Hum

Ann Lauterbach

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

Reprinted with permission of Penguin Books, a division of The Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map are like the casts of fishing lines looping and curved briefly across air. The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale. On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines drawn on walls and also lines drawn across the canvases of the last paintings of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares on a blackened field. The lines on your walls follows directions as if as if there were a kind of logic charged with motion at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold almost merged with the pale green at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

Poems

Hum

More by Ann Lauterbach

Or to Begin Again (audio only)

Day (audio only)

Elegy for Sol LeWitt

poets.org

academy of american poets

national poetry month

american poets