David Ray: "Doing Without"

            ’s an interesting

custom, involving such in-

            visible items as the food

that’s not on the table, the clothes

            that are not on the back

the radio whose only music

            is silence. Doing without

is a great protector of reputations

            since all places one cannot go

are fabulous, and only the rare and

            enlightened plowman in his field

or on his mountain does not overrate

            what he does not or cannot have.

Saluting through their windows

            of cathedral glass those restaurants

we must not enter (unless like

            burglars we become subject to

arrest) we greet with our twinkling

            eyes the faces of others who do

without, the lady with the

            fishing pole and the man who looks

amused to have discovered on a walk

            another piece of firewood.

"Doing Without" by David Ray. Text as published in Gathering Firewood: New Poems and Selected (Wesleyan Press, 1974). © David Ray. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Curator's note: This poem is half of a diptych. Its companion is entitled "Having Too Much," which you can read here.

Art credit: "Old Woman Fishing Alone," photograph by Steve Duffey.

David Ray: "Thanks, Robert Frost"

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

"Thanks, Robert Frost" by David Ray, from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems (Backwaters Press, 2006). Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Snow falling from backlit trees, Stowe, Vermont, USA," photograph by Don Landwehrle.