Reading poetry again--always a dangerous occupation

Love Song for Chloe
David Young

I guess your beauty doesn't
bother you, you wear it easy
and walk across the driveway
so casual and right it makes
my heart weigh twenty pounds
as I back out and wave
thinking She's my summer
peaches, corn, long moondawn dusks
watermelons chilling in a tub
of ice and water: mirrored there
the great midsummer sky
rolling with clouds and treetops
and down by the lake
the wild canaries
swinging on the horse mint
all morning long.

Intransitive
Christopher Buckley

Evening is that old tune I never tire of
especially when, as now, it is an adagio
of rose and grey above the autumn trees
and the turning leaves are nothing more
than brown and dead across the lawns.

When I was six or seven and climbed
the eucalyptus, or the pines,
I was in love, and wondering
at the underlay of music and everything
equally unattainable in the light--
I gave in to longing then, and liked it.

Doubtless, I have as much now as then--
and there is nothing less in an on-shore breeze
riffling the agapanthus and blue hibiscus,
or in the little salt on the air
lifting my lungs to breathe
as simple as that old desire to float
to where clouds turn red and dim,
to where the past dies out of us, and sleeps.

But this evening as I took the footpath
back up the long hill to the house,
I noticed the first few stars glide out
overhead and sing, and they were in need
of nothing more to complete their meaning.

for Deb & Edith Wylder

Names of Horses
Donald Hall

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacking beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day, hanging wide from the hayrack.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the window sill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.


I'd write some scintillating literary commentary, but I think these poems can stand alone. Sometimes, less really is more.