Mary Oliver’s poem, “A Poem for the Blue Heron,” appeared in NER 4.3 (1982):
1
Now the blue heron
wades the cold ponds
of November.
In the gray light his hunched shoulders
are also gray.
He finds scant food — a few
numbed breathers under
a rind of mud.
Lawrence Raab’s poem, “While You Were Sleeping,” appeared in NER 1.2 (1978):
Pale curtains
crumpled to the floor
And the heavy rug
out of place.
Something
simple but ambiguous,
that would please you.
An interrupted
game of cards.
An open window.
John Engels’s poem, “At Night on the Lake, in The Eye of the Hunter,” appeared in NER 1.1 (1978):
That night,
drifting far out
in the dark center of the lake,
I watched the stars. Later,
I shone my torch
down into the eel grass
of the perch beds,
and saw the fish there,
stunned into thrills
and tremblings of fins.
. . . for several years my Lexicon was my only companion
—Emily Dickinson
cry out your shibboleth
into your homeland strangeness
—Paul Celan
Word-ridden, have
you been that way:
-riddled,
I mean, morphemes
begging to be multibegotten
at once, and, for once, always
alphabet-encysted:
are you like me like that, relieved
from sense, shot
through with it, shot through it, into it…
Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently Theophobia (2012) and All Soul Parts Returned (2017), both published by BOA Editions.