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The Fish
by Billy Collins
As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.
I feel sorry for you., it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.
And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.
And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow
even after the waiter removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.
"The Fish" by Billy Collins, from Ballistics. © Random House, 2010.
Year’s End
by Ted Kooser
Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind.
"Year's End" by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
antepenultimate \an-tee-pi-NUHL-tuh-mit\, adjective:
1. Third from the end.
2. Of or pertaining to an antepenult.
noun:
1. An antepenult.
I was my parent's antepenultimate child.
-- dls, the blog of dlsesh1
The vengeful eagles of the open sequence [and] the birds of augury watched outside the library and the emblematic kinsmen who shake 'the wings of their exultant and terrible youth' in the antepenultimate entry in Stephen's diary.
-- James Joyce, introduction by Hugh Kenner, Ulysses
But all day that is how it is, from the first tick to the last tack, or rather from the third to the antepenultimate, allowing for the time it needs, the tamtam within, to drum you back into the dream and drum you back out again.
-- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier
Waiting on the Corners
by Donald Hall
Glass, air, ice, light,
and winter cold.
They stand on all the corners,
waiting alone, or in
groups that talk like the air
moving branches. It
is Christmas, and a red dummy
laughs in the window
of a store. Although
the trolleys come,
no one boards them,
but everyone moves
up and down, stamping his feet,
so unemployed.
They are talking, each of them,
but it is sticks and stones
that hear them,
their plans,
exultations,
and memories of the old time.
The words fly out, over
the roads and onto
the big, idle farms, on the hills,
forests, and rivers
of America, to mix into silence
of glass, air, ice, light,
and winter cold.
"Waiting on the Corners" by Donald Hall, from Old and New Poems. © Ticknor & Fields, 1990
Even as it envelops me
it is not mine, this autumn:
that wind blowing through
the pines,
I regret how it makes them fall
-- the leaves, the scarlet leaves
of ivy.
Autumn Ivy
Ogata kenzan, japanese, 1663-1743
Hanging scroll, ink color, and gold on paper
8 1/4 x 10 7/8 in., after 1732
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
douce \doos\, adjective:
Sedate; modest; quiet.
“So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas— how shall I put it— more douce?”
-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a Ken MacLeod.
-- Edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection
Douce comes from the French word of the same spelling meaning "sweet." It became widely used in English after it was used in the Chanson of Roland, a epic poem written about Charlemagne.
Gifts that keep on giving
by Marge Piercy
You know when you unwrap them:
fruitcake is notorious. There were only
51 of them baked in 1917 by the
personal chef of Rasputin. The mad monk
ate one. That was what finally killed him
But there are many more bouncers:
bowls green and purple spotted like lepers.
Vases of inept majolica in the shape
of wheezing frogs or overweight lilies.
Sweaters sized for Notre Dame's hunchback.
Hourglasses of no use humans
can devise. Gloves to fit three-toed sloths.
Mufflers of screaming plaid acrylic.
Necklaces and pins that transform
any outfit to a thrift shop reject.
Boxes of candy so stale and sticky
the bonbons pull teeth faster than
your dentist. Weird sauces bought
at warehouse sales no one will ever
taste unless suicidal or blind.
Immortal as vampires, these gifts
circulate from birthdays to Christmas,
from weddings to anniversaries.
Even if you send them to the dump,
they resurface, bobbing up on the third
day like the corpses they call floaters.
After all living have turned to dust
and ashes, in the ruins of cities
alien archeologists will judge our
civilization by these monstrous relics.
"Gifts that keep on giving" by Marge Piercy, from The Hunger Moon. © Knopf, 2012
