till the water table

cut into the ground
scoop straight down
the soil profile
reveals layers
at least four horizons
observe the different temperature gradients
as the water quantity is changed
how the soggy surface humus
how the the smudged boundaries
take on significance

sky

the sky turns
I turn towards
the sky: It is blue
deep falling blue
whole
the whole world

turns
looking up:
closed in it

I am falling

The War Ending by Medbh McGuckian (1991)

In the still world
between the covers of a book,
silk glides through your name
like a bee sleeping in a flower
or a seal that turns its head to look
at a boy rowing a boat.

The fluttering motion of your hands
down your body presses into my thoughts
as an enormous broken wave,
as a rainbow or a painting being torn
within me. I remove the hand
and order it to leave.

Your passion for light
is so exactly placed,
I read them as eyes, mouth, nostrils,
disappearing back into their mystery
like the war that has gone
into us ending,

there you have my head,
a meeting of Irish eyes
with something English:
and now,
today,
it bursts.

Finch at evening

Easy breathing
The night is just beginning
Evening cools into Toronto
Sighing

Trotting to the Viva at Finch
Glasses glint
Clouds lined in pink
Sunlight shuts

Two Views on Two Ghost Towns by Charles Tomlinson (1966)

                  I

Why speak of memory and death
on ghost ground? Absences
relieve, release. Speak
of the life that uselessness
has unconstrained. Rusting
to its rails, the vast obese
company engine that will draw
no more, will draw no more:
Keep Off
the warning says, and all
the mob of objects, freed
under the brightly hard
displacement of the desert light
repeat it: the unaxled wheels,
doorless doors and windowless
regard of space. Clear
of the weight of human
meanings, human need,
gradually
houses splinter to the ground
in white and red, two
rotting parallels beneath
the sombre slag-mound.

             II

How dry the ghosts
of dryness are. The air
here, tastes of sparseness
and the graveyard stones
are undecorated. To the left
the sea and, right, the shadows
hump and slide, climbing
the mountainside as clouds go over.
The town has moved away,
leaving a bitten hill
where the minehead’s visible. Brambles
detain the foot. Ketchum,
Clay, Shoemake, Jebez O’Haskill
and Judge H. Vennigerholz
all (save for the judge’s
modest obelisk) marked
by a metal cross; and there are four
crosses of wood, three
wooden stakes (unnamed)
that the sun, the frost, the sea-
wind shred alternately
in sapless scars. How dry
the ghosts of dryness are.

Laser by A.R. Ammons (1970)

An image comes
and the mind’s light, confused
as that on surf
or ocean shelves,
gathers up,
parallelizes, focuses
and in a rigid beam illuminates the image:

the head seeks in itself
fragments of left-over light
to cast a new
direction,
any direction,
to strike and fix
a random, contradicting image:

but any found image falls
back to darkness or
the lesser beams splinter and
go out:
the mind tries to
dream of diversity, of mountain
rapids shattered with sound and light,

of wind fracturing brush or
bursting out of order against a mountain
range: but the focused beam
folds all energy in:
the image glares filling all space:
the head falls and
hangs and cannot wake itself.