The Past by Stephen Dunn

Herrings begin to glow just after they die, 

never while alive. When I read this 

I wanted to sit for a long  time in the dark. 

Nothing in nature is a metaphor. 

Everything is. I thought both thoughts. 

And I knew inexactly why I felt sad. 

Herrings dead and a glow- 

I should have been properly amazed, 

the way anyone. looking at a star 

would be., realizing it was years away, 

untouchable. Yet there it is, shining.

Kinder than Man by Althea Davis

And God

play ease let the deer

on the highway

get some kind of heaven.

Something with tall soft grass

and sweet reunion.

Let the moths in porch lights

go someplace

with a thousand suns,

that taste like sugar

and get swallowed whole.

May the mice

in oil and glue

have forever dry, warm fur

and full bellies.

If I am killed

for simply living,

let death be kinder

than man.

 “Be careful. When you do too much for people, they start loving your hand and not your heart.”

The Sun by Mary Oliver

 

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Of the Shining Afterlife by Carl Phillips

 

Above me, the branches toss toward and away from each other

the way privacy does with what ends up

showing, despite ourselves, of

who we are, inside.

                                Then they’re branches again—hickory, I think.

      —It’s not too late, then.

Sisyphus And The Sudden Lightness by Stephen Dunn

 

It was as if he had wings, and the wind
behind him. Even uphill the rock
seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried;
he'd come to depend on his burden,
wasn't sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange.
He stopped to pet a dog.
Yet he kept going forward, afraid
of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized
the gods must be gone, that his wings
were nothing more than a perception
of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him.