From Yusef Komunyakaa:

But crawl out of your hide,
walk upright like a man,
& you may ask if hunger is the only passion
as you again lose yourself
in a white field’s point of view.

In this glacial quiet
nothing moves except—
then a flash of eyes & nerves.

– Snow Tiger

From Kenneth Rexroth:

Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

– Falling Leaves and Early Snow

From Jonathan Endurance:

my mother never wanted me to know

i was born inside an eagle’s claws
i am saying every letter of my name

has a sharp edge & blood gushes from
everything i touch

i open my window into a field of dust
the sun chokes on my shoulder blade

i invade the boneyard with holy books

– Aubade in the Boneyard

From Michael Wasson:

10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left
ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped
beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take
sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember
in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

– Countdown as Slow Kisses

From Louise Glück:

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises

– All Hallows

From Sandra Lim:

We did not say much to each other but
we grinned,
because this love was so good you sucked the
rib bones

and I licked my fingers like a cat.
Now I’m
omniscient. I’m going to skip past
the hard

parts that go on for a very long time.

– A Walk Round the Park

From N. Scott Momaday:

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

– The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

From Christopher Pearce Cranch:

No more the scarlet maples flash and burn
Their beacon-fires from hilltop and from plain;
The meadow-grasses and the woodland fern
In the bleak woods lie withered once again.

The trees stand bare, and bare each stony scar
Upon the cliffs; half frozen glide the rills;
The steel-blue river like a scimitar
Lies cold and curved between the dusky hills.

– December

From Heather McHugh:

A brilliance takes up residence in flaws—

a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design

refuse. The wine collects its starlets

at a lip’s fault, sunlight where the nicked

glass angles, and affection where the eye

is least correctable, where arrows of

unquivered light are lodged, where someone

else’s eyes have come to be concerned.

– In Praise of Pain

From Nicole Homer:

Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it
another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes
I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you
to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both.

– Underbelly