"Evening in the Sanitarium" by Louise Bogan

The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses are watching a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles; of the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over. 
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well. 
Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced woman whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now leveling off; one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy.
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth!

O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!

To the suburban railway station you will return, return,

To meet forever Jim home on the 5:35.

You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody else.

There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.

The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be.

Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink habitually.

The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet

And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.

The cats will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers relieved.

The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.

Childhoods will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.

At the ends of the corridors the baths are running.

Mrs. C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.

Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something.

"Staring Out the Window Three Weeks after His Death" by Paul Durcan

On the last day of his life as he lay comatose in the hospital bed

I saw that his soul was a hare which was poised

In the long grass of his body, ears pricked.

It sprang toward me and halted and I wondered if it

Could hear me breathing

Or if it could smell my own fear, which was,

Could he but have known it, greater than his

For plainly he was a just and playful man

And just and playful men are as brave as they are rare.

Then his cancer-eroded body appeared to shudder

As if a gust of wind blew through the long grass

And the hare of his soul made a U-turn

And began bounding away from me

Until it disappeared from sight into a dark wood

And I thought -- that is the end of that,

I will not be seeing him again.

He died in front of me; no one else was in the room.

My eyes teemed with tears; I could not damp them down.

I stood up to walk around his bed

Only to catch sight again of the hare of his soul

Springing out of the wood into a beachy cove of sunlight

And I thought: Yes, that's how it is going to be from now on.

The hare of his soul always there, when I least expect it;

Popping up out of nowhere, sitting still.

Joan Miró

"Sonnet IX: There where the waves shatter" by Pablo Neruda

There where the waves shatter on the restless rocks

the clear light bursts and enacts its rose,

and the sea-circle shrinks to a cluster of buds,

to one drop of blue salt, falling.

O bright magnolia bursting in the foam,

magnetic transient whose death blooms

and vanishes--being, nothingness--forever:

broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea.

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,

while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,

collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:

because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,

galloping water, incessant sand,

we make the only permanent tenderness.

David James

"Rain" by Raymond Carver

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Vincent Van Gogh

"Food Chain" by Sherman Alexie

This is my will:

Bury me

In an anthill.

After one week

Of this feast,

Set the ants on fire.

Make me a funeral pyre.

Let my smoke rise

Into the eyes

Of those crows

On the telephone wire.

Startle those birds

Into flight

With my last words:

I loved my life.

Edvard Munch

"Sonnet 57: Being your slave, what should I do but tend" by William Shakespeare

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you.
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

Ferdinand Hodler

From "Cré na Cille" by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

Glen Masan:

White its stalks of tall wild garlic.

Uneasy was our sleep

Above the long-maned firth of Masan.

If you ever come, love, come discreetly.

Come to the door that makes no creaking.

If my father asks me who are your people,

I'll tell him you are the wind in the treetops.

trans. Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson in Graveyard Clay

William Trost Richards