Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy Read Online Free

you do can stop time’s unfolding.
    You don’t ever let go of the thread.
    WILLIAM STAFFORD

‘I drew a line…’
    I drew a line:
    this far, and no further,
    never will I go further than this.
    When I went further,
    I drew a new line,
    and then another line.
    The sun was shining
    and everywhere I saw people,
    hurried and serious,
    and everyone was drawing a line,
    everyone went further.
    TOON TELLEGEN
translated from the Dutch by Judith Wilkinson

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
    Whose woods these are I think I know.
    His house is in the village, though;
    He will not see me stopping here
    To watch his woods fill up with snow.
    My little horse must think it queer
    To stop without a farmhouse near
    Between the woods and frozen lake
    The darkest evening of the year.
    He gives his harness bells a shake
    To ask if there is some mistake.
    The only other sound’s the sweep
    Of easy wind and downy flake.
    The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep.
    ROBERT FROST

Migratory
    Near evening, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts,
    seventeen wild geese arrowed the ashen blue
    over the Wal-Mart and the Blockbuster Video, 
    and I was up there, somewhere between the asphalt
    and their clear dominion – not in the parking lot,
    its tallowy circles just appearing,
    the shopping carts shining, from above,
    like little scraps of foil. Their eyes
    held me there, the unfailing gaze 
    of those who know how to fly in formation,
    wing-tip to wing-tip, safe, fearless.
    And the convex glamour of their eyes carried 
    the parking lot, the wet field
    troubled with muffler shops
    and stoplights, the arc of highway
    and its exits, one shattered farmhouse
    with its failing barn… The wind
    a few hundred feet above the grass 
    erases the mechanical noises, everything;
    nothing but their breathing
    and the perfect rowing of the pinions, 
    and then, out of that long, percussive pour
    toward what they are most certain of,
    comes their – question, is it? 
    Assertion, prayer, aria – as delivered
    by something too compelled in its passage
    to sing? A hoarse and unwieldy music 

    which plays nonetheless down the length
    of me until I am involved in their flight,
    the unyielding necessity of it, as they literally 
    rise above , ineluctable, heedless,
    needing nothing… Only animals
    make me believe in God now 
    – so little between spirit and skin,
    any gesture so entirely themselves.
    But I wasn’t with them, 
    as they headed toward Acushnet
    and New Bedford, of course I wasn’t,
    though I was not exactly in the parking lot 
    either, where the cars nudged in and out
    of their slots, each taking the place another
    had abandoned, so that no space, no desire 
    would remain unfilled. I wasn’t there.
    I was so filled with longing
    – is that what that sound is for? – 
    I seemed to be nowhere at all.
    MARK DOTY

Alone
    I
    One evening in February I came near to dying here.
    The car skidded sideways on the ice, out
    on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –
    their lights – closed in. 
    My name, my girls, my job
    broke free and were left silently behind
    further and further away. I was anonymous
    like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies. 
    The approaching traffic had huge lights.
    They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel
    in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.
    The seconds grew – there was space in them –
    they grew as big as hospital buildings. 
    You could almost pause
    and breathe out for a while
    before being crushed. 
    Then something caught: a helping grain of sand
    or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free
    and scuttled smartly right over the road.
    A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it
    flew away in the darkness. 
    Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt
    and saw someone coming through the whirling snow
    to see what had become of me.

II
    I have been walking for a long