Aubade
Philip Larkin
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. 
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. 
In time the curtain-edges will grow light. 
Till then I see what's really always there: 
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, 
Making all thought impossible but how 
And where and when I shall myself die. 
Arid interrogation: yet the dread 
Of dying, and being dead, 
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse 
- The good not done, the love not given, time 
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 
An only life can take so long to climb 
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; 
But at the total emptiness for ever, 
The sure extinction that we travel to 
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, 
Not to be anywhere, 
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. 

This is a special way of being afraid 
No trick dispels. Religion used to try, 
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade 
Created to pretend we never die, 
And specious stuff that says No rational being 
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing 
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound, 
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, 
Nothing to love or link with, 
The anasthetic from which none come round. 

And so it stays just on the edge of vision, 
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill 
That slows each impulse down to indecision. 
Most things may never happen: this one will, 
And realisation of it rages out 
In furnace-fear when we are caught without 
People or drink. Courage is no good: 
It means not scaring others. Being brave 
Lets no one off the grave. 
Death is no different whined at than withstood. 

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. 
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, 
Have always known, know that we can't escape, 
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. 
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring 
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring 
Intricate rented world begins to rouse. 
The sky is white as clay, with no sun. 
Work has to be done. 
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

%

Epistemology
Richard Wilbur
 
 
                      I
 
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
 
 
                      II
 
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, ``You are not true.''
 
%

Odysseus
W. S. Merwin
 
 
Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unravelling patience
He was wedded to.  There were the islands
Each with its woman and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call ``home.''
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went.  Therefore he went.  And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to?
 
%

About Marriage
Denise Levertov
 
 
Don't lock me in wedlock, I want
marriage, an
encounter---
 
I told you about the
green light of
May
 
        (a veil of quiet befallen
        the downtown park,
        late
 
        Saturday after
        noon, long
        shadows and cool
 
        air, scent of
        new grass,
        fresh leaves,
 
        blossom on the threshold of
        abundance---
 
        and the birds I met there,
        birds of passage breaking their journey,
        three birds each of a different species:
 
        the azalea-breasted with round poll, dark,
        the brindled, merry, mousegliding one,
        and the smallest, golden as gorse and wearing
        a black Venetian mask
 
        and with them the three douce hen-birds
        feathered in tender, lively brown---
 
        I stood
        a half-hour under the enchantment,
        no-one passed near,
        the birds saw me and
 
        let me be
        near them.)
 
It's not
irrelevant:
I would be
met
 
and meet you
so,
in a green
 
airy space, not
locked in.
 
%

The Horses of Achilles
C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
 
 
When they saw Patroklos dead
---so brave and strong, so young---
the horses of Achilles began to weep;
their immortal natures were outraged
by this work of death they had to look at.
They reared their heads, tossed their manes,
beat the ground with their hooves,
and mourned Patroklos, seeing him lifeless, destroyed,
now mere flesh only, his spirit gone,
defenseless, without breath,
turned back from life to the great Nothingness.
 
Zeus saw the tears of those immortal horses and felt sorry.
``I shouldn't have acted so thoughtlessly
at the wedding of Peleus,'' he said.
``Better if we hadn't given you as a gift,
my unhappy horses.  What business did you have down there,
among pathetic human beings, the toys of fate.
You're free of death, you won't get old,
yet ephemeral disasters torment you.
Men have caught you up in their misery.''
But it was for the eternal disaster of death
that those two gallant horses shed their tears.
 
%

   Acknowledgment

   Donna Steiner

   The sky opens like a clamshell,
   the pearl-white sun a blur. 

   Late winter is surreal. Like

   a parent humming Sinatra
   on the anniversary
   of a death that left you

   feeling overgrown and divided.
   Like a ladder on the lawn.

   At dinner last night my friends
   were filled with wanderlust
   except for one who said "nope,
   not me, give me home any day"

   and I don't know, with all these
   angels and ordinariness you'd think
   I'd be happier. But I'm still
   lonely and transparent, like the

   spider on the skylight, trying
   to figure out what's between that

   fragile body and the wild,
   bruised sky.

   

-- 
%

An untitled poem by William Allingham
 
 
Everything passes and vanishes;
  Everything leaves its trace;
And often you see in a footstep
  What you could not see in a face.
 
%

For the Anniversary of My Death

W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And then shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what


-- 
%

A Broken Appointment
Thomas Hardy
 
      You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.---
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
      You did not come.
 
      You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
---I know and knew it.  But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
      You love not me?
 
%

The Armful
Robert Frost
 
 
For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns---
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with, hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.
 
%

Autumn Cove
Li Po (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
At Autumn Cove, so many white monkeys,
bounding, leaping up like snowflakes in flight!
They coax and pull their young ones down from the branches
to drink and frolic with the water-borne moon.
 

%

Autumn Night
Sugawara no Michizane (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
In bed I toss and turn in the night's deep watches,
the dim lamp faced toward the wall; no dream comes.
Early geese, a cold cricket---these I hear as always,
but no voice of the little boy at his books.
 
%

Bea Hensley Hammers an Iron Chinquapin Leaf
 On His Anvil Near Spruce Pine
 & Cogitates on the Nature of Two Beauty Spots
Jonathan Williams
 
 
in the Linville Gorge I
know this place
 
now it's a rock wall
you look up
it's covered in punktatum all
the way to Heaven
 
that's a
sight!
 
*
 
up on Smoky
you ease up at daybust
and see the first
light in the tops of the tulip trees
 
now boys that just naturally
grinds and polishes
the soul
 
makes it
normal
again
 
I mean it's really
pretty!
 
%

Grief
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 
 
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach.  Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens.  Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death---
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
 

%

Magna est Veritas
Stevie Smith
 
 
With my looks I am bound to look either simple or fast I would
   rather look simple
So I wear a tall hat on the back of my head that is rather a temple
And I walk rather queerly and comb my long hair
And people say, Don't bother about her.
So in my time I have picked up a good many facts,
Rather more than the people do who wear smart hats
And I do not deceive because I am rather simple too
And although I collect facts I do not always know what they amount to.
I regard them as a contribution to almighty Truth, magna est
    veritas et praevalebit,
Agreeing with that Latin writer, Great is Truth and will prevail in a bit.
 
%
 
No Swan So Fine
Marianne Moore
 
 
"No water so still as the
  dead fountains of Versailles."  No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
  as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
 
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
  candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
  it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers---at ease and tall.  The king is dead.
 
%

Poem
Vladislav Khodasevich (translated by Vladimir Nabokov)
 
 
What is the use of time and rhyme?
We live in peril, paupers all.
The tailors sit, the builders climb,
but coats will tear and houses fall.
 
And only seldom with a sob
of tenderness I hear... oh, quite
a different existence throb
through this mortality and blight.
 
Thus does a wife, when days are dull,
place breathlessly, with loving care,
her hand upon her body, full
of the live burden swelling there.
 
%

The Term
William Carlos Williams
 
 
A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length
 
and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the
 
wind slowly over
and over in
the street as
 
a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to
 
the ground.  Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling
 
with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.
 
%

The Monkey
Vladislav Khodasevich (translated by Vladimir Nabokov)
 
 
The heat was fierce.  Great forests were on fire.
Time dragged its feet in dust.  A cock was crowing
in an adjacent lot.
                     As I pushed open
my garden-gate I saw beside the road
a wandering Serb asleep upon a bench
his back against the palings.  He was lean
and very black, and down his half-bared breast
there hung a heavy silver cross, diverting
the trickling sweat.
                      Upon the fence above him,
clad in a crimson petticoat, his monkey
sat munching greedily the dusty leaves
of a syringa bush; a leathern collar
drawn backwards by its heavy chain bit deep
into her throat.
                  Hearing me pass, the man
stirred, wiped his face and asked me for some water.
He took one sip to see whether the drink
was not too cold, then placed a saucerful
upon the bench, and, instantly, the monkey
slipped down and clasped the saucer with both hands
dipping her thumbs; then, on all fours, she drank,
her elbows pressed against the bench, her chin
touching the boards, her backbone arching higher
than her bald head.  Thus, surely, did Darius
bend to a puddle on the road when fleeing
from Alexander's thundering phalanges.
When the last drop was sucked the monkey swept
the saucer off the bench, and raised her head,
and offered me her black wet little hand.
Oh, I have pressed the fingers of great poets,
leaders of men, fair women, but no hand
had ever been so exquisitely shaped
nor had touched mine with such a thrill of kinship,
and no man's eyes had peered into my soul
with such deep wisdom...  Legends of lost ages
awoke in me thanks to that dingy beast
and suddenly I saw life in its fullness
and with a rush of wind and wave and worlds
the organ music of the universe
boomed in my ears, as it had done before
in immemorial woodlands.
                          And the Serb
then went his way thumping his tambourine:
on his left shoulder, like an Indian prince
upon his elephant, his monkey swayed.
A huge incarnadine but sunless sun
hung in a milky haze.  The sultry summer
flowed endlessly upon the wilting wheat.
 
That day the war broke out, that very day.
 
%

Dangerous Thoughts
C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
 
 
Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria during the reign
of the Emperor Konstans and the Emperor Konstantios;
in part a heathen, in part christianized):
``Strengthened by meditation and study,
I won't fear my passions like a coward;
I'll give my body to sensual pleasures,
to enjoyments I've dreamed of,
to the most audacious erotic desires,
to the lascivious impulses of my blood,
without being at all afraid, because when I wish---
and I'll have the will-power, strengthened
as I shall be by meditation and study---
when I wish, at critical moments I'll recover
my ascetic spirit as it was before.''
 
%

Held Up Two Days at Gold Mountain
Su Tung-p'o (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
The bell on the pagoda top talks to itself:
High winds tomorrow---no river-crossing!
Morning, and white waves pound the green bank,
Dashing showers of spray up to our window.
Hundred-weight ships don't dare put out.
But a fishing boat---one leaf---bounces along.
Come to think of it, why rush to town?
I laugh at rain dragons---who are they angry at?
The servants may wonder why I stay so long
But my family will forgive me with wind like this!
The monk of Ch'ien-shan---what's he doing?
Past midnight, up alone, listening for gruel call---
 
%

An untitled poem by Christina Rossetti
 
 
An emerald is as green as grass;
  A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
  A flint lies in the mud.
 
A diamond is a brilliant stone,
  To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
  But a flint holds fire.
 
%

At the Washing of my Son
Su Tung-p'o (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
 
Everybody wants an intelligent son.
My intelligence only got me into difficulties.
I want only a brave and simple boy,
Who, without trouble or resistance,
Will rise to the highest offices.
 
%

To the Reader
Charles Baudelaire (translated by Stanley Kunitz)
 
 
Ignorance, error, cupidity and sin
Possess our souls and exercise our flesh;
Habitually we cultivate remorse
As beggars entertain and nurse their lice.
 
Our sins are stubborn.  Cowards when contrite
We overpay confession with our pains,
And when we're back again in human mire
Vile tears, we think, will wash away our stains.
 
Thrice-potent Satan in our cursed bed
Lulls us to sleep, our spirit overkissed,
Until the precious metal of our will
Is vaporized---that cunning alchemist!
 
Who but the Devil pulls our walking-strings!
Abominations lure us to their side;
Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified.
 
Like an exhausted rake who mouths and chews
The martyrized breast of an old withered whore
We steal, in passing, whatever joys we can,
Squeezing the driest orange all the more.
 
Packed in our brains incestuous as worms
Our demons celebrate in drunken gangs,
And when we breathe, that hollow rasp is Death
Sliding invisibly down into our lungs.
 
If the dull canvas of our wretched life
Is unembellished with such pretty ware
As knives or poison, pyromania, rape,
It is because our soul's too weak to dare!
 
But in this den of jackals, monkeys, curs,
Scorpions, buzzards, snakes... this paradise
Of filthy beasts that screech, howl, grovel, grunt---
In this menagerie of mankind's vice
 
There's one supremely hideous and impure!
Soft-spoken, not the type to cause a scene,
He'd willingly make rubble of the earth
And swallow up creation in a yawn.
 
I mean Ennui! who in his hookah-dreams
Produces hangmen and real tears together.
How well you know this fastidious monster, reader,
---Hypocrite reader, you!---my double! my brother!
 
%

The Boats are Afloat
Chu Hsi (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
 
 
Last night along the river banks
The floods of Spring have risen.
Great warships and huge barges
Float as lightly as feathers.
Before, nothing could move them from the mud.
Today they swim with ease in the swift current.
 
%

The Book in Your Hand
Tom Disch
 
 
It was a memorable sunset,
and the elderly poets who wrote these poems
that I have tried to read tonight
must have had their moments too.
 
Where the brightest orange rammed up against
the intensest blue was as satisfying as an apple,
but even better was the way their finite rows
diminished as they neared the horizon.
 
So on our shelves, as on the shelves we see
in photos of forgotten writers, the titles
disappear into a solemn smudgy multitude
of bookishness, a smog of letters
 
all the lovelier for being indistinct.
Now this page blurs as your mind wanders
towards its own concerns.  Only the sunsets
are interesting, not the effort of getting there.
 
%

An untitled poem by Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth)
 
 
   A swallow
Flew out of the nose
   Of the Great Buddha.
 
%

An untitled poem by Lord Byron
 
 
When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,
  Let him combat for that of his neighbours;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,
  And get knocked on his head for his labours.
 
To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
  And is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom wherever you can,
  And, if not shot or hanged, you'll get knighted.
 
%

Cambridge
Frank O'Hara
 
 
It is still raining and the yellow-green cotton fruit
looks silly round a window giving out on winter trees
with only three drab leaves left.  The hot plate works,
it is the sole heat on earth, and instant coffee.  I
put on my warm corduroy pants, a heavy maroon sweater,
and wrap myself in my old maroon bathrobe.  Just like Pasternak
in Marburg (they say Italy and France are colder, but
I'm sure that Germany's at least as cold as this) and,
lacking the Master's inspiration, I may freeze to death
before I can get out into the white rain.  I could have left
the window closed last night?  But that's where health
comes from!  His breath from the Urals, drawing me into flame
like a forgotten cigarette.  Burn! this is not negligible,
being poetic, and not feeble, since it's sponsored by
the greatest living Russian poet at incalculable cost.
Across the street there is a house under construction,
abandoned to the rain.  Secretly, I shall go to work on it.
 
%

Candles
C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
 
 
Days to come stand in front of us
like a row of burning candles---
golden, warm, and vivid candles.
 
Days past fall behind us,
a gloomy line of burnt-out candles;
the nearest are still smoking,
cold, melted, and bent.
 
I don't want to look at them: their shape saddens me,
and it saddens me to remember their original light.
I look ahead at my burning candles.
 
I don't want to turn, don't want to see, terrified,
how quickly that dark line gets longer,
how quickly one more dead candle joins another.
 
%

   Candy Co.

   The sealed lip opens reluctantly, 
   toughly, hinge oozing a thick
   syrup of rust and dirt from its blunt edge,
   peeling back as we wedge open the coal door's
   baffled drum and drop into the tarnished dark beyond.
   Inside, the floor's oil-packed shallow dips
   away, a four-cornered drift of shadow clipped sharply,
   edge after edge, by the fused bulk of machinery stacked
   like a lock against the dust-glazed windows.
   We feel our way against the chill, touching the walls as delicately 
   as we would touch each other if we were truly blind, fingertips
     rubbing
   the path: a rack of No Deposit
   No Return, glittering as if still full of sweetness,
   red-painted winch no longer lifting 
   anything but air, the worn scoop of stair we climb
   into the light's dull slip. Overhead
   the bursting of birds in fear against the steel
   beams, scattering like grain in the threshing wind.

%

The Canyon
Kristen Sandel 

That the light is less
these days, turns from the eye to silence
in silence, sky mimicking, in its sweep, the palm's
open loss, a grief in the gestures
of air, bending and failing, a falling
wind against the dark--only by these
slow ways would I know
how far you have gone. A shearing of breath
into earth: that the light falls away.


%

   P. Celan

   
   Behind splinters of skull,
   in wood-wine
   fresh with need,

   (the place where you come from
   talks itself into darkness, southward),

   fearful of dahlias in the gold,
   on chairs evermore
   serene.
 
%

An untitled poem by Arthur Hugh Clough
 
 
To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
  The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one's latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw---
Is this the object, end and law,
  And purpose of our being here?
 
%


Cold Stone
Jay Macpherson
 
 
I lay my cheek against cold stone
And feel my self returned to me
As soft my flesh and firm my bone
By it declare their quality.
I hear my distant blood drive still
Its obscure purpose with clear will.
 
The stone's unordered rigour stands
Remote and heavy as a star.
My returned self in cheek and hands
Regards as yet not very far
The leap from shape to living form;
For where I rested, the stone is warm.
 
%

Instructions for a Commando
James Richardson

Paint everything black. Your knife, 
strop on the long nerve (enclosed).
Repeat three times the invocation
of silence, that the thin peal
of escaping life may not betray you.
Consider each step as the last
rung on the ladder to hell. Bring
no food, no light, no
ambitions. If fires break out
in you, cover them, pressing the afflicted part
to the earth. When you must,
scream as the dog or stone.
So when the come to find something 
at least it will not be you.
%

Comment
Dorothy Parker
 
 
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
 
%

The Common Cormorant
Christopher Isherwood
 
 
The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag,
You follow the idea, no doubt?
It's to keep the lightning out.
 
But what these unobservant birds
Have never thought of, is that herds
Of wandering bears might come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.
 
%

An untitled poem by Stephen Crane
 
 
A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it---
It was clay.
 
Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.
 
%

The Crime
James Richardson

All the windows have been broken
by someone desperate to see.

And though the glittering, ruined field
now is dark,

wheels of birds return,
probing for their fallen

starlight, finding
pieces after peace.

Surely a crime has been committed. Surely,
for the victims are everywhere.
 
%

The Dark Hills
Edwin Arlington Robinson
 
 
Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade---as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.
 
%
WS Merwin
Daybreak


Again this procession of the speechless
Bringing me their words
The future woke me with its silence
I join the procession
An open doorway
Speaks for me
Again


%

Development
Robert Browning
 
 
My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
`What do you read about?'
                           `The siege of Troy.'
`What is a siege and what is Troy?'
                                     Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
---Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom---since she was worth the pains, poor puss---
Towzer and Tray,---our dogs, the Atreidai,---sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
---Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable)---forth would prance
And put to flight Hector---our page-boy's self.
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old: a huge delight it proved
And still proves---thanks to that instructor sage
My Father, who knew better than turn straight
Learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance,
Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind,
Content with darkness and vacuity.
 
It happened, two or three years afterward,
That---I and playmates playing at Troy's Siege---
My Father came upon our make-believe.
`How would you like to read yourself the tale
Properly told, of which I gave you first
Merely such a notion as a boy could bear?
Pope, now, would give you the precise account
Of what, some day, by dint of scholarship,
You'll hear---who knows?---from Homer's very mouth.
Learn Greek by all means, read the "Blind Old Man,
Sweetest of Singers"---"tuphlos" which means "blind,"
"Hedistos" which means "sweetest."  Time enough!
Try, anyhow, to master him some day;
Until when, take what serves for substitute,
Read Pope, by all means!'
                           So I ran through Pope,
Enjoyed the tale---what history so true?
Also attacked my Primer, duly drudged,
Grew fitter thus for what was promised next---
The very thing itself, the actual words,
When I could turn---say, Buttmann to account.
 
Time passed, I ripened somewhat: one fine day,
`Quite ready for the Iliad, nothing less?
There's Heine, where the big books block the shelf:
Don't skip a word, thumb well the Lexicon!'
 
I thumbed well and skipped nowise till I learned
Who was who, what was what, from Homer's tongue,
And there an end of learning.  Had you asked
The all-accomplished scholar, twelve years old,
`Who was it wrote the Iliad?'---what a laugh!
`Why, Homer, all the world knows: of his life
Doubtless some facts exist: it's everywhere:
We have not settled, though, his place of birth:
He begged, for certain, and was blind beside:
Seven cities claimed him---Scio, with best right,
Thinks Byron.  What he wrote?  Those Hymns we have.
Then there's the "Battle of the Frogs and Mice,"
That's all---unless they dig "Margites" up
(I'd like that) nothing more remains to know.'
 
Thus did youth spend a comfortable time;
Until---`What's this the Germans say is fact
That Wolf found out first?  It's unpleasant work
Their chop and change, unsettling one's belief:
All the same, while we live, we learn, that's sure.'
So, I bent brow o'er "Prolegomena."
 
And, after Wolf, a dozen of his like
Proved there was never any Troy at all,
Neither Besiegers nor Besieged,---nay, worse,---
No actual Homer, no authentic text,
No warrant for the fiction I, as fact,
Had treasured in my heart and soul so long---
Ay, mark you! and as fact held still, still hold,
Spite of new knowledge, in my heart of hearts
And soul of souls, fact's essence freed and fixed
From accidental fancy's guardian sheath.
Assuredly thenceforward---thank my stars!---
However it got there, deprive who could---
Wring from the shrine my precious tenantry,
Helen, Ulysses, Hector and his Spouse,
Achilles and his Friend?---though Wolf---ah, Wolf!
Why must he needs come doubting, spoil a dream?
 
But then `No dream's worth waking'---Browning says:
And here's the reason why I tell thus much.
I, now mature man, you anticipate,
May blame my Father justifiably
For letting me dream out my nonage thus,
And only by such slow and sure degrees
Permitting me to sift the grain from chaff,
Get truth and falsehood known and named as such.
Why did he ever let me dream at all,
Not bid me taste the story in its strength?
Suppose my childhood was scarce qualified
To rightly understand mythology,
Silence at least was in his power to keep:
I might have---somehow---correspondingly---
Well, who knows by what method, gained my gains,
Been taught, by forthrights not meanderings,
My aim should be to loathe, like Peleus' son,
A lie as Hell's Gate, love my wedded wife,
Like Hector, and so on with all the rest.
Could not I have excogitated this
Without believing such men really were?
That is---he might have put into my hand
The `Ethics'?  In translation, if you please,
Exact, no pretty lying that improves,
To suit the modern taste: no more, no less---
The `Ethics': 'tis a treatise I find hard
To read aright now that my hair is grey,
And I can manage the original.
At five years old---how ill had fared its leaves!
Now, growing double o'er the Stagirite,
At least I soil no page with bread and milk,
Nor crumple, dogsear and deface---boys' way.
 
%

Diction
Robert Creeley
 
 
The grand time when the words
were fit for human allegation,
 
and imagination of small, local
containments, and the lids fit.
 
What was the wind blew through it,
a veritable bonfire like they say---
 
and did say in hostile, little voices:
"It's changed, it's not the same!"
 
%

A Disappointment
Joanna Baillie


  On village green, whose smooth and well-worn sod,
Cross-pathed, with every gossip's foot is trod;
By cottage door where playful children run,
And cats and curs sit basking in the sun:
Where o'er the earthen seat the thorn is bent,
Cross-armed, and back to wall, poor William leant.
His bonnet broad drawn o'er his gathered brow,
His hanging lip and lengthened visage show
A mind but ill at ease.  With motions strange,
His listless limbs their wayward postures change;
Whilst many a crooked line and curious maze,
With clouted shoon, he on the sand portrays.
The half-chewed straw fell slowly from his mouth,
And to himself low mutt'ring spoke the youth.
  `How simple is the lad, and reft of skill,
Who thinks with love to fix a woman's will:
Who ev'ry Sunday morn, to please her sight,
Knots up his neck-cloth gay and hosen white:
Who for her pleasure keeps his pockets bare,
And half his wages spends on pedlar's ware;
When every niggard clown or dotard old,
Who hides in secret nooks his oft-told gold,
Whose field or orchard tempts with all her pride,
At little cost may win her for his bride;
Whilst all the meed her silly lover gains
Is but the neighbours' jeering for his pains.
On Sunday last when Susan's banns were read,
And I astonished sat with hanging head,
Cold grew my shrinking limbs and loose my knee,
Whilst every neighbour's eye was fixed on me.
Ah, Sue! when last we worked at Hodge's hay,
And still at me you jeered in wanton play;
When last at fair, well pleased by showman's stand,
You took the new-bought fairing from my hand;
When at old Hobb's you sung that song so gay,
`Sweet William' still the burthen of the lay,
I little thought, alas! the lots were cast,
That thou should'st be another's bride at last:
And had, when last we tripped it on the green
And laughed at stiff-backed Rob, small thought, I ween,
Ere yet another scanty month was flown,
To see thee wedded to the hateful clown.
Ay, lucky swain, more gold thy pockets line;
But did these shapely limbs resemble thine,
I'd stay at home and tend the household gear,
Nor on the green with other lads appear.
Ay, lucky swain, no store thy cottage lacks,
And round thy barn thick stand the sheltered stacks;
But did such features hard my visage grace,
I'd never budge the bonnet from my face.
Yet let it be: it shall not break my ease;
He best deserves who doth the maiden please.
Such silly cause no more shall give me pain,
Nor ever maiden cross my rest again.
Such grizzly suitors with their taste agree,
And the black fiend may take them all for me!'
  Now through the village rise confused sounds,
Hoarse lads, and children shrill, and yelping hounds.
Straight ev'ry matron at the door is seen,
And pausing hedgers on their mattocks lean.
At every narrow lane and alley mouth,
Loud laughing lasses stand, and joking youth.
A near approaching band in colours gay,
With minstrels blithe before to cheer the way,
From clouds of curling dust which onward fly,
In rural splendour break upon the eye.
As in their way they hold so gaily on,
Caps, beads and buttons glancing in the sun,
Each village wag, with eye of roguish cast,
Some maiden jogs and vents the ready jest;
Whilst village toasts the passing belles deride,
And sober matrons marvel at their pride.
But William, head erect, with settled brow,
In sullen silence viewed the passing show;
And oft he scratched his pate with manful grace,
And scorned to pull the bonnet o'er his face;
But did with steady look unmoved wait,
Till hindmost man had turned the church-yard gate;
Then turned him to his cot with visage flat,
Where honest Tray upon the threshold sat.
Up jumped the kindly beast his hand to lick,
And, for his pains, received an angry kick.
Loud shuts the flapping door with thund'ring din;
The echoes round their circling course begin,
From cot to cot in wide progressive swell;
Deep groans the church-yard wall and neighb'ring dell,
And Tray responsive joins with long and piteous yell.


%

It Has For Ages Been Observed
Vladimir Uflyand

Translated by Daniel Weisshort


It has for ages bessn observed
how ugly is the diver in his suit.

But doubtless
there's a woman in this world
who'd give herself even to such as he.

Perchance
he'll issue from the watery depths,
wrapped around with streaming ends of algae,
and there'll be a night in store for him tonight
filled with all manner of delights
(and if not this time,
then another just like it).

To many that woman has denied her favors.
You --
rubbery,
steely,
leaden-legged --
are what she absolutely wants, O diver.

And now,
although not rubbery,
you stand,
another slimy fellow and
quite repulsive,
especially when nude.

But since this is precisely what she wants,
there is a woman waiting just
for you.

%

Driver Education
James Richardson


When you lose your brakes,
you must change your mind about everything.
Only what you have never noticed 
will help you. Avoid, at all costs, at

one cost, the sublimity of oak,
the watchtower boulder, home, 
and signs of all kinds. Above all, 
do not take the easy way down.

Head for the incline formerly
steep to the point of annoyance, yet
too gentle to be impressive.
Do not let your mind wander.

When your car is a scream
swung on a long rope, and the road
lets go, aim for the low, tenacious weed,
high grass, brittle scrub--in that order.

Water will help, if it is shallow enough
not to be interesting. Get the sun
at your back. Stay away from 
clouds, all large animals, friends.

When you are finally ready to stop, 
all that has guided and protected you--
glass, steering wheel, struts, beams
and dials--has decided before you,

and becomes your enemy. Hold
back, cursing them
past redemption, and unafraid
of their revenge--no one does this twice.

Stop. If you can get out, do so immediately.
If the car is not burning, burn it 
with your clothes inside. Change your name,
though no one will know it.

By now it is March, and you will
be tempted, but the smoke 
wailing over the town of your birth
is not, not really, for you.

%

Edward Lear
W. H. Auden
 
 
Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.
 
The legions of cruel inquisitive They
Were so many and big like dogs; he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.
 
How prodigious the welcome was.  Flowers took his hat
And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;
The demon's false nose made the table laugh; a cat
Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;
 
And children swarmed to him like settlers.  He became a land.
 
%

On Educating the Natives
P. K. Page
 
 
They who can from palm leaves and from grasses
weave baskets of so intricate a beauty
and simply as a girl combing her hair,
are taught in a square room by a square woman
to cross-stitch on checked gingham.
 
%

Encounter
Czeslaw Milosz
 
 
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
 
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
 
That was long ago.  Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
 
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
 
%

An untitled epigram by Timothy Steele
 
 
It's Lance's goal in life and bed
To make his mistresses believe
Regardless of his nakedness
He's always something up his sleeve.

%

Eve
Ralph Hodgson
 
 
Eve, with her basket, was
Deep in the bells and grass,
Wading in bells and grass
Up to her knees,
Picking a dish of sweet
Berries and plums to eat,
Down in the bells and grass
Under the trees.
 
Mute as a mouse in a
Corner the cobra lay,
Curled round a bough of the
Cinnamon tall....
Now to get even and
Humble proud heaven and
Now was the moment or
Never at all.
 
"Eva!"  Each syllable
Light as a flower fell,
"Eva!" he whispered the
Wondering maid,
Soft as a bubble sung
Out of a linnet's lung,
Soft and most silverly
"Eva!" he said.
 
Picture that orchard sprite,
Eve, with her body white,
Supple and smooth to her
Slim finger tips,
Wondering, listening,
Listening, wondering,
Eve with a berry
Half-way to her lips.
 
Oh had our simple Eve
Seen through the make-believe!
Had she but known the
Pretender he was!
Out of the boughs he came,
Whispering still her name,
Tumbling in twenty rings
Into the grass.
 
Here was the strangest pair
In the world anywhere,
Eve in the bells and grass
Kneeling, and he
Telling his story low....
Singing birds saw them go
Down the dark path to
The Blasphemous Tree.
 
Oh what a clatter when
Titmouse and Jenny Wren
Saw him successful and
Taking his leave!
How the birds rated him,
How they all hated him!
How they all pitied
Poor motherless Eve!
 
Picture her crying
Outside in the lane,
Eve, with no dish of sweet
Berries and plums to eat,
Haunting the gate of the
Orchard in vain....
Picture the lewd delight
Under the hill to-night---
"Eva!" the toast goes round,
"Eva!" again.
 
%

W.S. Merwin

Evening

I am strange here and often I am still trying
To finish something as the light is going
Occasionally as just now I think I see
Off to one side something passing at that time
Along the herded walls under the walnut trees
And I look up but it is only
Evening again the old hat without a head
How long will it be till he speaks when he passes


%

Exile
Virna Sheard
 
 
Ben-Arabie was the Camel,
  Belonging to the Zoo.
He lived there through a dozen years,
  With nothing much to do,
But chew, and chew, and chew, and chew,
  And chew, and chew, and chew.
 
He wondered when he might go home,---
  And what they kept him for;
Because he hated Zooish sounds
  And perfumes---more and more;---
Decidedly he hated them
  Much more, and more, and more.
 
And why the world turned white and cold
  He did not understand.
He only wanted lots of sun
  And lots and lots of sand;
Just sand, and sand, and sand, and sand,
  And sand, and sand, and sand.
 
He longed to see an Arab Sheik,
  And Arab girls and boys;
The kind of noise he yearned for most
  Was plain Arabian noise;
(The sound of little drums and flutes
  And all that sort of noise.)
 
He leant against the wind to hear
  The sound of harness bells;
He sniffed the air for scent of spice
  The nomad merchant sells;
He dreamed of pleasant tinkling bells,
  Of spice and tinkling bells.
 
The keepers said that he grew queer.
  They wondered why he sighed;
They called him supercilious
  And crabbed and sun-dried;
(Indeed he was quite crabbed and
  Exceedingly sun-dried.)
 
But ere his wooly fur was gone
  They put him on a train---
For a rich old Arab bought him
  And sent him home again;---
O joyous day!  He sent him home;
  He sent him home again!
 
%

Fears and Scruples
Robert Browning
 
 
Here's my case.  Of old I used to love him
  This same unseen friend, before I knew:
Dream there was none like him, none above him,---
  Wake to hope and trust my dream was true.
 
Loved I not his letters full of beauty?
  Not his actions famous far and wide?
Absent, he would know I vowed him duty;
  Present, he would find me at his side.
 
Pleasant fancy! for I had but letters,
  Only knew of actions by hearsay:
He himself was busied with my betters;
  What of that?  My turn must come some day.
 
`Some day' proving---no day!  Here's the puzzle.
  Passed and passed my turn is.  Why complain?
He's so busied!  If I could but muzzle
  People's foolish mouths that give me pain!
 
`Letters?' (hear them!) `You a judge of writing?
  Ask the experts!---How they shake the head
O'er these characters, your friend's inditing---
  Call them forgery from A to Z!
 
`Actions?  Where's your certain proof' (they bother)
  `He, of all you find so great and good,
He, he only, claims this, that, the other
  Action---claimed by men, a multitude?'
 
I can simply wish I might refute you,
  Wish my friend would,---by a word, a wink,---
Bid me stop that foolish mouth,---you brute you!
  He keeps absent,---why, I cannot think.
 
Never mind!  Though foolishness may flout me,
  One thing's sure enough: 'tis neither frost,
No, nor fire, shall freeze or burn from out me
  Thanks for truth---though falsehood, gained---though lost.
 
All my days, I'll go the softlier, sadlier,
  For that dream's sake!  How forget the thrill
Through and through me as I thought `The gladlier
  Lives my friend because I love him still!'
 
Ah, but there's a menace someone utters!
  `What and if your friend at home play tricks?
Peep at hide-and-seek behind the shutters?
  Mean your eyes should pierce through solid bricks?
 
`What and if he, frowning, wake you, dreamy?
  Lay on you the blame that bricks---conceal?
Say "At least I saw who did not see me,
  Does see now, and presently shall feel"?'
 
`Why, that makes your friend a monster!' say you:
  `Had his house no window?  At first nod,
Would you not have hailed him?'  Hush, I pray you!
  What if this friend happen to be---God?
 
%

At the Fishhouses
Elizabeth Bishop
 
 
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
 
Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
 
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals ... One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me.  He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang ``A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.''
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water ... Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas.  The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
 
%

I Give up Trying to Learn to Play the Lute
Sugawara no Michizane (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
I was certain that lute and calligraphy would help my studies,
idle seasons beside the window, seven stretched strings---
but no concentration of mind brings improvement---I squint in
     vain at the score,
fingering so confused I keep having to ask the teacher.
My choppy ``Rapids'' never has an autumn river sound,
my frigid ``Raven'' no sadness of a nighttime cry.
Music experts all inform me I'm merely wasting time---
better stick to the family tradition, writing poems!
 
%


Impromptu at the Fujinomori Shrine
Gensei (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
Autumn light enfolds the trees;
I've sat so long the dew wets my robe.
Slanting rays of sun reach in under the pines;
a light mist drifts beside the bamboo.
Blossoms of fragrant olive about to burst open,
maple leaves not yet urging their crimson on us:
insect voices echo, the twilight breeze is still.
Deep in poetry musings, I forget to go home.

%

A Geological Madrigal
Bret Harte
 
 
I have found out a gift for my fair;
  I know where the fossils abound,
Where the footprints of Aves declare
  The birds that once walked on the ground;
Oh, come, and---in technical speech---
  We'll walk this Devonian shore,
Or on some Silurian beach
  We'll wander, my love, evermore.
 
I will show thee the sinuous track
  By the slow-moving annelid made,
Or the Trilobite that, farther back,
  In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid;
Thou shalt see, in his Jurassic tomb,
  The Plesiosaurus embalmed;
In his Oolitic prime and his bloom,
  Iguanodon safe and unharmed!
 
You wished---I remember it well,
  And I loved you the more for that wish---
For a perfect cystedian shell
  And a whole holocephalic fish.
And oh, if Earth's strata contains
  In its lowest Silurian drift,
Or palaeozoic remains
  The same,---'tis your lover's free gift!
 
Then come, love, and never say nay,
  But calm all your maidenly fears;
We'll note, love, in one summer's day
  The record of millions of years;
And though the Darwinian plan
  Your sensitive feelings may shock,
We'll find the beginning of man,---
  Our fossil ancestors, in rock!
 
%

Girls in Crotona Park
Anna Margolin (translated by Marcia Falk)
 
 
Girls have woven themselves into autumn evenings
as in a faded picture.
Their eyes are cool, their smiles wild and thin,
their dresses lavender, old rose, apple green.
Dew flows through their veins.
Their talk is bright and empty.
Botticelli loved them in his dreams.
 
%

Rhyming with Tzu-yu's "Treading the Green"
Su Tung-p'o (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
East wind stirs fine dust on the roads:
First chance for strollers to enjoy the new spring.
Slack season---just right for roadside drinking,
Grain still too short to be crushed by carriage wheels.
City people sick of walls around them
Clatter out at dawn and leave the whole town empty.
Songs and drums jar the hills, grass and trees shake;
Picnic baskets strew the fields where crows pick them over.
Who draws a crowd there?  A priest, he says,
Blocking the way, selling charms and scowling:
"Good for silkworms---give you cocoons like water jugs!
Good for livestock---make your sheep big as deer!"
Passers-by aren't sure they believe his words---
Buy charms anyway to consecrate the spring.
The priest grabs their money, heads for a wine shop;
Dead drunk, he mutters: "My charms really work!"
 
%

Guilt
John Betjeman
 
 
The clock is frozen in the tower,
    The thickening fog with sooty smell
Has blanketed the motor power
    Which turns the London streets to hell;
And footsteps with their lonely sound
Intensify the silence round.
 
I haven't hope. I haven't faith.
    I live two lives and sometimes three.
The lives I live make life a death
    For those who have to live with me.
Knowing the virtues that I lack,
I pat myself upon the back.
 
With breastplate of self-righteousness
    And shoes of smugness on my feet,
Before the urge in me grows less
    I hurry off to make retreat,
For somewhere, somewhere, burns a light
To lead me out into the night.
 
It glitters icy, thin and plain,
    And leads me down to Waterloo---
Into a warm electric train
    Which travels sorry Surrey through
And crystal-hung the clumps of pine
Stand deadly still beside the line.
 
%

Untitled

Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light.  Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost quelerous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
 I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkin-seed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.


%

Halley's Comet
Kenneth Rexroth
 
 
When in your middle years
The great comet comes again
Remember me, a child,
Awake in the summer night,
Standing in my crib and
Watching that long-haired star
So many years ago.
Go out in the dark and see
Its plume over water
Dribbling on the liquid night,
And think that life and glory
Flickered on the rushing
Bloodstream for me once, and for
All who have gone before me,
Vessels of the billion-year-long
River that flows now in your veins.
 
%

WS Merwin
To My Brother Hanson


b. J

My elder,
Born into death like a message into a bottle,
The tide
Keeps coming in empty on the only shore.
Maybe it has lovers but it has few friends.
It is never still but it keeps its counsel, and

If I address you whose curious stars
Climbed to the tops of their houses and froze,
It is in hope of no
Answer, but as so often, merely
For want of another, for
I have seen catastrophe taking root in the mirror,
And why waste my words there?

Yes, now the roads themselves are shattered
As though they had fallen from a height, and the sky
Is cracked like varnish. Hard to believe,
Our family tree         
Seems to be making its mark everywhere.
I carry my head high
On a pike that shall be nameless.

Even so, we had to give up honor entirely,
But I do what I can. I am patient
With the woes of the cupboards, and God knows--
I keep the good word close to hand like a ticket.
I feel the wounded lights in their cages.
I wake up at night on the penultimate stroke, and with
My eyes still shut I remember to turn the thorn
In the breast of the bird of darkness.
I listen to the painful song
Dropping away into sleep.

                          Blood
Is supposed to be thicker. You were supposed to be there
When the habits closed in pushing
Their smiles in front of them, when I was filled
With something else, like a thermometer,
When the moment of departure, standing
On one leg, like a sleeping stork, by the doorway,
Put down the other foot and opened its eye.
I
Got away this time for a while. I've come
Again to the whetted edge of myself where I
Can hear the hollow waves breaking like
Bottles in the dark. What about it? Listen, I've

Had enough of this. Is there nobody
Else in the family
To take care of the tree, to nurse the mirror,
To fix up a bite for hope when the old thing
Comes to the door,
To say to the pans of the balance
Rise up and walk?


 
%

Happiness
Stevie Smith
 
 
Happiness is silent, or speaks equivocally for friends,
Grief is explicit and her song never ends,
Happiness is like England, and will not state a case,
Grief like Guilt rushes in and talks apace.
 
%

An untitled poem by Emily Dickinson
 
 
One need not be a Chamber---to be Haunted---
One need not be a House---
The Brain has Corridors---surpassing
Material Place---
 
Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting---
That Cooler Host.
 
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a'chase---
Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter---
In lonesome Place---
 
Ourself behind ourself, concealed---
Should startle most---
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror's least.
 
The Body---borrows a Revolver---
He bolts the Door---
O'erlooking a superior spectre---
Or More---
 
%

"Lord of my Heart's Elation"
Bliss Carman
 
 
Lord of my heart's elation,
Spirit of things unseen,
Be thou my aspiration
Consuming and serene!
 
Bear up, bear out, bear onward
This mortal soul alone,
To selfhood or oblivion,
Incredibly thine own,---
 
As the foamheads are loosened
And blown along the sea,
Or sink and merge forever
In that which bids them be.
 
I, too, must climb in wonder,
Uplift at thy command,---
Be one with my frail fellows
Beneath the wind's strong hand,
 
A fleet and shadowy column
Of dust or mountain rain,
To walk the earth a moment
And be dissolved again.
 
Be thou my exaltation
Or fortitude of mien,
Lord of the world's elation
Thou breath of things unseen!
 
%

An untitled poem by A. E. Housman
 
 
Crossing alone the nighted ferry
  With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
  Count you to find?  Not me.
 
The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
  The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
  And free land of the grave.
 
%
Kristin Sandel
IN THE LIGHT


   Pyramid Lake

   We drive, then walk, towards the old peninsula
   til even the light fails beneath us, sky the sunken ochre
   of an earth which never stops
   moving, taken by seasons of already forgotten fire,
   the steady wind, an inland ocean which swept
   this valley clear and swung
   itself away, leaving Pyramid
   advancing--bitter, depthless, pure.

   Seeming still consumed, water's long stretch
   against the shore trembles, fading
   from us in dusk as though to drop from sight
   means truly to die, the hand fumbling
   its touch, light again an endless act
   of faith we pull with a faker's lucky flourish,
   fingers cupped around the lamp, cheeks
   puffed and breathing out a trick
   against the night. Beyond us the lake's dark
   wreckage talks, driven
   to its breaking, beach hinging
   a single sheltered point which thrusts away
   to nothing on either side, land stifled into absence
   by our doubt, voices church-low, and the troubled story
   always known no matter how we tell it, sound
   only the safety we draw against
   whatever circles, the fire's fitful shake
   a promise flaring and falling back.

   From here we hold to what can kindle
   with a steadiness we can't grant ourselves,
   its simple need for air
   desire and command
   commanding us. Each gesture then
   a slow gift given by the still
   more slowly growing light.


%


In Mind
Denise Levertov
 
 
There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
 
fair-featured, and smelling of
apples or grass.  She wears
 
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
 
is kind and very clean without
ostentation---
              but she has
no imagination.
               And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
 
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
 
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs---
 
but she is not kind.
 

%

The Infinite
Giacomo Leopardi (translated by John Heath-Stubbs)
 
 
This lonely hill was always dear to me,
And this hedgerow, that hides so large a part
Of the far sky-line from my view.  Sitting and gazing
I fashion in my mind what lie beyond---
Unearthly silences, and endless space,
And very deepest quiet; until almost
My heart becomes afraid.  And when I hear
The wind come blustering among the trees
I set that voice against this infinite silence:
And then I call to mind Eternity,
The ages that are dead, and the living present
And all the noise of it.  And thus it is
In that immensity my thought is drowned:
And sweet to me the foundering in that sea.
 
%

`I look into my glass'
Thomas Hardy
 
 
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, `Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!'
 
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
 
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
 
%

It Is March
W. S. Merwin
 
 
It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices
 
When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write
 
The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses
 
At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps
 
Whatever I have to do has not yet begun
 
%

Just Walking Around

John Ashbery

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret
To say much, and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting,
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most effi
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there, and mystery and food.
Come see it. Come not for me but for it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.


-- 
%

Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,
     `Erected to the Memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien'
Patrick Kavanagh
 
 
O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer.  Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully.
Where by a lock Niagariously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July.  No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges---
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb---just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
 
%

To the Ladies
Lady Mary Chudleigh
 
 
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
Which nothing, nothing can divide,
When she the word "Obey" has said,
And man by law supreme has made,
Then all that's kind is laid aside,
And nothing left but state and pride.
Fierce as an eastern prince he grows,
And all his innate rigour shows:
Then but to look, to laugh, or speak,
Will the nuptial contract break.
Like mutes, she signs alone must make,
And never any freedom take,
But still be governed by a nod,
And fear her husband as her god:
Him still must serve, him still obey,
And nothing act, and nothing say,
But what her haughty lord thinks fit,
Who, with the power, has all the wit.
Then shun, oh! shun that wretched state,
And all the fawning flatt'rers hate.
Value yourselves, and men despise:
You must be proud, if you'll be wise.
 
%

Leaves
Sara Teasdale
 
 
One by one, like leaves from a tree,
All my faiths have forsaken me;
But the stars above my head
Burn in white and delicate red,
And beneath my feet the earth
Brings the sturdy grass to birth.
I who was content to be
But a silken-singing tree,
But a rustle of delight
In the wistful heart of night---
I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.
Blinded by a leafy crown
I looked neither up nor down---
But the little leaves that die
Have left me room to see the sky;
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below.
 
%

I could be anywhere else but here
 but the rain won't let me go.
There's a photograph hanging on my wall
 of a place I've never been to...

-Annie Lennox

%

Study of Loneliness
Czeslaw Milosz (translated by the author and Lillian Vallee)


A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?
A one-man crew of a fortress in the sand?
Whoever he was.  At dawn he saw furrowed mountains
The color of ashes, above the melting darkness,
Saturated with violet, breaking into fluid rouge,
Till they stood, immense, in the orange light.
Day after day.  And, before he noticed, year after year.
For whom, he thought, that splendor?  For me alone?
Yet it will be here long after I perish.
What is it in the eye of a lizard?  Or when seen by a migrant bird?
If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
And he knew there was no use crying out, for none of them would save him.

%

The Ballad of Longwood Glen
Vladimir Nabokov
 
 
That Sunday morning, at half past ten,
Two cars crossed the creek and entered the glen.
 
In the first was Art Longwood, a local florist,
With his children and wife (now Mrs. Deforest).
 
In the one that followed, a ranger saw
Art's father, stepfather and father-in-law.
 
The three old men walked off to the cove.
Through tinkling weeds Art slowly drove.
 
Fair was the morning, with bright clouds afar.
Children and comics emerged from the car.
 
Silent Art, who could stare at a thing all day,
Watched a bug climb a stalk and fly away.
 
Pauline had asthma, Paul used a crutch.
They were cute little rascals but could not run much.
 
"I wish," said his mother to crippled Paul,
"Some man would teach you to pitch that ball."
 
Silent Art took the ball and tossed it high.
It stuck in a tree that was passing by.
 
And the grave green pilgrim turned and stopped.
The children waited, but no ball dropped.
 
"I never climbed trees in my timid prime,"
Thought Art; and forthwith started to climb.
 
Now and then his elbow or knee could be seen
In a jigsaw puzzle of blue and green.
 
Up and up Art Longwood swarmed and shinned,
And the leaves said "yes" to the questioning wind.
 
What tiaras of gardens!  What torrents of light!
How accessible ether!  How easy flight!
 
His family circled the tree all day.
Pauline concluded: "Dad climbed away."
 
None saw the delirious celestial crowds
Greet the hero from earth in the snow of the clouds.
 
Mrs. Longwood was getting a little concerned.
He never came down.  He never returned.
 
She found some change at the foot of the tree.
The children grew bored.  Paul was stung by a bee.
 
The old men walked over and stood looking up,
Each holding five cards and a paper cup.
 
Cars on the highway stopped, backed, and then
Up a rutted road waddled into the glen.
 
And the tree was suddenly full of noise,
Conventioners, fishermen, freckled boys.
 
Anacondas and pumas were mentioned by some,
And all kinds of humans continued to come:
 
Tree surgeons, detectives, the fire brigade.
An ambulance parked in the dancing shade.
 
A drunken rogue with a rope and a gun
Arrived on the scene to see justice done.
 
Explorers, dendrologists---all were there;
And a strange pale girl with gypsy hair.
 
And from Cape Fear to Cape Flattery
Every paper had: Man Lost in Tree.
 
And the sky-bound oak (where owls had perched
And the moon dripped gold) was felled and searched.
 
They discovered some inchworms, a red-cheeked gall,
And an ancient nest with a new-laid ball.
 
They varnished the stump, put up railings and signs.
Restrooms nestled in roses and vines.
 
Mrs. Longwood, retouched, when the children died,
Became a photographer's dreamy bride.
 
And now the Deforests, with four old men,
Like regular tourists visit the glen;
 
Munch their lunches, look up and down,
Wash their hands, and drive back to town.
 
%
 
On Lord Holland's Seat near Margate, Kent
Thomas Gray
 
 
Old and abandon'd by each venal friend
  Here Holland took the pious resolution
To smuggle some few years and strive to mend
  A broken character and constitution.
On this congenial spot he fix'd his choice,
  Earl Godwin trembled for his neighbouring sand,
Here Seagulls scream and cormorants rejoice,
  And Mariners tho' shipwreckt dread to land,
Here reign the blustring north and blighting east,
  No tree is heard to whisper, bird to sing,
Yet nature cannot furnish out the feast,
  Art he invokes new horrors still to bring;
Now mouldring fanes and battlements arise,
  Arches and turrets nodding to their fall,
Unpeopled palaces delude his eyes,
  And mimick desolation covers all.
Ah, said the sighing Peer, had Bute been true
  Nor Shelburn's, Rigby's, Calcraft's friendship vain,
Far other scenes than these had bless'd our view
  And realis'd the ruins that we feign.
Purg'd by the sword and beautifyed by fire,
  Then had we seen proud London's hated walls,
Owls might have hooted in St. Peters Quire,
  And foxes stunk and litter'd in St. Pauls.
 
%

An untitled poem by Emily Dickinson
 
 
Love---is anterior to Life---
Posterior---to Death---
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of---Earth---
 
%

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Craig Raine
 
 
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings---
 
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
 
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
 
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
 
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
 
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
 
Model T is a room with the lock inside---
a key is turned to free the world
 
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
 
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
 
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
 
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
 
with sounds.  And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
 
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly.  Adults go to a punishment room
 
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
 
alone.  No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
 
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
 
and read about themselves---
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
 
%

Herman Melville (For Lincoln Kirstein)
W. H. Auden
 
 
Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness,
And anchored in his home and reached his wife
And rode within the harbour of her hand,
And went across each morning to an office
As though his occupation were another island.
 
Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge.
His terror had to blow itself quite out
To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him
Past the Cape Horn of sensible success
Which cries: `This rock is Eden.  Shipwreck here.'
 
But deafened him with thunder and confused with lightning:
---The maniac hero hunting like a jewel
The rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex,
Hatred for hatred ending in a scream,
The unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare---
All that was intricate and false; the truth was simple.
 
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect,
But wears a stammer like a decoration:
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.
 
For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams;
But there was something else the nightmare had distorted---
Even the punishment was human and a form of love:
The howling storm had been his father's presence
And all the time he had been carried on his father's breast.
Who now had set him gently down and left him.
He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:
And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood
`All, all is vanity,' but it was not the same;
For now the words descended like the calm of mountains---
---Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish---
Reborn, he cried in exultation and surrender
`The Godhead is broken like bread.  We are the pieces.'
 
And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.
 
%

 Incantation
 Czeslaw Milosz (translated by the author and Robert Pinsky)
  
  
 Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
 No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
 No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
 It establishes the universal ideas in language,
 And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
 With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
 It puts what should be above things as they are,
 Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
 It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
 Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
 It saves austere and transparent phrases
 From the filthy discord of tortured words.
 It says that everything is new under the sun,
 Opens the congealed fist of the past.
 Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
 And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
 As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
 The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
 Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
 Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
  
%

   Did I Miss Anything?

   Tom Wayman

   Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
   we sat with our hands folded on our desks
   in silence, for the full two hours

        Everything. I gave an exam worth
        40 per cent of the grade for this term
        and assigned some reading due today
        on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
        worth 50 per cent.

   Nothing. None of the content of this course
   has value or meaning
   Take as many days off as you like:
   any activities we undertake as a class
   I assure you will not matter either to you or me
   and are without purpose

        Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
        a shaft of light descended and an angel
        or other heavenly being appeared
        and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
        to attain divine wisdom in this life and
        the hereafter
        This is the last time the class will meet
        before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
           on earth 

   Nothing. When you are not present
   how could something significant occur?

        Everything. Contained in this classroom
        is a microcosm of human existence
        assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
        This is not the only place where such an opportunity has
           been gathered

   but it was one place

   And you weren't here


%

Untitled
            
Nelly Sachs

Oblivion! Skin
out of which what is newborn is wound
and sheets for the dying
that the white sleepers
who bring it home
lend it out again.

At times on the blood's
last spit of land
the foghorn resounds
and the drowned sailor sings

or on a sandy country path 
trails of footsteps run
from labyrinths of longing
like broken snail shells
bearing emptiness on their back--

Behind the dusk
music of blackbirds

The dead dance
flower stalks of the wind--


%

An untitled poem by Ariwara no Narihira (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
 
 
I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.
 
%

That the Night come
W. B. Yeats
 
 
She lived in storm and strife,
Her soul had such desire
For what proud death may bring
That it could not endure
The common good of life,
But lived as 'twere a king
That packed his marriage day
With banneret and pennon,
Trumpet and kettledrum,
And the outrageous cannon,
To bundle time away
That the night come.
 
%

A Night-Piece on Death
Thomas Parnell
 
 
By the blue Tapers trembling Light,
No more I waste the wakeful Night,
Intent with endless view to pore
The Schoolmen and the Sages o'er:
Their Books from Wisdom widely stray,
Or point at best the longest Way.
I'll seek a readier Path, and go
Where Wisdom's surely taught below.
 
  How deep yon Azure dies the Sky!
Where Orbs of Gold unnumber'd lye,
While thro' their Ranks in silver pride
The nether Crescent seems to glide.
The slumb'ring Breeze forgets to breathe,
The Lake is smooth and clear beneath,
Where once again the spangled Show
Descends to meet our Eyes below.
The Grounds which on the right aspire,
In dimness from the View retire:
The Left presents a Place of Graves,
Whose Wall the silent Water laves.
That Steeple guides thy doubtful sight
Among the livid gleams of Night.
There pass with melancholy State,
By all the solemn Heaps of Fate,
And think, as softly-sad you tread
Above the venerable Dead,
Time was, like thee they Life possest,
And Time shall be, that thou shalt Rest.
 
  Those Graves, with bending Osier bound,
That nameless heave the crumbled Ground,
Quick to the glancing Thought disclose
Where Toil and Poverty repose.
 
  The flat smooth Stones that bear a Name,
The Chissels slender help to Fame,
(Which e'er our Sett of Friends decay
Their frequent Steps may wear away.)
A middle race of Mortals own,
Men, half ambitious, all unknown.
 
  The Marble Tombs that rise on high,
Whose Dead in vaulted Arches lye,
Whose Pillars swell with sculptur'd Stones,
Arms, Angels, Epitaphs and Bones,
These (all the poor Remains of State)
Adorn the Rich, or praise the Great;
Who while on Earth in Fame they live,
Are senseless of the Fame they give.
 
  Ha! while I gaze, pale Cynthia fades,
The bursting Earth unveils the Shades!
All slow, and wan, and wrap'd with Shrouds,
They rise in visionary Crouds,
And all with sober Accent cry,
Think, Mortal, what it is to dye.
 
  Now from yon black and fun'ral Yew,
That bathes the Charnel House with Dew,
Methinks I hear a Voice begin;
(Ye Ravens, cease your croaking Din,
Ye tolling Clocks, no Time resound
O'er the long Lake and midnight Ground)
It sends a peal of hollow Groans,
Thus speaking from among the Bones.
 
  When Men my Scythe and Darts supply,
How great a King of Fears am I!
They view me like the last of Things:
They make, and then they dread, my Stings.
Fools! if you less provok'd your Fears,
No more my Spectre-Form appears.
Death's but a Path that must be trod,
If Man wou'd ever pass to God:
A Port of Calms, a State of Ease
From the rough Rage of swelling Seas.
 
  Why then thy flowing sable Stoles,
Deep pendent Cypress, mourning Poles,
Loose Scarfs to fall athwart thy Weeds,
Long Palls, drawn Herses, cover'd Steeds,
And Plumes of black, that as they tread,
Nod o'er the 'Scutcheons of the Dead?
 
  Nor can the parted Body know,
Nor wants the Soul, these Forms of Woe:
As men who long in Prison dwell,
With Lamps that glimmer round the Cell,
When e'er their suffering Years are run,
Spring forth to greet the glitt'ring Sun:
Such Joy, tho' far transcending Sense,
Have pious Souls at parting hence.
On Earth, and in the Body plac't,
A few, and evil Years, they wast:
But when their Chains are cast aside,
See the glad Scene unfolding wide,
Clap the glad Wing and tow'r away,
And mingle with the Blaze of Day.
 
%

Night Thoughts while Traveling
Tu Fu (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
 
 
A light breeze rustles the reeds
Along the river banks.  The
Mast of my lonely boat soars
Into the night.  Stars blossom
Over the vast desert of
Waters.  Moonlight flows on the
Surging river.  My poems have
Made me famous but I grow
Old, ill and tired, blown hither
And yon; I am like a gull
Lost between heaven and earth.
 
%

The Chinese Obelisks
Edward Gorey
 
 
A was an Author who went for a walk
B was a Bore who engaged him in talk
C was a Canvas encrusted with dirt
D was a Dog who appeared to be hurt
E an Egyptian with things from a tomb
F was a Fire in a top-storey room
G was the Glove that he dropped without thinking
H was a House whose foundations were sinking
I was an Infant who clung to his sleeve
J was the Jam that he gave it to leave
K was a Keepsake picked up from the gutter
L was a Lady who peered through a shutter
M was a Muffin he bought from a tray
N was a Notice that caused him dismay
O was an Opening let in a wall
P was a Place he did not know at all
Q was the Question he asked of a stranger
R the Reply that his life was in danger
S was the Sun which went under a cloud
T was a Thunderclap horribly loud
U was the Urn it dislodged from the sky
V was its Victim who cried out `But why?'
W was the Wagon in which his life ended
X was the Exequies sparsely attended
Y was the Yew beneath which he was laid
Z was the Zither he left to the maid
 
%

   I Go Back to May 1937

   I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
   I see my father strolling out
   under the ochre sandstone arch, the
   red tiles glinting like bent
   plates of blood behind his head, I
   see my mother with a few light books at her hip
   standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
   wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
   sword-tips black in the May air,
   they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
   they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
   innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
   I want to go up to them and say Stop,
   don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
   he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
   you cannot imagine you would ever do,
   you are going to do bad things to children,
   you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
   you are going to want to die. I want to go
   up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
   her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
   her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
   his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
   his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
   but I don't do it. I want to live. I
   take them up like the male and female
   paper dolls and bang them together
   at the hips like chips of flint as if to
   strike sparks from them, I say
   Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. 

                                              --Sharon Olds
                                                      

%

The Onchosphere
Walter Garstang
 
 
The Onchosphere or Hexacanth was not designed for frolic,
His part may be described perhaps as coldly diabolic:
He's born amid some gruesome things, but this should count for virtue,
That steadily, 'gainst fearful odds, he plies his task---to hurt you!
 
He's very small, a mere pin's head, beset with six small hooklets,
Is whirled about by wind and rain through puddles, fields and brooklets;
But if a pig should swallow him, as many porkers do,
He's made a start with no mistake: he's on the road to you!
 
Again I say, don't blame the brat---he hasn't any head!
It isn't any fault of his---he wasn't painted red!
But once inside, he burrows through, and gropes his way about,
Then swells and sprouts a head at last, though this is inside out!
 
He's now a Cysticerus in the muscles of a pig,
With just a sporting chance of getting out to grow up big.
If you'll consent to eat your pork half-raw or underdone,
His troubles will be over, and a Tapeworm will have won:
He'll cast his anchors out, and on your best digested food
Will thrive, and bud an endless chain to raise a countless brood.
 
%

The Slow Pacific Swell
Yvor Winters
 
 
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more.  The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply---
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion.  The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
 
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone.  The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean.  From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
 
A landsman, I.  The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long.  The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
 
%

Phantom
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
 
All look and likeness caught from earth
All accident of kin and birth,
Had pass'd away.  There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Uprais'd beneath the rifted stone
But of one spirit all her own;---
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.
 
%

The Chicago Picasso
  August 15, 1967
Gwendolyn Brooks
 
 
                         ``Mayor Daley tugged a white ribbon, loosing the
                         blue percale wrap.  A hearty cheer went up as the
                         covering slipped off the big steel sculpture that
                         looks at once like a bird and a woman.''
                                                      ---Chicago Sun-Times
 
 
                              (Seiji Ozawa leads the Symphony.
                              The Mayor smiles.
                              And 50,000 See.)
 
Does man love Art?  Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts.  Art urges voyages---
and it is easier to stay at home,
the nice beer ready.
     In commonrooms
we belch, or sniff, or scratch.
Are raw.
 
But we must cook ourselves and style ourselves for Art, who
is a requiring courtesan.
We squirm.
We do not hug the Mona Lisa.
We
may touch or tolerate
an astounding fountain, or a horse-and-rider.
At most, another Lion.
 
Observe the tall cold of a Flower
which is as innocent and as guilty,
as meaningful and as meaningless as any
other flower in the western field.
 
%

View of a Pig
Ted Hughes
 
 
The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.
 
Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.
 
I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels guilty insulting the dead,
Walking on graves.  But this pig
Did not seem able to accuse.
 
It was too dead.  Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.
 
Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false start, and off the point.
 
Too deadly factual.  Its weight
Oppressed me---how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up!
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.
 
Once I ran a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
Its squeal was the rending of metal.
 
Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse's---
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.
 
Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished with.
I stared at it a long time.  They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.
 

%

Places, Loved Ones
Philip Larkin
 
 
No, I have never found
The place where I could say
"This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;"
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;
 
To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it's not your fault
Should the town turn dreary,
The girl a dolt.
 
Yet, having missed them, you're
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.
 
%

A Plodding Student
John Earle
 
 
Is a kind of Alchemist or persecutor of nature, that would change the
dull lead of his brain into finer metal, with success many times as
unprosperous, or at least not quitting the cost, to wit, of his own
oil and candles.  He has a strange forced appetite to learning, and
to achieve it brings nothing but patience and a body.  His study is
not great but continual, and consists much in the sitting up till
after midnight in a rug gown and a night-cap, to the vanquishing perhaps
of some six lines; yet what he has, he has perfect, for he reads
it so long to understand it, till he gets it without book.  He may with
much industry make a breach into Logic, and arrive at some ability in
an argument; but for politer studies he dare not skirmish with them, and
for Poetry accounts it impregnable.  His invention is no more than the
finding out of his papers, and his few gleanings there; and his
disposition of them is as just as the book-binder's, a setting or gluing
of them together.  He is a great discomforter of young students, by
telling them what travail it has cost him, and how often his brain
turned at philosophy, and makes others fear studying as a cause of
duncery.  He is a man much given to apothegms which serve him for wit,
and seldom breaks any jest but which belonged to some Lacedaimonian
or Roman in Lycosthenes.  He is like a dull carrier's horse, that will
go a whole week together, but never out of a foot-pace; and he that
sets forth on the Saturday shall overtake him.
 
%

A Plum
Mani Leyb (translated by John Hollander)
 
 
In the cool evening, the good provider plucked
From off a tree a fully ripened plum,
Still with its leaf on, and bit into some
Of its dewy, blue skin.  From there, unlocked,
 
The long-slumbering juice came leaping up,
Foaming and cool.  In order to make use
Of every single drop of all that juice,
Slowly, as one walks bearing a full cup
 
Of wine, he brought a double handful of plum
To his wife, and gently raised it to her mouth,
Whereupon she could lovingly begin---
 
"Thanks," she said---to gnaw the plum from out
Of his hands, until those hands held only skin,
And pit, and flecks of overbrimming foam.
 
%

Last of the Poet's Car
Tony Connor
 
 
The end came as I drove it down the road
that leads off this one.
                          The chassis broke with a clang,
pitching the rear suspension on the near side
on to the ground, where it dragged for a moment or two
until I was able to stop.
                           I drove home
somehow.  It stood there in the drive looking
alright---like a poem seen in a magazine
that looks alright although you read it yesterday
and know that it's crap.
                          I had to force myself
to ring the breaker, who came and towed it away,
giving in exchange five pound notes
which I took to town and spent on books of verse.
 
What debts are owed to Life by Art and vice-
versa, I thought as I placed the books upon
the shelf, remembering how I bought the car
with dollars I earned from the sale of love poems.
 
%

When I Reached the Post Station at Kaya, I Was Moved to Tears
Sugawara no Michizane (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
Last year my old friend, His Excellency Wang,
in the post house tower gripped my hand, wept when we parted.
Arriving, I inquire of the official in charge;
``Some time ago,'' he answers, ``---that little grave there.''
 
%

A Prize Riddle on Herself when 24
Elizabeth Frances Amherst
 
 
I'm a strange composition as e'er was in nature,
Being wondrously studious and yet a great prater.
Retirement and quiet I love beyond measure,
Yet always am ready for parties of pleasure.
I can cry till I laugh, or laugh till I cry,
Yet few have a temper more equal than I.
  My shape is but clumsy, I see it and know it,
Yet always am dancing and skipping to show it.
My visage is round, just the shape of a bowl,
With a great pair of grey eyes resembling an owl.
My nose and my mouth are none of the least,
Though one serves me to smell and the other to taste.
  What I gain in these features makes up for no chin,
But here's my misfortune, my smile's a broad grin.
My temper is rather addicted to satire,
And yet, without vanity, fraught with good nature.
My friends I can laugh at, but most at myself.
I've no inclination for titles or pelf;
And this I can vouch for, believe me or nay,
To my friend's my own interest does always give sway.
  I really am cleanly, but yet my discourse,
If you're squeamish, may make you as sick as a horse.
Without any voice, I can sing you a song,
And though I grow old, I shall always be young.
I put on assurance, though nat'rally shy,
And most people love me, though none can tell why.
I'm not yet disposed of: come bid for a blessing,
For those who first guess me shall have me for guessing.
 
%


A Full Professor
Howard Nemerov
 
 
Surely there was, at first, some love of letters
To get him started on the routine climb
That brought him to this eminence in time?
But now he has become one of his betters.
 
He has survived, and even fattened on,
The dissertation and the discipline.
The eyes are spectacled, the hair is thin,
He is a dangerous committeeman.
 
An organism highly specialized,
He diets on, for daily bill of fare,
The blood of Keats, the mind of poor John Clare;
Within his range, he cannot be surprised.
 
Publish or perish!  What a frightful chance!
It troubled him through all his early days.
But now he has the system beat both ways;
He publishes and perishes at once.
 

%

The Railway Children

Seamus Heaney

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled 

We could stream through the eye of a needle.


%

A Ransom Note
James Richardson

Do not call
anyone, for who deserves
to be believed, and haven't you,
since the roads one October blazed and
fell from their destinations, been trying to explain
what was taken from you? No, do not
call.

Do not
try to deceive us. Valises
angular with gems, bricks of unmarked bills,
will never do. What it hurts
to give is our demand--
what no one wants but you,
who least of all believe 
in your own pernicious conterfeit of pain.

Do not take
us lightly; do not
be tempted that way, for we know
the face that almost surfaces
in your most paralytic dreams, the cause
of certain early frosts, the rising edge
in someone's voice, shadows
across innumerable lives, more darkness
than you would at first believe--
we will show you over and over how it is you.
Do not take us lightly.

Do not hurry, for in
no time, as they say, we
will have our due.
Kneeling, shred your days
in flame. Heap up,
with extravagant denial, the ransom.
Though of course it is you we have and it's over
no matter what you bring.


%

The Rat
W. H. Davies
 
 
"That woman there is almost dead,
Her feet and hands like heavy lead;
Her cat's gone out for his delight,
He will not come again this night.
 
"Her husband in a pothouse drinks,
Her daughter at a soldier winks;
Her son is at his sweetest game,
Teasing the cobbler old and lame.
 
"Now with these teeth that powder stones,
I'll pick at one of her cheek-bones:
When husband, son and daughter come,
They'll soon see who was left at home."
 
%

ted hughes

   Relic

   I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
   There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
   To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
   Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
   In that darkness cameraderie does not hold:
   Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,
   Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
   Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
   Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
   This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
   Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

   Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
   Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
   That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
   In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
   But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.
 
%

Richard Cory
Edwin Arlington Robinson
 
 
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
 
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
 
And he was rich---yes, richer than a king---
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
 
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
 
%

Night on the ``River Queen''
  Palm Sunday, 1865
John Burt
 
 
``Play `Dixie','' he had said, and as the band
Puffed gamely through a tune that once again
They might feel free to like, he saw them turn,
The knot of prisoners beyond the crowd,
The moldy hardtack in their hands, inert.
Poor boys, he thought, and watched them watching him.
And further back, where Richmond was, steam rose
From broken chimneys and from piles of brick.
 
At last the ship wheezed back into the James
And scooped the muddy current like a teal.
He read aloud: ``Duncan is in his grave.
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.''
But later dreamed, again, he sailed alone,
Swiftly, silently, through dark and fog.
 
%

   Ronald Wallace

   I know that the gold in this ring
   is the offspring of the explosion
   of some dark star ten billion years ago
   when the atoms went shimmering off on
   their long voyage that would pause here
   to flicker on your finger as if
   it were somehow substantial, and not
   just a casual addition of electrons

   in a probably indifferent emptiness.
   What theory is there to explain us?
   How we accelerate through our half-lives
   toward these moments of exquisite collision,
   making what new particles visible
   to the most untutored, elementary eye?
 
%

Charlotte Mew

Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide--
Rooms where for good or for ill--things died.
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem 
   to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun--in the rain.




%

   Muriel Rukeyser

   The fear of poetry is the
   fear: mystery and fury of a midnight street
   of windows whose low voluptuous voice
   issues, and after that there is no peace.

   The round waiting moment in the 
   theatre: curtain rises, dies into the ceiling
   and here is played the scene with the mother
   bandaging a revealed son's head. The bandage is torn off.
   Curtain goes down. And here is the moment of proof.

   The climax when the brain acknowledges the world,
   all values extended into the blood awake.
   Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did,
   building his bird to extend through soaring air,
   as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity
   through time extended. And the climax strikes.

   Love touches so, that months after the look of
   blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart
   is translated into the pure cry of birds
   following air-cries, or poems, the new scene.
   Moment of proof. That strikes long after act.

   They fear it. They turn away, hand up palm out
   fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem.
   The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's shot.
   The prolonged love after the look is dead,
   the yellow joy after the song of the sun.

   
-- 
%

The Rural Lass
Catherine Jemmat
 
 
My father and mother (what ails 'em?)
  Pretend I'm too young to be wed;
They expect, but in troth I shall fail 'em,
  That I finish my chairs and my bed.
 
Provided our minds are but cheery,
  Wooden chairs wonnot argue a glove,
Any bed will hold me and my deary,
  The main chance in wedlock is love.
 
My father, when asked if he'd lend us
  An horse to the parson to ride,
In a wheel-barrow offered to send us,
  And John for the footman beside.
 
Would we never had asked him, for, whip it!
  To the church through two miles and a half,
Twice as far 'twere a pleasure to trip it;
  But then how the people would laugh!
 
The neighbours are nettled most sadly,
  `Was e'er such a forward bold thing!
Sure never girl acted so madly!'
  Through the parish these backbitings ring.
 
Yet I will be married tomorrow,
  And charming young Harry's the man;
My brother's blind nag we can borrow,
  And he may prevent us that can.
 
Not waiting for parents' consenting,
  My brother took Nell of the Green,
Yet both, far enough from repenting,
  Now live like a king and a queen.
 
Pray when will your gay things of London
  Produce such a strapper as Nell's?
There wives by their husbands are undone,
  As Saturday's newspaper tells.
 
Poll Barnley said, over and over,
  I soon should be left in the lurch;
For Harry, she knows, was a rover,
  And never would venture to church.
 
And I know the sorrows that wound her;
  He courted her once, he confessed:
With another too great when he found her,
  He bid her take him she liked best.
 
But all that are like her, or would be,
  May learn from my Harry and me,
If maids would be maids while they should be,
  How faithful their sweethearts would be.
 
My mother says clothing and feeding
  Will soon make me sick of a brat:
But though I prove sick in my breeding,
  I care not a farthing for that.
 
For if I'm not hugely mistaken,
  We can live by the sweat of our brow,
Stick a hog, once a year, for fat bacon,
  And all the year round keep a cow.
 
I value no dainties a button,
  Coarse food will our stomachs allay;
If we cannot get veal, beef and mutton,
  A chine and a pudding we may.
 
A fig for your richest brocading;
  In linsey there's nothing that's base;
Your finery soon sets a-fading,
  My dowlas will last beyond lace.
 
I envy not wealth to the miser,
  Nor would I be plagued with his store:
To eat all and wear all is wiser;
  Enough must be better than more.
 
So nothing shall tempt me from Harry,
  His heart is as true as the sun:
Eve with Adam was ordered to marry;
  This world it should end as begun.
 
%

Santa Claus: in a department store
Christopher Hassall
 
 
Wolsey, or possibly my John of Gaunt,
Was the best thing I did.  Come over here,
Behind the Christmas crib.  (I'm not supposed
To let the children see me having tea.)
To tell the truth I'm glad of this engagement.
Dozens applied, but all they said was Thank you,
We'll stick to Mr. Borthwick.
It's nice to feel one has given satisfaction.
Time was I had it all at my finger-tips,
Could plant a whisper in the back of the pit,
Or hold them breathless with the authority
Of absolute repose---a skill despised,
Not seen, in your day.  It amounts to this:
Technique's no more than the bare bones.  There are some
Unwittingly instil the faith that Man
Is greater than he knows.  This I fell short of.
  You never met my wife.  You are too young.
She often came with me on tour.  One night
At Nottingham, got back from the show, and there
She was.  I knew at once what made her do it.
She had resented me for years.  No, not
Myself, but what she knew was in me, my
Belief in---Sir, forgive me if I say
My "art", for I had shown, you'll understand,
Some promise.  To use her word, she felt herself
"Usurped", and by degrees, unconsciously,
She managed somehow to diminish me,
Parch all my vital streams.  A look would do it.
I was a kind of shrunken river-bed
Littered with tins, old tyres, and bicycle frames.
 
  Well, that was years ago, and by then too late
To start afresh.  Yet all the while I loved her.
Explain that if you can...  By all means, madam,
Those clocks are very popular this year.
I'll call the man in charge.  No, there's no risk
Of damage.  They pack the cuckoo separately.
 
%

   Same Title As Before

   Robert Hershon

   Hand me those nails, I'm going
   to repair this broken cup  Hand me
   those nails, I'm going to mend the sparrow's
   wing  Hand me those nails, I'm going to stop
   the fire door from blowing in the breeze
   Experience suggests that if I am given
   the same problem twenty years later
   I will devise the same solution I did
   twenty years before (Hand me those nails,
   I'm going to mark my place
   in this book of dreams)
                         Does this mean that I refuse
   to learn anything at all or that I
   have a splendid storehouse in my unconscious
   filled with the ingenious answers
   of yesteryear? I favor the latter view
   but it's also true that
   if I screwed it up twenty years ago
   I'll probably screw it up again
   Let me just 
   plunge these nails into these wires
   and cut off the outside world

%

Memoir of Sergei O...
Frank O'Hara
 
 
My feet have never been comfortable
since I pulled them out of the Black Sea
and came to your foul country
what fatal day did I dry them off for
travel loathsome travel to a world
even older than the one I grew up in
what fatal day meanwhile back in France
they were stumbling towards the Bastille
and the Princesse de Lamballe was
shuddering as shudderingly as I
with a lot less to lose I still hated
to move sedentary as a roach of Tiflis
never again to go swimming in the nude
publicly little did I know how
awfulness could reach perfection abroad
I even thought I would see a Red Indian
all I saw was lipstick everything cov-
ered with grass or shrouds pretty
shrouds shot with silver and plasma
even the chairs are upholstered to a
smothering perfection of inanity
and there are no chandeliers and there
are no gates to the parks so you don't
know whether you're going in them or
coming out of them that's not relaxing
and so you can't really walk all you can
do is sit and drink coffee and brood
over the lost leaves and refreshing scum
of Georgia Georgia of my heritage
and dismay meanwhile back in my old
country they are renaming everything so
I can't even tell any more which ballet
company I am remembering with so much
pain and the same thing has started
here American Avenue Park Avenue South
Avenue of Chester Conklin Binnie Barnes
Boulevard Avenue of Toby Wing Barbara
Nichols Street where am I what is it
I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious
you are ruining your awful country and me
it is not new to do this it is terribly
democratic and ordinary and tired
 
%

The Song of Shadows
Walter de la Mare
 
 
Sweep thy faint strings, Musician,
  With thy long lean hand;
Downward the starry tapers burn,
  Sinks soft the waning sand;
The old hound whimpers couched in sleep,
  The embers smoulder low;
Across the walls the shadows
    Come, and go.
 
Sweep softly thy strings, Musician,
  The minutes mount to hours;
Frost on the windless casement weaves
  A labyrinth of flowers;
Ghosts linger in the darkening air,
  Hearken at the open door;
Music hath called them, dreaming,
    Home once more.
 
%

Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis
Robert Browning
 
 
Plague take all your pedants, say I!
  He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
  Leaving this rubbish to cumber the land;
This, that was a book in its time,
  Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime
  Just when the birds sang all together.
 
Into the garden I brought it to read,
  And under the arbuste and laurustine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
  From title-page to closing line.
Chapter on chapter did I count,
  As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
Added up the mortal amount;
  And then proceeded to my revenge.
 
Yonder's a plum-tree with a crevice
  An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
  In a castle of the Middle Age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
  When he'd be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady's chamber:
  Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
 
Splash, went he, as under he ducked,
  ---At the bottom, I knew, rain-drippings stagnate:
Next, a handful of blossoms I plucked
  To bury him with, my bookshelf's magnate;
Then I went indoors, brought out a loaf,
  Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis;
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
  Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.
 
Now, this morning, betwixt the moss
  And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
A spider had spun his web across,
  And sat in the midst with arms akimbo:
So, I took pity, for learning's sake,
  And, ``de profundis, accentibus laetis,
Cantate!'' quoth I, as I got a rake;
  And up I fished his delectable treatise.
 
Here you have it, dry in the sun,
  With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
  And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O'er the page so beautifully yellow:
  Oh, well have the droppings played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow?
  Here's one stuck in his chapter six!
 
How did he like it when the live creatures
  Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
  Came in, each one, for his right of trover?
---When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
  Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
  As tiled in the top of his black wife's closet?
 
All that life and fun and romping,
  All that frisking and twisting and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping
  And clasps were cracking and covers suppling!
As if you had carried sour John Knox
  To the play-house at Paris, Vienna or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
  And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.
 
Come, old martyr!  What, torment enough is it?
  Back to my room you shall take your sweet self.
Good-bye, mother beetle; husband-eft, sufficit!
  See the snug niche I have made on my shelf!
A.'s book shall prop you up, B.'s shall cover you,
  Here's C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay,
And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,
  Dry-rot at ease till the Judgement-day!
 
%

Six Years Later
Joseph Brodsky (translated by Richard Wilbur)
 
 
So long had life together been that now
the second of January fell again
on Tuesday, making her astonished brow
lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
     so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
     a cloudless distance waiting up the road.
 
So long had life together been that once
the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
     not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
     would beat against my palm like butterflies.
 
So alien had all novelty become
that sleep's entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
     her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
     to join my own, without another thought.
 
So long had life together been that all
that tattered brood of papered roses went,
and a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
and we had money, by some accident,
     and tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
     the sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.
 
So long had life together been without
books, chairs, utensils --- only that ancient bed ---
that the triangle, before it came about,
had been a perpendicular, the head
     of some acquaintance hovering above
     two points which had been coalesced by love.
 
So long had life together been that she
and I, with our joint shadows, had composed
a double door, a door which, even if we
were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
     somehow its halves were split and we went right
     through them into the future, into night.
 
%

The Snoring Bedmate
Anonymous Irish poet (adapted by John V. Kelleher)
 
 
You thunder at my side,
Lad of ceaseless hum;
There's not a saint would chide
My prayer that you were dumb.
 
The dead start from the tomb
With each blare from your nose.
I suffer, with less room,
Under these bedclothes.
 
Which could I better bide
Since my head's already broke---
Your pipe-drone at my side,
Woodpecker's drill on oak?
 
Brass scraped with knicky knives,
A cowbell's tinny clank,
Or the yells of tinkers' wives
Giving birth behind a bank?
 
A drunken, braying clown
Slapping cards down on a board
Were less easy to disown
Than the softest snore you've snored.
 
Sweeter the grunts of swine
Than yours that win release.
Sweeter, bedmate mine,
The screech of grieving geese.
 
A sick calf's moan for aid,
A broken mill's mad clatter,
The snarl of flood cascade...
Christ! now what's the matter?
 
That was a ghastly growl!
What signified that twist?---
An old wolf's famished howl,
Wave-boom at some cliff's breast?
 
Storm screaming round a crag,
Bellow of raging bull,
Hoarse bell of rutting stag,
Compared with this were lull!
 
Ah, now a gentler fall---
Bark of a crazy hound?
Brats squabbling for a ball?
Ducks squawking on a pond?
 
No, rough weather's back again.
Some great ship's about to sink
And roaring bursts the main
Over the bulwark's brink!
 
Farewell, tonight, to sleep.
Every gust across the bed
Makes hair rise and poor flesh creep.
Would that one of us were dead!
 
%
 
Snowdrop 

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse's dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

                   --Ted Hughes


%

To a Snowflake
Francis Thompson
 
 
What heart could have thought you?---
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapour?---
`God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered, He wrought me,
From curled silver vapour,
To lust of His mind:---
Thou could'st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.'
 
%

On Squaw Peak
Haas

I don't even know which sadness
it was came up
in me when we were walking down the road to Shirley Lake,
the sun gleaming in snowpatches,
the sky so blue it seemed the light's dove
of some pentecost of blue,
the mimulus, yellow, delicate of petal,
and the pale yellow cinquefoil trembling in the damp
air above the creek,--
and fields of lupine, a swath of paintbrush
sheening it, and so much of it, long meadows
of it gathered out of the mountain air and spilling
down ridge toward the lake it almost looked like
in the wind. I think I must have thought
the usual things: that the flowering season
in these high mountain meadows is so brief, that
the feeling, something like hilarity, of sudden
pleasure when you first come across some tough little plant
you knew you'd see comes because it seems--I mean
by "it" the larkspur of penstemon curling    
arching the reach of its sexual being
up out of a little crack in granite--to say
that human hunger has a niche up here in the light-cathedral
of the dazzled air. I wanted to tell you
that when the ghost-child died, the three-month dreamer
she and I would never know, I kept feeling that
the heaven it went to was like the inside of a store window
on a rainy day from which you watch the blurred forms
passing in the street. Or to tell you, more terrible,
that when she and I walked off the restlessness
of our misery afterward in the Coast Range hills,
we saw come out of the thicket shyly
a pure white doe. I wanted to tell you I knew
it was a freak of beauty like the law of averages
that killed our child and made us know, as you had said,
that things between lovers, even of longest standing,
can be botched in their bodies, though their wills don't fail.
Still later, on the beach, we watched the waves.
No two the same size. No two in the same arch
of rising up and pouring. But it is the same law.
You shell a pea, there are three plump seeds and one
that's shriveled. You shell a bushelful and you begin
to feel the rhythm of the waves at Limantour,
glittering, jagged, that last bright October afternoon.
It killed something in me, I thought, or froze it,
to have to see where beauty comes from. I imagined
for a long time that the baby, since
it would have liked to smell our clothes to know
what a mother and father would have been,
hovered sometime in our closet and I half expected
to see it there, half-fish spirit, form of tenderness,
a little dead dreamer with open eyes. That was
private sorrow. I tried not to hate my life,
to fear the frame of things. I knew what two people
couldn't say
on a cold November morning in the fog--
you remember the feel of Berkeley winter mornings--
what they couldn't say to each other 
was the white deer not seen. It meant to me
that beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully
and went so deep that any kind of love
can fail. I didn't say it. I think the mountain startled
my small grief. Maybe there wasn't time.
We may have been sprinting to catch the tram
because we had to teach poetry 
in that valley two thousand feet below us.
You were running--Steven's mother, Michael's lover,
mother and lover, grieving, of a girl
about to leave for school and die to you a little
(or die into you, or simply turn away)--
and you ran like a gazelle,
in purple underpants, royal purple,
and I laughed out loud. It was the abundance
the world gives, the more-than-you-bargained-for
surprise of it, waves breaking,
the sudden fragarance of the mimulus at creekside
sharpended by the summer dust.
Things bloom up there, They are
for their season alive in the bright vanishings
of air we ran through.


%

   Louis MacNeice


   Star-Gazer

   Forty-two years ago(to me if to no one else
   The number is of some interest)it was a brilliant starry night
   And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
   So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
   Of those almost intolerably bright
   Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
   Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the
    textbooks
   How very far off they were, it seemed their light
   Had left them(some at least)long years before I was.

   And this remembering now I mark that what
   Light was leaving some of them at least then,
   Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
   In time for me to catch it, which light when
   It does get here may find that there is not
   Anyone left alive
   To run from side to side in a late night train
   Admiring and adding noughts in vain.

%

Star-Winds ("Fungi from Yuggoth", XIV)
H. P. Lovecraft
 
 
It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,
Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,
But showing early lamplight from snug rooms.
The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,
And chimney-smoke whirls around with alien grace
Heeding geometries of outer space,
While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.
 
This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!
 
%

Meditation on Statistical Method
J. V. Cunningham
 
 
 
Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,
 
How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And errors slight;
 
But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.
 
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.
 
%


   Steelhead

   Joan Swift

   Because they flicker like stars of the twelfth magnitude
   and have come all the way from the Bering Sea
   through the Gulf of Alaska up to the glacier-grey water
   of the Copper River and then curved their backs to the plunge
   of the Hanagita where they rest now, or have fallen
   half conscious into the small green pool
   fringed with spruces and scrub grass, you may think
   they know something about endurance. Loneliness. Hope.
   Or even birth and rebirth, their journey's reason.
   When I stand with my shadow across the water
   they are almost visible, finning in the place of my heart.
   Then we bait our hooks and cast, lines floating out
   toward the Wrangells, lures settling into the ripples
   and riding downstream on a slant of September sunlight.
   We do this one by one and one by one they wake up
   to the transparent insect wing or the blackness
   of raven down or the sweet round salmon egg.
   They rise, are taken, and thrash--the bubbles silver,
   the clouds of foam, hard runs over the gravel bottom.
   All afternoon they are hooked and we let them go,
   the same stunned fish over and over. We let them go.
   Like all who desire and desire, they know nothing.

   
%

Adrienne Rich

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned     
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on     
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements    
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an 
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match t
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.



%

The Rainy Summer
Alice Meynell
 
 
There's much afoot in heaven and earth this year;
  The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon,
Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear
  Height of a threatening noon.
 
No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,
  May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud;
The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,
  And strains against the cloud.
 
No scents may pause within the garden-fold;
  The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells;
Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold
  Wild honey to cold cells.
 
%

The Great Fire of Takaoka
Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth)
 
 
 
   Twenty thousand people
Without a home;
   The summer moon.
 
 
%

In the unending tedium...
Paul Verlaine (translated by Muriel Kittel)
 
 
In the unending
Tedium of the plain
The uncertain snow
Gleams like sand.
 
The copper sky
Has no light at all,
You think you can see
The moon live and die.
 
Like clouds the oaks
Of nearby forests
Are gray, and float
Among the mists.
 
The copper sky
Has no light at all,
You think you can see
The moon live and die.
 
Broken-winded crow
And you, gaunt wolves,
What happens to you
In these harsh winds?
 
In the unending
Tedium of the plain
The uncertain snow
Gleams like sand.
 
 
%

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Wallace Stevens
 
 
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
 
%

   Thanksgiving Prayer

   William S. Burroughs

   Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
   Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
   Thanks for vast hordes of bison to kill and skin, leaving the
     carcasses to rot.
   Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
   Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the
     bare lies shine through.
   Thanks for the KKK.
   For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
   For decent, church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter,
     evil faces.
   Thanks for "Kill A Queer For Christ" stickers.
   Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
   Thanks for prohibition and the war against drugs.
   Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own
     business.
   Thanks for a nation of finks.
   Yes, thanks for all the memories--all right, let's see your arms!
   You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
   Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest
     of human dreams.

%

The Cat
Guillaume Apollinaire (translated by Pepe Karmel)
 
 
In my house I want:
A reasonable woman,
A cat passing among the books,
And friends in every season,
Whom I cannot live without.
 
%

W.S. Merwin

The P

It is twenty years
since I first looked for words
for me now
whose wisdom or something would stay me
I chose to
trouble myself about the onset
of this
it was remote it was grievous
it is true I was still a child

I was older then
than I hope ever to be again
that summer sweating in the attic
in the foreign country
high above the piper but hearing him
once
and never moving from my book
and the narrow
house full of pregnant women
floor above floor
waiting 
in that city
where the sun was the one bell

It has taken me til now
to be able to say
even this
it has taken me this long
to know what I cannot say
where it begins
like the names of the hungry

Beginning
I am here
please
be ready to teach me
I am almost ready to learn

%

Thinking of My Wife
P'an Yueh (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
Alone in my sorrow, where do my thoughts go?
Man's life is like the morning dew.
Wandering in distant provinces,
fondly, tenderly I call up the past.
Your love follows me even here;
my heart too turns back in longing.
Though our bodies are parted and cannot touch,
our spirits join at journey's midpoint.
Have you never seen the hilltop pine,
how even in winter it keeps the same hue?
Have you never seen the knoll and valley cypresses,
in year-end cold, guarding their constant green?
Don't say it is my wish that parts us;
far away, my love grows stronger still.
 
%

Thirty Bob a Week
John Davidson
 
 
I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw,
  And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth---I hope, like you---
  On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
  I'm a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.
 
But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss;
  There's no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It's just the power of some to be a boss,
  And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur;
  Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!
 
For like a mole I journey in the dark,
  A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar'd Halls and broad Suburbean Park,
  To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
  A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.
 
And it's often very cold and very wet,
  And my missis stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let---
  Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
  When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
 
But you never hear her do a growl or whine,
  For she's made of flint and roses, very odd;
And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine,
  Or I'd blubber, for I'm made of greens and sod:
So p'r'aps we are in Hell for all that I can tell,
  And lost and damn'd and served up hot to God.
 
I ain't blaspheming, Mr Silver-tongue;
  I'm saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung,
  Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks,
  Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?
 
I didn't mean your pocket, Mr, no:
  I mean that having children and a wife,
With thirty bob on which to come and go,
  Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife:
When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven! it makes you think,
  And notice curious items about life.
 
I step into my heart and there I meet
  A god-almighty devil singing small,
Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
  And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
  He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.
 
And I meet a sort of simpleton beside,
  The kind that life is always giving beans;
With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
  He fell in love and married in his teens:
At thirty bob he stuck; but he knows it isn't luck:
  He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.
 
And the god-almighty devil and the fool
  That meet me in the High Street on the strike,
When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
  Are my good and evil angels if you like.
And both of them together in every kind of weather
  Ride me like a double-seated bike.
 
That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled.
  But I have a high old hot un in my mind---
A most engrugious notion of the world,
  That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind:
I give it at a glance when I say `There ain't no chance,
  Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind.'
 
And it's this way that I make it out to be:
  No fathers, mothers, countries, climates---none;
No Adam was responsible for me,
  Nor society, nor systems, nary one:
A little sleeping seed, I woke---I did, indeed---
  A million years before the blooming sun.
 
I woke because I thought the time had come;
  Beyond my will there was no other cause;
And everywhere I found myself at home,
  Because I chose to be the thing I was;
And in whatever shape of mollusc or of ape
  I always went according to the laws.
 
I was the love that chose my mother out;
  I joined two lives and from the union burst;
My weakness and my strength without a doubt
  Are mine alone for ever from the first:
It's just the very same with a difference in the name
  As `Thy will be done.'  You say it if you durst!
 
They say it daily up and down the land
  As easy as you take a drink, it's true;
But the difficultest go to understand,
  And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
  And feel that that's the proper thing for you.
 
It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;
  It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It's walking on a string across a gulf
  With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
  And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
 
%

An untitled poem by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
 
 
But man finds means, grant him but place and room,
To gauge the depths and views a wonder dawn,
Sees all the worlds in utmost space withdrawn
In shape and structure like a honeycomb,
Locates his sun and grasps the universe
Or to their bearings bids the orbs disperse;
Now seems to stand like that great angel girt
With moon and stars: now, sick for shelter even,
Craves but a roof to turn the thunder-rain---
Or finds his vaunted reach and wisdom vain,
Lost in the myriad meaning of a word,
Or starts at its bare import, panic-stirred:
For earth is earth or hearth or dearth or dirt,
The sky heaved over our faint heads is heaven.
 
%

A. Velischansky

The flame's speech is confused.  The muttering of the water is hollow.
How many ingenuous secrets would we hear,
if warmth had words and moisture were filled with sense--
but their revelations are only the flood, or conflagration.

%

The Ballad of the Veliger, or How the Gastropod got its Twist
Walter Garstang
 
 
The Veliger's a lively tar, the liveliest afloat,
A whirling wheel on either side propels his little boat;
But when the danger signal warns his bustling submarine,
He stops the engine, shuts the port, and drops below unseen.
 
He's witnessed several changes in pelagic motor-craft;
The first he sailed was just a tub, with a tiny cabin aft.
An Archi-mollusk fashioned it, according to his kind,
He'd always stowed his gills and things in a mantle-sac behind.
 
Young Archi-mollusks went to sea with nothing but a velum---
A sort of autocycling hoop, instead of pram---to wheel 'em;
And, spinning round, they one by one acquired parental features,
A shell above, a foot below---the queerest little creatures.
 
But when by chance they brushed against their neighbours in the briny,
Coelenterates with stinging threads and Arthropods so spiny,
By one weak spot betrayed, alas, they fell an easy prey---
Their soft preoral lobes in front could not be tucked away!
 
Their feet, you see, amidships, next the cuddy-hole abaft,
Drew in at once, and left their heads exposed to every shaft.
So Archi-mollusks dwindled, and the race was sinking fast,
When by the merest accident salvation came at last.
 
A fleet of fry turned out one day, eventful in the sequel,
Whose left and right retractors on the two sides were unequal:
Their starboard halliards fixed astern alone supplied the head,
While those set aport were spread abeam and served the back instead.
 
Predaceous foes, still drifting by in numbers unabated,
Were baffled now by tactics which their dining plans frustrated.
Their prey upon alarm collapsed, but promptly turned about,
With the tender morsel safe within and the horny foot without!
 
This manoeuvre (vide Lamarck) speeded up with repetition,
Until the parts affected gained a rhythmical condition,
And torsion, needing now no more a stimulating stab,
Will take its predetermined course in a watchglass in the lab.
 
In this way, then, the Veliger, triumphantly askew,
Acquired his cabin for'ard, holding all his sailing crew---
A Trochosphere in armour cased, with a foot to work the hatch,
And double screws to drive ahead with smartness and despatch.
 
But when the first new Veligers came home again to shore,
And settled down as Gastropods with mantle-sac afore,
The Archi-mollusk sought a cleft his shame and grief to hide,
Crunched horribly his horny teeth, gave up the ghost, and died.
 
%

The Voyage
Ted Hughes


Without hope my words and looks
Toward you, to claim
Neither known face nor held name--
Death-bed, book might keep those. The whole sea's

Accumulations and changes
Are the sea. The sea's elsewhere
Than surrenders to sand and rocks,
Other than men taste who drown out there.


%

Wedlock. A Satire
Hetty Wright
 
 
Thou tyrant, whom I will not name,
Whom heaven and hell alike disclaim;
Abhorred and shunned, for different ends,
By angels, Jesuits, beasts and fiends!
What terms to curse thee shall I find,
Thou plague peculiar to mankind?
O may my verse excel in spite
The wiliest, wittiest imps of night!
Then lend me for a while your rage,
You maidens old and matrons sage:
So may my terms in railing seem
As vile and hateful as my theme.
  Eternal foe to soft desires,
Inflamer of forbidden fires,
Thou source of discord, pain and care,
Thou sure forerunner of despair,
Thou scorpion with a double face,
Thou lawful plague of human race,
Thou bane of freedom, ease and mirth,
Thou deep damnation upon earth,
Thou serpent which the angels fly,
Thou monster whom the beasts defy,
Whom wily Jesuits sneer at too;
And Satan (let him have his due)
Was never so confirmed a dunce
To risk damnation more than once.
That wretch, if such a wretch there be,
Who hopes for happiness from thee,
May search successfully as well
For truth in whores and ease in hell.
 
%

The Well Dressed Man with a Beard
Wallace Stevens
 
 
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night.  Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough.  Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
 
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
 
%

The Custodian of a Field of Whisky Bushes
  By the Nolichucky River Speaks
Jonathan Williams
 
 
took me a pecka real ripe tomaters up
into the Grassy Gap
one night
 
and two quarts of good stockade
and just laid there
 
sippin and tastin and lookin agin the moon
at them sort of fish eyes in the jar
you get when its right
 
boys Im talkin bout somethin
good
 

%

Ted Hughes

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Til day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. I dared once to look up--
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap:
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

%

A Christmas Ballad
Joseph Brodsky (translated by George L. Kline)
 
 
In anguish unaccountable
the steady ship that burns at dark,
the small shy streetlamp of the night,
floats out of Alexander Park
in the exhaustion of dull bricks.
Like a pale-yellow, tiny rose,
it drifts along, past lovers' heads
and walkers' feet.
 
In anguish unaccountable
sleep-walkers, drunkards, float like bees.
A stranger sadly snaps a shot
of the metropolis by night;
a cab with squeamish passengers
jolts loudly to Ordynka Street,
and dead men stand in close embrace
with private homes.
 
In anguish unaccountable
a melancholy poet swims
along the town.  Beside a shop
for kerosene, a porter stands,
round-faced and sad.  A ladies' man,
now old, lopes down a dingy street.
A midnight wedding party sways
in anguish unaccountable.
 
On Moscow's murky south-side streets
a random swimmer sadly floats.
A Jewish accent wanders down
a yellowed melancholy stair.
A fragile beauty swims alone
from New Year's Eve to Saturday,
exchanging love for bitterness,
unable to explain her grief.
 
The chilly evening floats above
our eyes; two trembling snowflakes strike
the bus.  A pale and numbing wind
slaps reddened hands.  The honey-gold
of evening-lamps flows out; a scent
of halvah fills the air.  The Eve
of Christmas holds the pie of heaven
above its head.
 
Your New Year's Day floats on a wave,
within the city's purple sea,
in anguish unaccountable---
as though life will begin anew,
and we will live in fame and light
with sure success and bread to spare;
as though, from lurching to the left,
life will swing right.
 
%

The Zeppelin Watchers
  (New Haven, 1918)
John Burt
 
 
At first we saw in every cloud
The coming Huns, and when the light
Came to us from the yet unrisen moon
We ran to stations to fend off
A German fleet.  Now we watch
The railyards rust, and play
Card games which never end.
Every day we practice aiming the big guns.
They crouch like insects basking in the sun.
In front of us, where the wind
Comes rushing up the cliff
The sparrow-hawks are circling
Like a squadron gone to sleep.
Sometimes, for lack of Zeppelins,
We shoot at them.  Other times
We watch the ships come gliding past the bar,
Or feel the seasons pass us
Like the movement of a hand.
All day long we hear them living far below,
And every night the crickets
Scratch their names upon the air,
And the trees make sounds like breaking waves,
And the rivers at our feet lose themselves in reeds.
We could be idle gods
Sprawled awash in our own thoughts.
In the afternoon we send a runner down the rock
To say that we have nothing to report
And that the coast is clear.
 
%

Dag Hammarskjold
Haikus from 1959


Night. Plains.  An empty hall.
In the window niche
She waits for the sunrise.

The trees pant.  Silence.
An irresolute raindrop furrows 
The dark pane.

A cone of light in the fog.
A winter moth dancing
Round the lamp post.

The plain's horizon,
The wall's vertical,
Intersect like two fate-lines.

My home drove me
Into the wilderness.
Few look for me.  Few hear me.

%

Carl Sandburg
Spring Grass


Spring grass, there is a dance to be danced for you.
Come up, spring grass, if only for young feet.
Come up, spring grass, young feet ask you.

Smell of the young spring grass,
You're a mascot riding on the wild horses.
You came to my nose and spiffed me.  This is your lucky year.

Young sprin grass just after the winter,
Shoots of the big green whisper of the year,
Come up, if only for young feet.
Come up, young feet ask you.

%

W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

%

Remembering
WS Merwin

There are threads of old sound heard over and over
phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender
wands of the auroras playing out from them
into dark time the passing of a few
migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks
far from the rest of the words far from the instruments 

%

Separation
WS Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

%

Willam Stafford

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot: peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about. 

%

William Stafford
Level Light


Sometimes the light when evening fails
stains all haystacked country and hills,
runs the cornrows and clasps the barn
with that kind of color escaped from corn
that brings to autumn the winter word
a level shaft that tells the world:

It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them*fail.

In one stride night then takes the hill.

%

Meditation on a Grapefruit
By Craig Arnold

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
To ease each pale pink section
out of its case so carefully
without breaking
a single pearly cell
To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
so sweet
a discipline
precisely pointless a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

%