The Thought-Fox

by Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Rumi

Some untitled poems, by Rumi

*
Drunks fear the police,
but the police are drunks too.
People in this town love them both
like different chess pieces.'


*
In the middle of the night
I cried out,
"Who lives in this love
I have?"
You said, "I do, but I'm not here
alone. Why are these other images
with me?"


*
There's a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love everywhere?


*
You are in love with me, I shall make you perplexed.

Do not build much, for I intend to have you in ruins. If you build two hundred houses in a manner that the bees do; I shall make you as homeless as a fly. If you are the mount Qaf in stability. I shall make you whirl like a millstone.

The Nature Of Electricity

The Nature Of Electricity
by John Shade

The dead, the gentle dead - who knows? -
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures pale moths of starless nights.

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.

And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants down in hell.

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