everything that ticked - has stopped -
And space stares - all around -
Or Grisly frosts - first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground -

But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -
Without a Chance, or spar -
Or even a Report of Land -
To justify - Despair.

Charles Bukowski – Pull A String, A Puppet Moves

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand -
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ...

Thomas Stearns Eliot – To Walter de la Mare

The children who explored the brook and found

A desert island with a sandy cove

(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

For here the water buffalo may rove,

The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound

In the dark jungle of a mango grove,

And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree -

The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

At not quite time for bed? ...

Or when the lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,

The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we yet have to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,

Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

At witches' sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse

No sleeper by his call; or when by chance

An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove -

The inexplicable mystery of sound.

Sylvia Plath – Who

The month of flowering's finished. The fruit's in,

Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.

October's the month for storage.

Thie shed's fusty as a mummy's stomach:

Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.

I am at home here among the dead heads.

Let me sit in a flowerpot,

The spiders won't notice.

My heart is a stopped geranium.

If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.

Dogsbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down.

They rattle like hydrangea bushes.

Mouldering heads console me,

Nailed to the rafters yesterday:

Inmates who don't hibernate.

Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,

A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,

Their veins white as porkfat.

O the beauty of usage!

The orange pumpkins have no eyes.

These halls are full of women who think they are birds.

This is a dull school.

I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,

Without dreams of any sort.

Mother, you are the one mouth

I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness

Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

There were such enormous flowers,

Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.

Now they light me up like an electric bulb.

For weeks I can remember nothing at all.

Sylvia Plath – Whiteness I Remember

Whiteness being what I remember

About Sam: whiteness and the great run

He gave me. I've gone nowhere since but

Going's been tame deviation. White,

Not of heraldic stallions: off-white

Of the stable horse whose history's

Humdrum, unexceptionable, his

Tried sobriety hiring him out

To novices and to the timid.

Yet the dapple toning his white down

To safe gray never grayed his temper.

I see him one-tracked, stubborn, white horse,

First horse under me, high as the roofs,

His near trot pitching my tense poise up,

Unsteadying the steady-rooted green

Of country hedgerows and cow pastures

To a giddy jog. Then for ill will

Or to try me he suddenly set

Green grass streaming, houses a river

Of pale fronts, straw thatchings, the hard road

An anvil, hooves four hammers to jolt

Me off into their space of beating,

Stirrups undone, and decorum. And

Wouldn't slow for the hauled reins, his name,

Or shouts of walkers: crossed traffic

Stalling curbside at his oncoming,

The world subdued to his run of it.

I hung on his neck. Resoluteness

Simplified me: a rider, riding

Hung out over the hazard, over hooves

Loud on earth's bedrock. Almost thrown, not

Thrown: fear, wisdom, at one: all colors

Spinning to still in his one whiteness.