tell me where they end

it's in the early mornings that i can better imbibe poetry and its exacting images than i can read prose, maybe because the mind is newly minted, the air is cool, and time is still asleep. of late, i have also been turning to poetry as amulets against me.

from Storm Warnings

Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

-- adrienne rich

there's this class that i teach all 3 subjects to, and i cannot say enough how much i've been enjoying the lessons with them. i see them everyday, sometimes twice a day - cheery, precocious, bright fifteen year olds naturally interested in anything anatomical and petulant.

i love this mark doty - the final stanza is heartrending -

Fog Argument

1. Jade

Of course I know it ends.
I know there's a precise limit

where salt marsh gives way
to fogged water's steel.

But from here, from moor's edge
where the tide pond

doubles the swallows,
it doesn't seem to;

blonde acres
vanish at the rim

into the void,
a page on which anything

might be written,
though nothing is. What I love

is trying to see
the furthest grassy extreme,

that fog-marbled horizontal...
Rippling strokes, a few high dunes

hung on the edges of the page
like Chinese brushstrokes,

barely there, and out
on the far shore

the sea gone a clouded mint,
gone without edges, horizon erased,

a single silken exhalation
the color of mown grass,

unripe persimmon, gooseberry,
juniper, sage, green shadow

in the hollow of collarbone,
love, i know, it ends,

you don't have to remind me,
though it seems a field

of endless jade.

2. Beach Roses

What are they, the white roses,
when they are almost nothing,
only a little denser than the fog,

shadow-centered petals blurring,
toward the edges, into everything?

This morning one broken cloud
built an archipelago,
fourteen gleaming islands

hurrying across a blank plain of sheen:
nothing, or next to nothing

--pure scattering, light on light,
fleeting.
And now, a heap of roses
beside the sea, white rugosa
beside the foaming hem of shore:
brave,
waxen candles...

And we talk
as if death were a line to be crossed.
Look at them, the white roses.
Tell me where they end.