Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
...

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
......
...

It shines in the garden,
in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,
in the brim of my father's hat
as he walks on the gravel.
...

A rough sound was polished until it became
a smoother sound, which was polished until
it became music.
...

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
...

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
...

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
...

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
...

The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.
They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel
them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.
Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.
...

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
...

When you see them
tell them I am still here,
that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams,
that this is the only way,
...

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.
...

The huge doll of my body
refuses to rise.
I am the toy of women.
My mother
...

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
...

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
...

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling
the old self become the older self, imagining
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.
You think that silence is the extra page,
...

For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
...

Tonight I walked,
lost in my own meditation,
and was afraid,
not of the labyrinth
...

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
...

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
...