When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –
Not so when I have danced for an hour:
The dancers inherit the party
While the talkers wear themselves out and
sit in corners alone, and glower.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more –
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Up on the hill abüne the toun
Whan pit-mirk is the nicht,
And but a star or twa glent doun
Wi’ their cauld and clinty licht;
A thocht comes cryin through the bluid
That there is nae toun ava:
Only the water and the wüd
And the heuch attowre them a’:
And set within a nicht sae black,
And in sae lane an hour,
Wha kens gin he is glowerin back
Or glimmerin far afore?
William Soutar
When I was young, writing was my one sport,
And I read a prodigious quantity of books.
In prose I made The Faults of Ch’in my standard;
In verse I imitated The Tale of Mr. Nothing.
But then the arrows began singing at the frontier
And a winged summons came flying from the City.
Although arms were not my profession
I had once read the war-book of Jang-chü.
I whooped aloud; my shouts rent the air;
I felt as though Eastern Wu were already annihilated.
The scholar’s knife cuts best at its first use,
In day-dreams only are his glorious plans fulfilled;
By a glance to the left, I cleared the Yangtze and Hsiang,
By a glance to the right, I quelled the Tibetans and Hu.
When my task was done, I did not accept a barony,
But refusing with a bow retired to a cottage in the country.
Tso Ssŭ, trans. by Arthur Waley
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Rudyard Kipling
This is only a note
To say how sorry I am
You died. You will realise
What a position it puts
Me in. I couldn’t really
Have died for you if so
I were inclined. The carn
Foxglove here on the wall
Outside your first house
Leans with me standing
In the Zennor wind.
Anyhow how are things?
Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
Are you there at all?
I would like to think
You were all right
And not worried about
Monica and the children
And not unhappy or bored.
Speaking to you and not
Knowing if you are there
Is not too difficult.
My words are used to that.
Do you want anything?
Where shall I send something?
Rice-wine, meanders, paintings
By your contemporaries?
Or shall I send a kind
Of news of no time
Leaning against the wall
Outside your old house.
The house and the whole moor
Is flying in the mist.
I am up. I’ve washed
The front of my face
And here I stand looking
Out over the top
Half of my bedroom window.
There almost as far
As I can see I see
St Buryan’s church tower.
An inch to the left, behind
That dark rise of woods,
Is where you used to lurk.
This is only a note
To say I am aware
You are not here. I find
It difficult to go
Beside Housman’s star
Lit fences without you.
And nobody will laugh
At my jokes like you.
Bryan, I would be obliged
If you would scout things out
For me. Although I am not
Just ready to start out.
I am trying to be better,
Which will make you smile
Under your blue hat.
I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.
W. S. Graham
Dennis was very sick.
His face retreated
But his eyes advanced from it
With great courage.
When the fresh reinforcements
Pass on their way to the front
The retreating columns of the beaten.
He has to get healthy soon.
He is like our bank,
In which we deposited all we had in our heart.
He is like Switzerland,
Filled with banks.
Already he is smoking one cigarette,
Trembling a little,
And as it should be with a true poet,
He puts the burned matches
Back into the box.
Yehuda Amichai, trans. with Ted Hughes
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? –
If design govern in a thing so small.
Robert Frost
Hark, now everything is still,
The screech-owl and the whistler shrill,
Call upon our dame aloud,
And bid her quickly don her shroud!
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay’s now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed.
Of what is’t fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping:
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
Strew your hair with powders sweet,
Don clean linen, bathe your feet:
And the foul fiend more to check –
A crucifix let bless your neck.
’Tis now full tide ’tween night and day:
End your groan, and come away.
John Webster
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.
Wallace Stevens
For J. G. Farrell
‘Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.’
Seferis, Mythistorema
Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rain-barrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.
They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.
There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong –
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.
A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
Derek Mahon
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror, the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
William Blake
Of all among the fallen from on high,
We count you last and leave you to regain
Your born dominion of a life made vain
By three spheres of insidious ivory.
You dwindle to the lesser tragedy –
Content, you say. We call, but you remain.
Nothing alive gone wrong could be so plain,
Or quite so blasted with absurdity.
You click away the kingdom that is yours,
And you click off your crown for cap and bells;
You smile, who are still master of the feast,
And for your smile we credit you the least;
But when your false, unhallowed laugh occurs,
We seem to think there may be something else.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Doll’s boy’s asleep
under a stile
he sees eight and twenty
ladies in a line
says to nine ladies
his lips drink water
but his heart drinks wine
the tenth lady
says to nine ladies
they must chain his foot
for his wrist’s too fine
the nineteenth
says to nine ladies
you take his mouth
for his eyes are mine.
Doll’s boy’s asleep
under the stile
for every mile the feet go
the heart goes nine
e. e. cummings
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
Theodore Roethke
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me –
That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening …
A tall, slim tree …
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
Langston Hughes
We talk openly, and exchange souls.
Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!
The same double life among the bores and vegetables,
By lamplight in the coffee-houses you have sat it out
Half toad, half Sultan, of the rubbish-heap,
You know the deadly dull excitement; the champagne sleet
Of living; you know all the kitchen details of my ego’s thinking,
When, with our imaginations shuddering,
We move arrogantly into one another’s power,
And the last barriers go down between us ….
More at home in a jazz pit than with you,
Hotter on the Baltic, when it fries in ice,
Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood,
My refrigerated body feels the coffin’s touch in every word
You utter, and backs away for ever from your bed.
You know me far too well, O dustbin of the soul;
My sex, her nerve completely broken by it, has constructed
Barriers, thick walls, never to be battered down.
On the other side (with a last mouthful of the double-dutch to spit!)
She looks away; and in a wholly opposite direction.
Rosemary Tonks
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –
Among other things – or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think ‘the past is finished’
Or ‘the future is before us’.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death” – that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
T. S. Eliot
They sing their dearest songs –
He, she, all of them – yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face …
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss –
Elders and juniors – aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat …
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all –
Men and maidens – yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee …
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them – aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs …
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
Thomas Hardy
Each flower is a little night
pretending to draw near
But where its scent rises
I cannot hope to enter
which is why it bothers me
so much and why I sit so long
before this closed door
Each colour, each incarnation
begins where the eyes stop
of an unseen conflagration
Philippe Jacottet, trans.
by Derek Mahon
When first we hear the shy come nightingales
They seem to mutter o ’er their songs in fear
And climb we e’er so soft the spinney rails
All stops as if no bird was anywhere
The kindled bushes with the young leaves thin
Let curious eyes to search a long way in
Until impatience cannot see or hear
The hidden music gets but little way
Upon the path when up the songs begin
Full loud a moment and then low again
But when a day or two confirms her stay
Boldly she sings and loud for half the day
And soon the village brings the woodman’s tale
Of having heard the new-come nightingale
John Clare
I met ayont the cairney
A lass wi’ tousie hair
Singin’ till a bairnie
That was nae langer there.
Wunds wi’ warlds to swing
Dinna sing sae sweet,
The licht that bends owre a’ thing
Is less ta’en up wi’t.
Hugh MacDiarmid
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
Wisława Szymborska, trans. by
Joanna Trzeciak
But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.
All its more ponderous and bulky worth
Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth
A steady splendour; but at the tip-top,
There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop
Of light, and that is love: its influence,
Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense,
At which we start and fret; till in the end,
Melting into its radiance, we blend,
Mingle, and so become a part of it –
Nor with aught else can our souls interknit
So wingedly. When we combine therewith,
Life’s self is nourished by its proper pith,
And we are nurtured like a pelican brood.
Ay, so delicious is the unsating food,
That men, who might have towered in the van
Of all the congregated world, to fan
And winnow from the coming step of time
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men-slugs and human serpentry,
Have been content to let occasion die,
Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium.
And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb,
Than speak against this ardent listlessness:
For I have ever thought that it might bless
The world with benefits unknowingly,
As does the nightingale, up-perched high,
And cloistered among cool and bunched leaves –
She sings but to her love, nor e’er conceives
How tip-toe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.
Just so may love, although ’tis understood
The mere commingling of passionate breath,
Produce more than our searching witnesseth –
What I know not: but who, of men, can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would
swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,
If human souls did never kiss and greet?
John Keats
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Patrick Kavanagh
Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue
Nor swifter Grey-hound follow,
Whose foot ne’er tainted morning dew
Nor ear heard huntsman’s hallo’,
Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nurs’d with tender care
And to domestic bounds confined,
Was still a wild Jack-hare.
Though duly from my hand he took
His pittance ev’ry night,
He did it with a jealous look,
And, when he could, would bite.
His diet was of wheaten bread
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.
On twigs of hawthorn he regaled,
On pippins’ russet peel,
And, when his juicey sallads fail’d,
Sliced carrot pleased him well.
Whereon he lov’d to bound,
To skip and gambol like a fawn,
And swing his rump around.
His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear,
But most before approaching show’rs
Or when a storm drew near.
Eight years and five round rolling moons
He thus saw steal away,
Dozing out all his idle noons,
And ev’ry night at play.
I kept him for his humour’ sake,
For he would oft beguile
My heart of thoughts that made it ache,
And force me to a smile.
But now, beneath this walnut-shade
He finds his long last home,
And waits in snug concealment laid
’Till gentler Puss shall come.
He, still more aged, feels the shocks
From which no care can save,
And, part’ner once of Tiney’s Box,
Must soon partake his grave.
William Cowper
Here lies in earth a root of Hell,
Set by the Deil’s ain dibble;
This worthless body damned himsel,
To save the Lord the trouble.
Robert Burns
My dearest dust could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay
One hower longer; so that we might either
Sate up, or gone to bedd together?
But since thy finisht labor hath possest
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly; and thy widdowe bride
Shall soone repose her by thy slumbring side;
Whose business, now is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayre:
Mine eyes wax heavy and the day growes old
The dew falls thick, my bloud growes cold;
Draw, draw the closed curtaynes: and make roome;
My deare, my dearest dust; I come, I come.
Katherine, Lady Dyer
When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.
But first I’ll shrink to fairy size,
With a whisper no one understands,
Making blind moons of all your eyes,
And muddy roads of all your hands.
And you may grope for me in vain
In hollows under the mangrove root,
Or where, in apple-scented rain,
The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.
Elinor Wylie
Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat
As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes.
Continual wars and wives are what
Have tattered his ears and battered his head.
Like a bundle of old rope and iron
Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear
His eyes, green as ringstones: he yawns wide red,
Fangs fine as a lady’s needle and bright.
A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,
Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks
While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.
After hundreds of years the stain’s there
On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom:
That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still
Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,
Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,
Is unkillable. From the dog’s fury,
From gunshot fired point-blank he brings
His skin whole, and whole
From owlish moons of bekittenings
Among ashcans. He leaps and lightly
Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon.
Nightly over the round world of men,
Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.
Ted Hughes
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Derek Mahon
Calling to minde mine eie long went about,
T’cntice my hart to seeke to leave my brest,
All in a rage I thought to pull it out,
By whose device I liv’d in such unrest,
What could it say to purchase so my grace?
Forsooth that it had seene my Mistres face.
Another time I likewise call to minde,
My hart was he that all my woe had wrought,
For he my brest the fort of Love resignde,
When of such warrs my fancie never thought,
What could it say, when I would him have slaine?
But he was yours, and had forgone me cleane.
At length when I perceiv’d both eie and hart,
Excusde themselves, as guiltles of mine ill,
I found my selfe was cause of all my smart,
And tolde my selfe, my selfe now slay I will:
But when I found my selfe to you was true,
I lov’d my selfe, bicause my selfe lov’d you.
Sir Walter Raleigh
My whole eye was sunset red,
the old cut cornea throbbed,
I saw things darkly,
as through an unwashed goldfish globe.
I lay all day on my bed.
I chain-smoked through the night,
learning to flinch
at the flash of the matchlight.
Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel.
My eyes throb.
Nothing can dislodge
the house with my first tooth
noosed in a knot to the doorknob.
Nothing can dislodge
the triangular blotch
of rot on the red roof,
a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.
No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one ascetic talon
clasping the abstract imperial sky.
It says:
an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth.
No ease for the boy at the keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women’s white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.
Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.
Robert Lowell
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Jack Gilbert
for Cyril Connolly
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
W. H. Auden
At night when the ordinary loves have settled
like dust drifting a little in my son’s cough, my wife’s breath, my
daughter’s sigh,
I call them in. From the dark side of leaves,
from the countries of desire, from the cracks in the road,
from the places I went to and never gave back
at the border, the faces I wanted and never forgave
for dying, from the dark side of leaves, they come
softer than smoke, shadows on paper,
like dust drifting a little in my wife’s cough, my son’s sigh, my
daughter’s breath.
They make hoarse journeys in my head. They cry
at the lamp’s white pain. I silence them.
They orbit, tongueless. They die like stars; they cool
to ash. I trace their stain on paper, and sign it. Watch them
wind my life down like small, burnt moons. Watch them fall
like dust drifting a little in my daughter’s cough, my wife’s sigh,
my son’s breath.
Dennis Scott
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water
at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That’s all.
I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts.
Tony Hoagland
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
In this deep quiet, from what source unknown,
Those seeds of fire their fatal birth disclose;
And first, few scattering sparks about were blown,
Big with the flames that to our ruin rose.
Then in some close-pent room it crept along,
And smouldering as it went, in silence fed;
Till th’ infant monster, with devouring strong,
Walked boldly upright with exalted head.
Now like some rich or mighty murderer
Too great for prison, which he breaks with gold,
Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear,
And dares the world to tax him with the old:
So scapes th’ insulting fire his narrow jail,
And makes small outlets into open air;
There the fierce winds his tender force assail,
And beat him downward to his first repair.
The winds like crafty courtesans withheld
His flames from burning but to blow them more,
And every fresh attempt he is repelled,
With faint denials, weaker than before.
And now no longer letted of his prey
He leaps up at it with enraged desire,
O’erlooks the neighbours with a wide survey
And nods at every house his threatening fire.
The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice;
About the fire into a dance they bend,
And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.
Our guardian angel saw them where he sate
Above the palace of our slumbering King;
He sighed, abandoning his charge to Fate,
And drooping, oft looked back upon the wing.
At length the crackling noise and dreadful blaze
Called up some waking lover to the sight,
And long it was ere he the rest could raise,
Whose heavy eyelids yet were full of night.
The next to danger, hot pursued by Fate,
Half-clothed, half-naked, hastily retire,
And frighted mothers strike their breasts too late
For helpless infants left amidst the fire.
Their cries soon waken all the dwellers near:
Now murmuring noises rise in every street;
The more remote run stumbling with their fear,
And in the dark men jostle as they meet.
So weary bees in little cells repose,
But if night-robbers lift the well-stored hive
An humming through their waxen city grows,
And out upon each other’s wings they drive.
Now streets grow thronged and busy as by day:
Some run for buckets to the hallowed choir,
Some cut the pipes, and some the engines play,
And some more bold mount ladders to the fire.
In vain: for from the east a Belgian wind
His hostile breath through the dry rafters sent;
The flames impelled soon left their foes behind
And forward with a wanton fury went.
A quay of fire ran all along the shore
And lightened all the river with the blaze;
The wakened tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.
Old father Thames raised up his reverend head,
But feared the fate of Simois would return;
Deep in his ooze he sought his sedgy bed,
And shrunk his waters back into his urn.
The fire, meantime, walks in a broader gross,
To either hand his wings he opens wide:
He wades the streets, and straight he reaches ’cross
And plays his longing flames on th’ other side.
At first they warm, then scorch, and then they take;
Now with long necks from side to side they feed:
At length grown strong their mother fire forsake,
And a new colony of flames succeed.
John Dryden
Because he loves off-duty policemen and their murderers
Christ is still seen walking on the water of Lough Neagh,
Whose fingers created bluebottles, meadow-browns, red
Admirals, painted ladies, fire-flies, and are tying now
Woodcock hackles around hooks, lamb’s wool, badger fur
Until about his head swarm artificial flies and their names,
Dark Mackerel, Gravel Bed, Greenwell’s Glory, Soldier
Palmer, Coachman, Water Cricket, Orange Grouse, Barm,
Without snagging in his hair or ceasing to circle above
Policemen turned by gunmen into fishermen for ever.
Michael Longley
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, ‘Let us flee,’
Said the flea, ‘Let us fly,’
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
Anon.
One that is ever kind said yesterday:
‘Your well-belovèd’s hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.’
Heart cries, ‘No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’
O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.
W. B. Yeats
Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow
hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Robert Hayden
What I saw in his head
was an inverted vision,
and the glass cracked
when I put my hand in.
My own head is round
with hair for adornment,
but the face
is an ornament.
with long hair, and eyes
so wide they grow
deep as I watch.
If the world
could only be rounder,
like your head, like mine,
with your eyes for real lakes!
I sleep in myself.
That man was a friend,
sans canoe,
and I wanted to help him.
Robert Creeley
Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.
Jack Gilbert
Buck has a headache. Tony ate
a real hot pepper. Sylvia weighs
herself naked on the bathroom
Internal Revenue. Roger says
poetry is the manufacture of lightning-rods.
José wants to punch his wife
in the mouth. Ted’s afraid
of his own shadow. Ray talks
to his tomato plants. Paul
wants a job in the post office
selling stamps. Mary keeps
smiling at herself in the mirror.
And I,
I piss in the sink
with a feeling of
eternity.
Charles Simic
Its former green is blue and thin,
And its once firm legs sink in and in;
Soon it will break down unaware,
Soon it will break down unaware.
At night when reddest flowers are black
Those who once sat thereon come back;
Quite a row of them sitting there,
Quite a row of them sitting there.
With them the seat does not break down,
Nor winter freeze them, nor floods drown,
For they are as light as upper air,
They are as light as upper air!
Thomas Hardy
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This – holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
Marie Howe
It fell about the Martinmas time,
And a gay time it was then,
When our goodwife got puddings to make,
And she’s boild them in the pan.
The wind sae cauld blew south and north,
And blew into the floor;
Quoth our goodman to our goodwife,
‘Gae out and bar the door.’
‘My hand is in my hussyfskap,
Goodman, as ye may see;
An it shoud nae be barrd this hundred year,
It’s no be barrd for me.’
They made a paction tween them twa,
They made it firm and sure,
That the first word whaeer shoud speak,
Shoud rise and bar the door.
Then by there came two gentlemen,
At twelve o clock at night,
And they could neither see house nor hall,
Nor coal nor candle-light.
‘Now whether is this a rich man’s house,
Or whether is it a poor?’
But neer a word wad ane o them speak,
For barring of the door.
And first they ate the white puddings,
And then they ate the black;
Tho muckle thought the goodwife to hersel,
Yet neer a word she spake.
Then said the one unto the other,
‘Here, man, tak ye my knife;
Do ye tak aff the auld man’s beard,
And I’ll kiss the goodwife.’
‘But there’s nae water in the house,
And what shall we do than?’
‘What ails ye at the pudding-broo,
That boils into the pan?’
O up then started our goodman,
An angry man was he:
‘Will ye kiss my wife before my een,
And scad me wi pudding-bree?’
Then up and started our goodwife,
Gied three skips on the floor:
‘Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,
Get up and bar the door.’
Anon.
The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer;
May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.
That parboiled ape, with the toughest jaw you will see
On virtue’s path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,
Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,
And threw me out of the house on the back of my head!
If I asked her master he’d give me a cask a day;
But she, with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!
May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.
James Stephens
My big friend, I bow help;
I bow Get up, big friend:
let me land-swim again beside your clicky feet,
don’t sleep flat with dried wet in your holes.
Les Murray
He told us, with the years, you will come
to love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
and comforted them.
Dorothea Tanning
Grasshoppers go in many a thumming spring
And now to stalks of tasseled sow-grass cling,
That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight;
While arching oxeye doubles with his weight.
Next on the cat-tail-grass with farther bound
He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.
John Clare
Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,
something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly
muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like –
though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded
scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws’
gesture of menace
and power. A gull’s
gobbled the centre,
leaving this chamber
– size of a demitasse –
open to reveal
a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,
this little travelling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing
the brilliant rinse
of summer’s firmament.
What colour is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,
if we could be opened
into this –
if the smallest chambers
of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.
Mark Doty
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.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There cam’ seven Egyptians on a day,
And wow, but they sang bonny!
And they sang sae sweet, and sae very complete,
Down cam’ Earl Cassilis’ lady.
She cam’ tripping down the stair,
And a’ her maids before her;
As soon as they saw her weel-faur’d face
They cast the glamourie owre her.
They gave to her the nutmeg,
And they gave to her the ginger;
But she gave to them a far better thing,
The seven gold rings off her fingers.
And when the Earl he did come home.
Enquiring for his ladie,
One of the servants made this reply,
‘She’s awa’ with the gypsie laddie.’
‘Come saddle for me the brown,’ he said,
‘For the black was ne’er so speedy,
And I will travel night and day
Till I find out my wanton ladie.’
‘Will you come home, my dear?’ he said,
‘Oh will you come home, my honey?
And by the point of my broad sword,
A hand I’ll ne’er lay on you.’ …
‘Yestreen I rade this water deep,
And my own gude lord beside me;
But this night I maun wet my little pretty feet
With a wheen blackguards to wade me.
‘Yestreen I lay on a good feather-bed,
And my own wedded lord beyond me,
And to-night I’ll lie in the ash-corner,
With the gypsies all around me.
‘They took off my high-heeled shoes,
That were made of Spanish leather,
And I have put on coarse Lowland brogues.
To trip it o’er the heather.
‘The Earl of Cassilis is lying sick;
Not one hair I’m sorry;
I’d rather have a kiss from Johnny Faa’s lips
Than all his gold and his money.’
Anon.
Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood
There’s a board nailed across the window
I looked through to see the west
And my love is a birch forever
By Hallaig Stream, at her tryst
Between Inver and Milk Hollow,
somewhere around Baile-chuirn,
A flickering birch, a hazel,
A trim, straight sapling rowan.
In Screapadal, where my people
Hail from, the seed and breed
Of Hector Mor and Norman
By the banks of the stream are a wood.
To-night the pine-cocks crowing
On Cnoc an Ra, there above,
And the trees standing tall in moonlight –
They are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birches to move,
The wood to come up past the cairn
Until it has veiled the mountain
Down from Beinn na Lice in shade.
If it doesn’t, I’ll go to Hallaig,
To the sabbath of the dead,
Down to where each departed
Generation has gathered.
Hallaig is where they survive,
All the MacLeans and MacLeads
Who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
The dead have been seen alive,
The men at their length on the grass
At the gable of every house,
The girls a wood of birch trees
Standing tall, with their heads bowed.
Between The Leac and Fearns
The road is plush with moss
And the girls in a noiseless procession
Going to Clachan as always
And coming back from Clachan
And Suisnish, their land of the living,
Still lightsome and unheartbroken,
Their stories only beginning.
From Fearns Burn to the raised beach
Showing clear in the shrouded hills
There are only girls congregating,
Endlessly walking along
Back through the gloaming to Hallaig
Through the vivid speechless air,
Pouring down the steep slopes,
Their laughter misting my ear
And their beauty a glaze on my heart.
Then as the kyles go dim
And the sun sets behind Dun Cana
Love’s loaded gun will take aim.
It will bring down the lightheaded deer
As he sniffs the grass round the wallsteads
And his eye will freeze: while I live,
His blood won’t be traced in the woods.
Sorley MacLean, trans. by Seamus Heaney
Wha hasna turn’d inby a sunny street
And fund alang its length nae folk were there:
And heard his step fa’ steadily and clear
Nor wauken ocht but schedows at his feet.
Shüther to shüther in the reemlin heat
The houses seem’d to hearken and to stare;
But a’ were doverin whaur they stüde and were
Like wa’s ayont the echo o’ time’s beat.
Wha hasna thocht whan atween stanes sae still,
That had been biggit up for busyness,
He has come wanderin into a place
Lost, and forgotten, and unchangeable:
And thocht the far-off traffic sounds to be
The weary waters o’ mortality.
William Soutar
Harold, are you asleep?
Harold, I remember your leap,
It may have killed you
But it was a brave thing to do.
Two promontories ran high into the sky,
He leapt from one rock to the other
And fell to the sea’s smother.
Harold was always afraid to climb high,
But something urged him on,
He felt he should try.
I would not say that he was wrong,
Although he succeeded in doing nothing but die.
Would you?
Ever after that steep
Place was called Harold’s Leap.
It was a brave thing to do.
Stevie Smith
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable.
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall –
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
Seamus Heaney
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
Frank O’Hara
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
– The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds –
‘I’m sixty-eight’ he said,
‘I first bucked hay when I was seventeen
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.’
Gary Snyder
When I was employed at Cooperative Fashions, in spite of the dark, ugly old maid, I tried to steal some garters. I was pursued down the superb staircases, not for the theft, but for my laziness at work and for my hatred of the innocent finery. Descend, you are pursued. The staircases are less beautiful in the offices than in the part open to the public. The staircases are less beautiful in the ‘service’ quarters than in the offices. The staircases are still less beautiful in the cellar! But what can I say of the marsh where I arrived? What can I say of the laughter? Of the animals that brushed by me, and of the whisperings of unseen creatures? Water gave place to fire, to fear, to unconsciousness; when I came to myself I was in the hands of silent and nameless surgeons.
Max Jacob, trans. by Elizabeth Bishop
In the southern village the boy who minds the ox
With his naked feet stands on the ox’s back.
Through the hole in his coat the river wind blows;
Through his broken hat the mountain rain pours.
On the long dyke he seemed to be far away;
In the narrow lane suddenly we were face to face.
The boy is home and the ox is back in its stall;
And a dark smoke oozes through the thatched roof.
Lu Yu, trans. by Arthur Waley
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
A. E. Housman
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots like in each respect.
The reason no man knows: let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe
In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,
I had a vision once – though you understand
It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints,
And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,
Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza
In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows
From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made
A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored
A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,
Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints
Were all on sale. The colors and noise
Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
So that even the bargaining
Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.
And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,
And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved
And even the great Farnese Palace itself
Was gone, for all its marble; in its place
Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.
The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.
And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.
Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week
I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.
All this happened about ten years ago,
And it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last, today,
I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left
Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy
I stood before it for hours in wintertime.
Anthony Hecht
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one? –
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution? –
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
Edgar Lee Masters
Sometimes when I’m lonely,
Don’t know why,
Keep thinkin’ I won’t be lonely
By and by.
Langston Hughes
I stick a black flag on my forehead,
and with self-esteem lowered to half mast,
I decree the official mourning:
because in our town today
nineteen people were born.
Statistics lie before me
and just like the star gazers
searched for destiny
among the heavenly signs
when a royal child
was born
I pore over them
trying to find the answer to:
what will be their fate.
2 will die young of lung disease,
1 will die a hero, 0.059, however, will be a movie star,
3 tax-paying citizens, 1 a notorious criminal,
2 unemployed, and again 1 – a streetwalker;
4 of the women among them will on average have 2
children (on average, because 3 will have no children,
while the 4th will bring 8 into the world);
1 will commit suicide, 2 will have venereal disease,
and 1 will become the victim of a fatal traffic accident.
This will be the fate of 18, whilst the 19th
can only be expressed
in the 10,000ths:
that one will become the President of a Republic,
a banker, the world champion in 100-meter sprint,
or remain a virgin into extreme old age.
I know – now I should be lying
like a fortune teller on a home visit, who,
in spite of ominous signs,
prophesies a phenomenal path for the newborn.
I rather not say anything,
instead, all day long, I write telegrams of condolence
and whistle Chopin’s funeral march.
And when the day arrives:
that they commit suicide
or get run over by a tram,
I take out the completed death notice
from the appropriate card index,
address it
and dispatch it to the relatives.
Then they will assuredly cry
because it will occur to them
that one day they, too,
will have to die –
will go dry-eyed to the window
and watch,
how indifferently is washing his hands
in the autumn rain,
an unknown, enormous Pilate.
Lajos Walder
Do but consider this small dust,
Here running in the glass,
By atoms moved;
Could you believe that this
The body was
Of one that loved?
And in his mistress’ flame, playing like a fly,
Turned to cinders by her eye?
Yes; and in death, as life, unblessed,
To have’t expressed,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest.
Ben Jonson
How heavy do I journey on the way
When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend.’
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed being made from thee.
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan
More sharp to me than spurring to his side,
For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
William Shakespeare
is the last unshattered 78
by ‘Patrolman Jack O’Ryan, violin’,
a Sligo fiddler in dry America.
A legend, he played Manhattan’s ceilidhs,
fell asleep drunk one snowy Christmas
on a Central Park bench and froze solid.
They shipped his corpse home, like his records.
This record’s record is its lunar surface.
I wouldn’t risk my stylus to this gouge,
or this crater left by a flick of ash –
When Anne Quinn got hold of it back in Kilrush,
she took her fiddle to her shoulder
and cranked the new Horn of Plenty
Victrola over and over and over,
and scratched along until she had it right
or until her father shouted
Of that tune
In this house tonight.’
She slipped out back and strapped the contraption
to the parcel rack and rode her bike
to a far field, by moonlight.
It skips. The penny I used for ballast slips.
O’Ryan’s fiddle pops, and hiccoughs
back to this, back to this, back to this:
a napping snowman with a fiddlecase;
a flask of bootleg under his belt;
three stars; a gramophone on a pushbike;
a cigarette’s glow from a far field;
over and over, three bars in common time.
Michael Donaghy
That quality of the great boxers
to be able to stand there
and take shots,
gargle with firewater,
encounter intoxication
at sub- and supra-atomic levels,
to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s lip
like Empedocles, and descend,
not say: I’ll be back,
not think: fifty-fifty,
to vacate molehills
when dwarves want space to grow,
indivisible,
and able to renounce your victory –
a hymn to that man.
Gottfried Benn, trans.
by Michael Hofmann
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world’s both parts, and oh, both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it if it must be drowned no more:
But oh it must be burnt alas the fire;
Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; let their flames retire,
And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.
John Donne
I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes –
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live – like vapours tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below – above, the vaulted sky.
John Clare
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the
egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains,
esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.
In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.
Walt Whitman
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
‘For beauty,’ I replied.
‘And I for truth, – the two are one;
We brethren are,’ he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
Emily Dickinson
I found the phrase to every thought
I ever had, but one;
And that defies me, – as a hand
Did try to chalk the sun
To races nurtured in the dark; –
How would your own begin?
Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?
Emily Dickinson
I hear, the axe has flowered,
I hear, the place is not nameable,
I hear, the bread that looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread his wife baked him,
I hear, they call life
our only refuge.
Paul Celan
I hear a river thro’ the valley wander
Whose water runs, the song alone remaining.
A rainbow stands and summer passes under.
Trumbull Stickney
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, – John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
Robert Creeley
I read my sentence steadily,
Reviewed it with my eyes,
To see that I made no mistake
In its extremest clause, –
The date, and manner of the shame;
And then the pious form
That ‘God have mercy’ on the soul
The jury voted him.
I made my soul familiar
With her extremity,
That at the last it should not be
A novel agony,
But she and Death, acquainted,
Meet tranquilly as friends,
Salute and pass without a hint –
And there the matter ends.
Emily Dickinson
It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.
Stevie Smith
I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a pismire swallow up a whale
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of men’s tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man that saw this wondrous sight.
Anon.
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favourite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far, –
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their
possession.
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Ghathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly
terms.
A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.
His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and
return.
I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.
Walt Whitman
I used to be inexorable,
But now I am elusive.
I used to be the future of America,
But now I am America.
I used to be part of the problem,
But now I am the problem.
I used to be part of the solution, if not all of it,
But now I am not that person.
I used to be intense, & useful,
But now I am heavy, & boring.
I used to be sentimental about myself, & therefore ruthless,
But now I am, I think, a sympathetic person, although
easily amused.
I used to be a believer,
But now, alas, I believe.
Ted Berrigan
I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’
A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’
I cried, ‘Well, but –
‘The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’
A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’
Stephen Crane
I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling –
Because at least the past were pass’d away –
And for the future – (but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly to-day,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say – the future is a serious matter –
And so – for God’s sake – hock and soda-water!
Lord Byron
Rognvald who stalks round Corse with his stick
I do not love.
His dog has a loud sharp mouth.
The wood of his door is very hard.
Once, tangled in his barbed wire
(I was paying respects to his hens, stroking a wing)
He laid his stick on me.
That was out of a hard forest also.
Mansie at Quoy is a biddable man.
Ask for water, he gives you rum.
I strip his scarecrow April by April.
Ask for a scattering of straw in his byre
He lays you down
Under a quilt as long and light as heaven.
Then only his raging woman spoils our peace.
Gray the fisherman is no trouble now
Who quoted me the vagrancy laws
In a voice slippery as seaweed under the kirkyard.
I rigged his boat with the seven curses.
Occasionally still, for encouragement,
I put the knife in his net.
Though she has black peats and a yellow hill
And fifty silken cattle
I do not go near Merran and her cats.
Rather break a crust on a tombstone.
Her great-great-grandmother
Wore the red coat at Gallowsha.
The thousand rabbits of Hollandsay
Keep Simpson’s corn short,
Whereby comes much cruelty, gas and gunshot.
Tonight I have lit a small fire.
I have stained my knife red.
I have peeled a round turnip.
And I pray the Lord
To preserve those nine hundred and ninety nine innocent
Finally in Folscroft lives Jeems,
Tailor and undertaker, a crosser of limbs,
One tape for the living and the dead.
He brings a needle to my rags in winter,
And he guards, against my stillness,
The seven white boards
I got from the Danish wreck one winter.
George Mackay Brown