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Hippos on Holiday
by Billy Collins
is not really the title of a movie
but if it were I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theatre.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.
I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
"Hippos on Holiday" by Billy Collins from Aimless Love. © Random House, 2013.
Elegy for J.F.K.
— W. H. Auden
When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.
Why then, why there,
Why thus, we cry, did he die?
The heavens are silent.
What he was, he was:
What he is fated to become
Depends on us
Remembering his death,
How we choose to live
Will decide its meaning.
When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.
It's Not Just Trains
by Lawrence Raab
The ticket office was closing
when we arrived and were informed
our train had departed ahead of schedule.
"What do you mean?” I asked. "Trains
leave on time, or late, but never early."
"Such things happen," the agent replied,
"more often than you would think."
"Look around," he added,
"and pay attention. It’s not just trains."
When I told my family of this unexpected
predicament, I was taken aback
by their lack of surprise. "Let’s wander
a while through this pretty little town,”
my wife proposed, “and see what happens."
"Or else,” said my son, "let’s head off
into that dark woods beyond the tracks,
each alone and without our baggage,
and try to find our way out
before nightfall.” He smiled, I thought,
at me in particular, as if he’d known
all along that would be the plan.
"It's Not Just Trains" by Lawrence Raab from Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts. © Tupelo Press, 2015.
Gauguin's Grandson
by Paul Hostovsky
was named Paul Gauguin,
too. He was an artist,
too. He lived in Denmark
in his grandfather’s shadow
all his life. And he chafed
against that shadow.
Like living under a rock—
a rock as big as the biggest
island in French Polynesia.
He painted only insects.
Insects that live under rocks—
beetles, ants, centipedes,
pill bugs. In a later period,
he painted only his wife Marta
in only her long black hair
and horn-rimmed glasses.
Toward the end of his life
he made hundreds of collages
of orthopterous insects—
katydids, mantids, cicadas,
crickets and grasshoppers
with long hind legs for jumping
or, you could say, flying;
and for making a rasping, chafing
sound or, you could say, song.
"Gauguin's Grandson" by Paul Hostovsky from The Bad Guys. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.
Student
by Ted Kooser The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,
paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the surf. He’s got his baseball cap on
backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.
"Student" by Ted Kooser from Delights & Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press, 2007.
And Now it's October
by Barbara Crooker
the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run
to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy
pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells,
the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright
as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery
grasses shine in the slanted light. It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs
and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker
down. Summer’s fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time.
No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope
of silk. At night, the moon’s restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.
"And Now it's October" by Barbara Crooker from Small Rain. © Purple Flag Press, 2014.
O Cheese
by Donald Hall
In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.
O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.
Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l’Évêque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.
O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.
Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.
O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.
"O Cheese" by Donald Hall from Old and New Poems. © Ticknor & Fields, 1990.
