Free You Drive Me Crazy by Mary D. Esselman, Elizabeth Ash Vélez

her delicate hands
    Weave back and forth.
    I feel the seasons changing beneath me,
    Under the floor.
    She is braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes
    Of happy colts.
    They canter, without making a sound, along the shores
    Of melting snow.
    JAMES WRIGHT
    Excerpt from “The Ivy Crown”
    At our age the imagination
    across the sorry facts
    lifts us
    to make roses
    stand before thorns.
    Sure
    love is cruel
    and selfish
    and totally obtuse—
    at least, blinded by the light,
    young love is.
    But we are older,
    I to love
    and you to be loved,
    we have,
    no matter how,
    by our wills survived
    to keep
    the jeweled prize
    always
    at our finger tips.
    We will it so
    and so it is
    past all accident.
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
    Habitation
    Marriage is not
    a house or even a tent
    it is before that, and colder:
    the edge of the forest, the edge
    of the desert
    the unpainted stairs
    at the back where we squat
    outside, eating popcorn
    the edge of the receding glacier
    where painfully and with wonder
    at having survived even
    this far
    we are learning to make fire
    MARGARET ATWOOD
    Animals
    Have you forgotten what we were like then
    when we were still first rate
    and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
    it's no use worrying about Time
    but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
    and turned some sharp corners
    the whole pasture looked like our meal
    we didn't need speedometers
    we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
    I wouldn't want to be faster
    or greener than now if you were with me O you
    were the best of all my days
    FRANK O'HARA
    Earthly Love
    Conventions of the time
    held them together.
    It was a period
    (very long) in which
    the heart once given freely
    was required, as a formal gesture,
    to forfeit liberty: a consecration
    at once moving and hopelessly doomed.
    As to ourselves:
    fortunately we diverged
    from these requirements,
    as I reminded myself
    when my life shattered.
    So that what we had for so long
    was, more or less,
    voluntary, alive.
    And only long afterward
    did I begin to think otherwise.
    We are all human—
    we protect ourselves
    as well as we can
    even to the point of denying
    clarity, the point
    of self-deception. As in
    the consecration to which I alluded.
    And yet, within this deception,
    true happiness occurred.
    So that I believe I would
    repeat these errors exactly.
    Nor does it seem to me
    crucial to know
    whether or not such happiness
    is built on illusion:
    it has its own reality.
    And in either case, it will end.
    LOUISE GLÜCK
    The Journey
    Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down
    A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out
    To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.
    But far up the mountain, behind the town,
    We too were swept out, out by the wind,
    Alone with the Tuscan grass.
    Wind had been blowing across the hills
    For days, and everything now was graying gold
    With dust, everything we saw, even
    Some small children scampering along a road,
    Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.
    We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,
    And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.
    I found the spider web there, whose hinges
    Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
    Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
    And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
    And then she stepped into the center of air
    Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
    Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
    While ruins crumbled on every side of her.
    Free of the dust, as though a moment before
    She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.
    I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
    Away in her own good time.
    Many men
    Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
    What I found there, the heart of the light
    Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
    On filaments themselves falling. The secret
    Of this journey is to let the wind
    Blow its dust all over your body,
    To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
    All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
    Any sleep over the dead, who