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Reply to the Question: “How Can You Become a Poet?” take the leaf of a tree trace its exact shape the outside edges and inner lines memorize the way it is fastened to the twig (and how the twig arches from the branch) how it springs forth in April how it is panoplied in July by late August crumple it in your hand so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness chew its woody stem listen to its autumn rattle watch it as it atomizes in the November air then in winter when there is no leaf left                 invent one —Eve Merriam

A Meeting In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: “How you been?” He grins and looks at me. “I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.” —Wendell Berry

How to See Deer Forget roadside crossings. Go nowhere with guns. Go elsewhere your own way, lonely and wanting. Or stay and be early: next to deep woods inhabit old orchards. All clearings promise. Sunrise is good, and fog before sun. Expect nothing always; find your luck slowly. Wait out the windfall. Take your good time to learn to read ferns; make like a turtle: downhill toward slow water. Instructed by heron, drink the pure silence. Be compassed by wind. If you quiver like aspen trust your quick nature: let your ear teach you which way to listen. You've come to assume protective color; now colors reform to new shapes in your eye. You've learned by now to wait without waiting; as if it were dusk look into light falling: in deep relief things even out. Be careless of nothing. See what you see. —Philip Booth

The Wild Geese They are not wisdom or freedom or history. They are not what’s lost. They are nothing but wild geese. I can hear them everywhere, wings pushing down metaphor. —Victoria Chang

Writing in a Time of Violence In my last year in College I set out to write an essay on the Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find the country already lost to me in song and figure as I scribbled down names for sweet euphony and safe digression. And when I came to the word insinuate I saw that language could writhe and creep and the lore of snakes which I had learned as a child not to fear— because the Saint had sent them out of Ireland— came nearer. Chiasmus. Litotes. Periphrasis. Old indices and agents of persuasion. How I remember them in that room where a girl is writing at a desk with dusk already in the streets outside. I can see her. I could say to her— we will live, we have lived where language is concealed. Is perilous, We will be—we have been—citizens of its hiding place. But it is too late to shut the book of satin phrases, to refuse to enter an evening bitter with peat smoke, where newspaper sellers shout headlines and friends call out their farewells in a city of whispers and interiors where the dear vowels Irish Ireland ours are absorbed into Autumn air, are out of earshot in the distances we are stepping into where we never imagine words such as hate and territory and the like—unbanished still as they always would be—wait and are waiting under beautiful speech. To strike. —Eavan Boland

Moving the Bones There are too many ancestors, so we are gathering their bones. The poor ones, their graves broken by the roots of trees. The ones whose headstones have been weathered as blank as snow-drifts. We have bought the wide plot. We have built the mausoleum. And now we fill it with the bones. The ones killed in the monsoon floods. The one buried in her wedding dress. The one buried with his medals. Because there will be a time when we cannot keep track of them, scattered in the cemetery like prodigals, we collect the bones. The ones whose faces I can still recall. The ones who have been dead for a hundred years. We collect their bones. At each opened grave, we think about the body taking its shape as father, sister, cousin, uncle. We hunger for the story of each figure. We hold the bones, though we know memory is mostly forgetting. Or memory is the sweeper who clears the sidewalk each morning. Or memory is the broom. The mausoleum is marble, white as certain roses, and shaped like a house. There is room for everyone we will put there. The rich ones, their gravestones glowing with gold paint. The infants with sweet names. We open their graves. We move their bones. Look back far enough and your family becomes unfamiliar, a circle of people with a fading circumference. When I think of it long enough, home becomes a confusion of birthplace, hometown, country, and nation. We walk through the cemetery, we point to our own, and we gather their bones. Maybe memory is the desperate pharaoh who commands that the things of this life go with him into the next. I would take with me the books I loved best. A jar of the ocean spanning my two countries. A slip of my lover’s sunny hair. I would take with me a sack of rice. My mother’s orange shawl. The robe my father wears in the kitchen at night, drinking a glass of water. That we might go to just one place to worship them, to wonder at who they were, we are moving the bones. Our tribe of eros and vinegar. Our black hair, our ordinary minds. Holding the bones, we say the names of the dead, the music of the syllables, conjuring the hearts they answered to. We hold the bones. Each stern skull. Each proud sternum. Each elegant rib, curved like a horizon. —Rick Barot

Parts of Speech Some stories don’t want to be told. They walk away, carrying their suitcases held together with grey string. Look at their disappearing curved spines. Hunch-backs. Harmed ones. Hold-alls. Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed, drop their scuffed canes and clattering tap-shoes, erase their traces in nursery rhymes or ancient games like blind man’s buff. And at this stained place words are scraped from resinous tongues, wrung like washing, hung on the lines of courtroom and confessional, transposed into the dialect of record. Why still believe stories can rise with wings, on currents, as silver flares, levitate unweighted by stones, begin in pain and move towards grace, aerating history with recovered breath? Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds: the flame splutter of consonants, deep sea-anemone vowels, birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart, and verbs, verbs that move mountains? —Ingrid de Kok

this beginning may have always meant this end coming from a place where we meandered mornings and met quail, scrub jay, mockingbird, i knew coyote, like everyone else, i knew cactus, knew tumbleweed, lichen on the rocks and pill bugs beneath, rattlers sometimes, the soft smell of sage and the ferment of cactus pear. coming from this place, from a place where grass might grow greener on the hillside in winter than in any yard, where, the whole rest of the year, everything i loved, chaparral pea, bottle brush tree, jacaranda, mariposa, pinyon and desert oak, the kumquat in the back garden and wisteria vining the porch, the dry grass whispering long after the last rains, raccoons in and out of the hills, trash hurled by the hottest wind, the dry grass tall now and golden, lawn chairs, 
eucalyptus, everything, in a place we knew, every thing, we knew, little and large and mine and ours, except horror, all of it, everything could flame up that quickly, could flare and be gone. —Camille T. Dungy