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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie Ponsot
Marie Ponsot
Native New Yorker Marie Ponsot was born in 1921. She has published numerous works, including Springing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award...
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FURTHER READING
Spring
A Blessing
by James Wright
Another Attempt at Rescue
by M. L. Smoker
Birds Again
by Jim Harrison
Black Petal
by Li-Young Lee
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
City That Does Not Sleep
by Federico García Lorca
Diary [Surface]
by Rachel Zucker
Equinox
by Joy Harjo
From you have I been absent in the spring... (Sonnet 98)
by William Shakespeare
If a Wilderness
by Carl Phillips
In cold spring air
by Reginald Gibbons
In the Memphis Airport
by Timothy Steele
Morning News
by Marilyn Hacker
National Poetry Month
by Elaine Equi
Prologue of the Earthly Paradise
by William Morris
Spring and All
by William Carlos Williams
Spring is like a perhaps hand
by E. E. Cummings
Spring Snow
by Arthur Sze
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Springing  
by Marie Ponsot

In a skiff on a sunrisen lake we are watchers.

Swimming aimlessly is luxury just as walking 
loudly up a shallow stream is.

As we lean over the deep well, we whisper.

Friends at hearths are drawn to the one warm air; 
strangers meet on beaches drawn to the one wet sea.

What wd it be to be water, one body of water 
(what water is is another mystery) (We are 
water divided.) It wd be a self without walls, 
with surface tension, specific gravity a local
exchange between bedrock and cloud of falling and rising, 
rising to fall, falling to rise.

(1961)




Excerpted from Springing by Marie Ponsot. Copyright © 2002 by Marie Ponsot. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.
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