stolen poetry

i just read this on my friend's blog and had to share it here. my hunger for summer is strengthening.

from blossoms

from blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted peaches.

from laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

o, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

there are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

- li-young lee

and this is one i found on my own today from a collection of poems by billy collins that my good friend gave me for my birthday.

books

from the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
i can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
giovanni pontano next to pope, dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

i picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
he moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

i hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

i watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks new england,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

i see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

and i'll leave you tonight with photos of the last weeks suns and skies.