Poetry by Carver, Walker, and Updike

HWK:

Please read and enjoy the following poems:

Waiting

by Raymond Carver

Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There's a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there'll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There's a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It's not that house. It's
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It's
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing the sun in her hair. The one
who's been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
"What's kept you?"



Happiness

By Raymond Carver

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.




Desire

by Alice Walker

My desire
is always the same; wherever Life
deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
& sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
& dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I've survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it.

Returning Native

BY JOHN UPDIKE

What can you say about Pennsylvania

in regard to New England except that

it is slightly less cold, and less rocky,

or rather that the rocks are different?

Redder, and gritty, and piled up here and there,

whether as glacial moraine or collapsed springhouse

is not easy to tell, so quickly

are human efforts bundled back into nature.

In fall, the trees turn yellower—

hard maple, hickory, and oak

give way to tulip poplar, black walnut,

and locust. The woods are overgrown

with wild-grape vines, and with greenbrier

spreading its low net of anxious small claws.

In warm November, the mulching forest floor

smells like a rotting animal.

A genial pulpiness, in short: the sky

is soft with haze and paper-gray

even as the sun shines, and the rain

falls soft on the shoulders of farmers

while the children keep on playing,

their heads of hair beaded like spider webs.

A deep-dyed blur softens the bleak cities

whose people palaver in prolonged vowels.

There is a secret here, some death-defying joke

the eyes, the knuckles, the bellies imply—

a suet of consolation fetched straight

from the slaughterhouse and hung out

for chickadees to peck in the lee of the spruce,

where the husks of sunflower seeds

and the peace-signs of bird feet crowd

the snow that barely masks the still-green grass.

I knew that secret once, and have forgotten.

The death-defying secret—it rises

toward me like a dog’s gaze, loving

but bewildered. When winter sits cold and black

on Boston’s granite hills, in Philly,

slumped between its two polluted rivers,

warmth’s shadow leans close to the wall

and gets the cement to deliver a kiss.

John Updike