The Chimney Sweeper(Songs of Experience) A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!

Where are thy father & mother! say! They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil'd among the winters snow: They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy, & dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury: And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King Who make up a heaven of our misery.

The Blue Bowl

Jane Kenyon
Like primitives we buried the cat with his bowl. Bare-handed we scraped sand and gravel back into the hole. They fell with a hiss and thud on his side, on his long red fur, the white feathers between his toes, and his long, not to say aquiline, nose. We stood and brushed each other off. There are sorrows keener than these. Silent the rest of the day, we worked, ate, stared, and slept. It stormed all night; now it clears, and a robin burbles from a dripping bush like the neighbor who means well but always says the wrong thing.

The Summer I Was Sixteen

Geraldine Connolly
The turquoise pool rose up to meet us, its slide a silver afterthought down which we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles. We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy. Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated, we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete, danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl". Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles, we came to the counter where bees staggered into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses, shared on benches beneath summer shadows. Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears, mouthing the old words, then loosened thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance through the chain link at an improbable world.

Numbers
Mary Cornish
I like the generosity of numbers. The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition-add two cups of milk and stir-the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree. And multiplication's school of fish times fish,

whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else's garden now. There's an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four, with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mothers' call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

The Cord
Leanne OSullivan
I used to lie on the floor for hours after school with the phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear, a plate of cold rice to my left, my school books to my right. Twirling the cord between my fingers I spoke to friends who recognized the language of our realm. Throats and lungs swollen, we talked into the heart of the night, toying with the idea of hair dye and suicide, about the boys who didnt love us, who we loved too much, the pang of the nights. Each sentence was new territory, like a door someone was rushing into, the glass shattering with delirium, with knowledge and fear. My Mother never complained about the phone bill, what it cost for her daughter to disappear behind a door, watching the cord stretching its muscle away from her.

Perhaps she thought it was the only way she could reach me, sending me away to speak in the underworld. As long as I was speaking she could put my ear to the tenuous earth and allow me to listen, to decipher. And these were the elements of my Mother, the earthed wire, the burning cable, as if she flowed into the room with me to somehow say, Stay where I can reach you, the dim room, the dark earth. Speak of this and when you feel removed from it I will pull the cord and take you back towards me.

Neglect
R. T. Smith
Is the scent of apple boughs smoking in the woodstove what I will remember of the Red Delicious I brought down, ashamed that I could not convince its limbs to render fruit? Too much neglect will do that, skew the sap's passage, blacken leaves, dry the bark and heart. I should have lopped the dead limbs early and watched each branch with a goshawk's eye, patching with medicinal pitch, offering water, compost and mulch, but I was too enchanted by pear saplings, flowers and the pasture, too callow to believe that death's inevitable for any living being unloved, untended. What remains is this armload of applewood now feeding the stove's smolder. Splendor ripens a final time in the firebox, a scarlet harvest headed, by dawn, to embers. Two decades of shade and blossoms - tarts and cider, bees dazzled by the pollen, spare elegance in ice - but what goes is gone. Smoke is all, through this lesson in winter regret, I've been given to remember. Smoke, and Red Delicious apples redder than a passing cardinal's crest or cinders.