list four: My Favorite Poems

* Why I Am Not a Painter
By Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.  
Why? I think I would rather be  
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.  
“Sit down and have a drink” he  
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”  
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by  
and I drop in again. The painting  
is going on, and I go, and the days  
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of  
a color: orange. I write a line  
about orange. Pretty soon it is a  
whole page of words, not lines.  
Then another page. There should be  
so much more, not of orange, of  
words, of how terrible orange is  
and life. Days go by. It is even in  
prose, I am a real poet. My poem  
is finished and I haven’t mentioned  
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call  
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery  
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

* Love after Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

* Sleeping in the Forest
by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before,
a stone on the riverbed,
nothing between me
and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts,
and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom.

By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.