Neighbors at 46th and Hazel have this brilliant bit of landscaping by the side of their house. It has become a sort of watering hole.

Potential next poems:

A Song on the End of the World by Czelaw Milosz (I have taught this one, maybe a bit easier?)

From Blossoms Li-Young Lee

An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin

Hitherto by Matthew Dickman

A Color of the Sky by Tony Hoagland

Never Again the Same by James Tate

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan th’ expense of many a vanish’d sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

A- for memorization…inserted an “and.”

B- for memorization — two errors.

A for memorization; B- for delivery.

Sonnet 29. A for memorization, B for delivery.

Mary Oliver, Breakage

Breakage

By Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
       full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

B for memorization, B- for delivery. We’ll get there.