O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Anon.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
John Keats
Brother of the blowfly
& godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork
& flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus Christ, you’re merciless
With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar’s tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.
No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.
Yusef Komunyakaa
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vows, and in devotion.
As humorous is my contrition
As my profane love, and as soon forgot:
As riddlingly distempered, cold and hot,
As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.
I durst not view heaven yesterday; and today
In prayers, and flattering speeches I court God:
Tomorrow I quake with true fear of his rod.
So my devout fits come and go away
Like a fantastic ague: save that here
Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.
John Donne
Old Man, or Lad’s-love, – in the name there’s nothing
To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.
The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as some day the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps
Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs
Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
But half as tall as she, though it is as old;
So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
And I can only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.
As for myself,
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
Edward Thomas
All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him – at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping here, he scared it once again
In clomping off; – and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man – one man – can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.
Robert Frost
See how the orient dew,
Shed from the bosom of the morn
Into the blowing roses,
Yet careless of its mansion new,
For the clear region where ’twas born
Round in itself incloses;
And in its little globe’s extent
Frames as it can its native element.
How it the purple flow’r does slight,
Scarce touching where it lies,
But gazing back upon the skies,
Shines with a mournful light,
Like its own tear,
Because so long divided from the sphere.
Restless it rolls and unsecure,
Trembling lest it grow impure,
Till the warm sun pity its pain,
And to the skies exhale it back again.
So the soul, that drop, that ray
Of the clear fountain of eternal day,
Could it within the human flow’r be seen,
Remembering still its former height,
Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green,
And recollecting its own light,
Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express
The greater heaven in an heaven less.
In how coy a figure wound,
Every way it turns away:
So the world excluding round,
Yet receiving in the day,
Dark beneath, but bright above,
Here disdaining, there in love.
How loose and easy hence to go,
How girt and ready to ascend,
Moving but on a point below,
It all about does upwards bend.
Such did the manna’s sacred dew distil,
White and entire, though congealed and chill,
Congealed on earth: but does, dissolving, run
Into the glories of th’ almighty sun.
Andrew Marvell
That which her slender waist confined,
Shall now my joyful temples bind;
No monarch but would give his crown,
His arms might do what this has done.
It was my heaven’s extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely dear;
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love
Did all within this circle move!
A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair;
Give me but what this ribbon bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round!
Edmund Waller
My heid did yak yester nicht,
This day to mak that I na micht.
So sair the magryme dois me menyie,
Perseing my brow as ony ganyie,
That scant I luik may on the licht.
And now, schir, laitlie eftir mes
To dyt thocht I begowthe to dres,
The sentence lay full evill till find,
Vnsleipit in my heid behind,
Dullit in dulnes and distres.
Full oft at morrow I wpryse,
Quhen that my curage sleipeing lyis.
For mirth, for menstrallie and play,
For din nor danceing nor deray,
It will not walkin me no wise.
William Dunbar
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy,
Seven yeeres tho’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I loose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envie?
To have so soone scap’d worlds, and fleshes rage,
And, if no other miserie, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye
BEN. JONSON his best piece of poetrie.
For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
Ben Jonson
Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuffe,
Who, when you’ve burnt your selves downe to the snuffe,
Stinke, and are throwne away. End faire enough.
Ben Jonson
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
Donald Justice
A Caucasian gets on at
the 17th floor.
He is old, fat and expensively
dressed.
I say hello / I’m friendly.
He says, ‘Hi.’
Then he looks very carefully at
my clothes.
I’m not expensively dressed.
I think his left shoe costs more
than everything I am wearing.
He doesn’t want to talk to me
any more.
I think that he is not totally aware
that we are really going down
and there are no clothes after you have
been dead for a few thousand years.
He thinks as we silently travel
down and get off at the bottom
floor
that we are going separate
ways.
Richard Brautigan
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead –
That is the Grasshopper’s. He takes the lead
In summer luxury; he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
John Keats
The stars go out one by one
as though a bluetit the size of the world
were pecking them like peanuts out of the sky’s string bag,
A ludicrous image, I know.
Take away the gray light.
I want the bronze shields of summer
or winter’s scalding sleet.
My mind is struggling with itself.
approaching me. It’s a secret
coming out of another one.
I want to know the first one of all.
Everything’s in the distance,
as I am. I wish I could flip that distance
like a cigarette into the water.
I want an extreme of nearness.
I want boundaries on my mind.
I want to feel the world like a straitjacket.
Norman MacCaig
In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line –
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it’s best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person’s reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you’re not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide
another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another – one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column.
One bath may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the
laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple – this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The
obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife
and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother’s bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter’s bag one finds oneself
confronted by the mother’s
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another
love or the same love
As when ‘I love you’ suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when ‘I’m full of doubts’
Hides ‘I’m certain about something and it is that’
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too.
In the Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria
Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you’re asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at
the foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you’d have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one.
It can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.
Kenneth Koch
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange –
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave –
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
Wendy Cope
Heart be kind and sign the release
As the trees their loss approve.
Learn as leaves must learn to fall
Out of danger, out of love.
What belongs to frost and thaw
Sullen winter will not harm.
What belongs to wind and rain
Is out of danger from the storm.
Betray the heart they feed upon.
But what belongs to earth and death
Is out of danger from the sun.
I was cruel, I was wrong –
Hard to say and hard to know.
You do not belong to me.
You are out of danger now –
Out of danger from the wind,
Out of danger from the wave,
Out of danger from the heart
Falling, falling out of love.
James Fenton
Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it hold fair weather.
Time shall moult away his wings
Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world agen
Such a constant Lover.
But a pox upon’t, no praise
There is due at all to me:
Love with me had made no stay,
Had it any been but she.
And that very very Face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.
Sir John Suckling
I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.
What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.
Stevie Smith
The scene within the paperweight is calm,
A small white house, a laughing man and wife,
Deep snow. I turn it over in my palm
And watch it snowing in another life,
Another world, and from this scene learn what
It is to stand apart: she serves him tea
Once and forever, dressed from head to foot
As she is always dressed. In this toy, history
Sifts down through the glass like snow, and we
Wonder if her single deed tells much
Or little of the way she loves, and whether he
Sees shadows in the sky. Beyond our touch,
Beyond our lives, they laugh, and drink their tea.
We look at them just as the winter night
With its vast empty spaces bends to see
Our isolated little world of light,
Covered with snow, and snow in clouds above it,
And drifts and swirls too deep to understand.
Still, I must try to think a little of it,
With so much winter in my head and hand.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
You principle of song, what are you for now
Perking up under any spasmodic light
To trot out your shadowed warblings?
Mince, slight pillar. And sleek down
Your furriness. Slim as a whippy wire
Shall be your hope, and ultraflexible.
Flap thinly, sheet of beaten tin
That won’t affectionately plump up
More cushioned and receptive lays.
But little song, don’t so instruct yourself
For none are hanging around to hear you.
They have gone bustling or stumbling well away.
It’s late. And it always will be late.
Your small monument’s atop its hillock
Set with pennants that slap, slap, over the soil.
Here’s a denatured thing, whose one eye rummages
Into the mound, her other eye swivelled straight up:
A short while only, then I come, she carols – but is only
A fat-lot-of-good mother with a pointless alibi: ‘I didn’t
Know.’ Yet might there still be some part for me
To play upon this lovely earth? Say. Or
Say No, earth at my inner ear.
A wardrobe gapes, a mourner tries
Her several styles of howling-guise:
You’d rather not, yet you must go
Briskly around on beaming show.
A soft black gown with pearl corsage
Won’t assuage your smashed ménage.
It suits you as you are so pale.
Still, do not get that saffron veil.
Your dead don’t want you lying flat.
There’ll soon be time enough for that.
Oh my dead son you daft bugger
This is one glum mum. Come home I tell you
And end this tasteless melodrama – quit
Playing dead at all, by now it’s well beyond
A joke, but your humour never got cruel
Like this. Give over, you indifferent lad,
Take pity on your two bruised sisters. For
Didn’t we love you. As we do. But by now
We’re bored with our unproductive love,
And infinitely more bored by your staying dead
Which can hardly interest you much, either.
I can’t get sold on reincarnating you
As those bloody ‘gentle showers of rain’
Or in ‘fields of ripening grain’ – oooh
Anodyne – nor yet on shadowing you
In the hope of eventually pinpointing
You bemused among the flocking souls
Clustered like bats, as all thronged gibbering
Dusk-veiled – nor in modern creepiness.
Lighthearted presence, be bodied forth
Straightforwardly. Lounge again under
The sturdy sun you’d loved to bake in.
Even ten seconds’ worth of a sighting
Of you would help me get through
This better. With a camera running.
Ardent bee, still you go blundering
With downy saddlebags stuffed tight
All over the fuchsia’s drop earrings.
I’ll cry ‘Oh bee!’ to you, instead –
Since my own dead, apostrophised,
Keep mute as this clear garnet glaze
You’re bumping into. Blind diligence,
Bee, or idiocy – this banging on and on
Against such shiny crimson unresponse.
Dun blur of this evening’s lurch to
Eventual navy night. Yet another
Night, day, night over and over.
I so want to join you.
The flaws in suicide are clear
Apart from causing bother
To those alive who hold us dear
We could miss one another
We might be trapped eternally
Oblivious to each other
One crying Where are you, my child
The other calling Mother.
Suspended in unsparing light
The sloping gull arrests its curl
The glassy sea is hardened waves
Its waters lean through shining air
Yet never crash but hold their arc
Hung rigidly in glaucous ropes
Muscled and gleaming. All that
Should flow is sealed, is poised
In implacable stillness. Joined in
Non-time and halted in free fall.
It’s all a resurrection song.
Would it ever be got right
The dead could rush home
Keen to press their chinos.
She do the bereaved in different voices
For the point of this address is to prod
And shepherd you back within range
Of my strained ears; extort your reply
By finding any device to hack through
The thickening shades to you, you now
Strangely unresponsive son, who were
Such reliably kind and easy company,
Won’t you be summoned up once more
By my prancing and writhing in a dozen
Mawkish modes of reedy piping to you
– Still no? Then let me rest, my dear.
My sisters and my mother
Weep dark tears for me
I drift as lightest ashes
Under a southern sea
O let me be, my mother
In no unquiet grave
My bone-dust is faint coral
Under the fretful wave
Denise Riley
Matthew 13:45
I know the ways of learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun
In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire;
Both th’ old discoveries, and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and history:
All these stand open, or I have the keys:
Yet I love thee.
I know the ways of honour, what maintains
The quick returns of courtesy and wit:
In vies of favours whether party gains,
When glory swells the heart, and mouldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle, wheresoe’er it goes:
How many drams of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
Yet I love thee.
I know the ways of pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.
I know all these, and have them in my hand:
Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes
I fly to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale, and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love;
With all the circumstances that may move:
Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heaven to me;
Did both conduct, and teach me, how by it
To climb to thee.
George Herbert
Words are a monstrous excrescence.
Everything green is extended. It
is apricot, orange, lemon, olive and cherry,
and other snakes in the linguistic grass;
also a white touch of marble which evokes
no ghosts, the taste of squid, the …
Go away. I shall call a policeman.
Acrocorinth which evokes no
goats under the lemon blossom.
World is a monstrous excrescence;
he is following me everywhere, one
Nescafé and twenty Athenes, everything
green; I am not responsible for it.
I don’t want to speak to you.
Leave me alone. I shall stay here.
I refuse a green extension. Beware.
I have paid you. I have paid you
enough, sea, sun, and octopodi.
It is raining cats and allomorphs.
‘Where’ is the British Embassy.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson
I’m standing here inside my skin,
which will do for a Human Remains Pouch
for the moment. Look down there (up here).
Quickly. Slowly. This is my own front room
where I’m lost in the action, live from a war,
on screen. I am an Englishwoman, I don’t understand you.
What’s the matter? You are right. You are wrong.
Things are going well (badly). Am I disturbing you?
TV is showing bliss as taught to pilots:
Blend, Low silhouette, Irregular shape, Small,
Secluded. (Please write it down. Please speak slowly.)
Bliss is how it was in this very room
when I raised my body to his mouth,
when he even balanced me in the air,
or at least I thought so and yes the pilots say
yes they have caught it through the Side-Looking
Airborne Radar, and through the J-Stars.
I am expecting a gentleman (a young gentleman,
two gentlemen, some gentlemen). Please send him
(them) up at once. This is really beautiful.
Yes they have seen us, the pilots, in the Kill Box
on their screens, and played the routine for
getting us Stealthed, that is, Cleansed, to you and me,
Taken Out. They know how to move into a single room
like that, to send in with Pinpoint Accuracy, a hundred Harms.
I have two cases and a cardboard box. There is another
bag there. I cannot open my case – look out,
the lock is broken. Have I done enough?
Bliss, the pilots say, is for evasion
and escape. What’s love in all this debris?
Just one person pounding another into dust,
into dust. I do not know the word for it yet.
Where is the British Consulate? Please explain.
What does it mean? What must I do? Where
can I find? What have I done? I have done
nothing. Let me pass please. I am an Englishwoman.
Jo Shapcott
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went –
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
Austin Clarke
Please can I have a man who wears corduroy.
Please can I have a man
who knows the names of 100 different roses;
who doesn’t mind my absent-minded rabbits
wandering in and out
as if they own the place,
who makes me creamy curries from fresh lemon-grass,
who walks like Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle;
who sticks all my carefully-selected postcards –
sent from exotic cities
he doesn’t expect to come with me to,
but would if I asked, which I will do –
with nobody else’s, up on his bedroom wall,
starting with Ivy, the Famous Diving Pig,
whose picture, in action, I bought ten copies of;
who talks like Belmondo too, with lips as smooth
and tightly-packed as chocolate-coated
(melting chocolate) peony buds;
who knows that piling himself stubbornly on top of me
like a duvet stuffed with library books and shopping-bags
is all too easy: please can I have a man
who is not prepared to do that.
Who is not prepared to say I’m ‘pretty’ either.
Who, when I come trotting in from the bathroom
like a squealing freshly-scrubbed piglet
that likes nothing better than a binge
of being affectionate and undisciplined and uncomplicated,
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.
Selima Hill
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Oh, la … le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
Wallace Stevens
It was because there was nothing to do
that I did it; because silence was golden
I broke it. There was a vacuum
I found myself in, full of echoes
of dead languages. Where to turn
when there are no corners? In curved
space I kept on arriving
at my departures. I left no stones
unraised, but always wings
were tardy to start. In ante-rooms
of the spirit I suffered the anaesthetic
of time and came to with my hurt
unmended. Where are you? I
shouted, growing old in
the interval between here and now.
R. S. Thomas
At various times I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
Jorge Luis Borges
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Wallace Stevens
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[ ] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead there’s no more dying then.
William Shakespeare
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in dawn of cornflowers.
Sylvia Plath
I am a kind of farthing dip,
Unfriendly to the nose and eyes;
A blue-behinded ape, I skip
Upon the trees of Paradise.
At mankind’s feast, I take my place
In solemn, sanctimonious state,
And have the air of saying grace
While I defile the dinner plate.
I am ‘the smiler with the knife,’
The battener upon garbage, I –
Dear Heaven, with such a rancid life,
Were it not better far to die?
Yet still, about the human pale,
I love to scamper, love to race,
To swing by my irreverent tail
All over the most holy place;
And when at length, some golden day,
The unfailing sportsman, aiming at,
Shall bag, me – all the world shall say:
Thank God, and there’s an end of that!
Robert Louis Stevenson
The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul’s fair emblem and its only name –
But of the soul escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things, whereon we feed.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you’d stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.
And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew
Of living idiots, pressing round that new
Oak coffin – they alive, I dead beneath
That board, – you’d rave and rend them with your teeth.
J. M. Synge
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Billy Collins
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Edward Thomas
His aunt has gone astray in her concern
And the boy’s mum leans across his wheelchair
To talk to him. She points to the river.
An aged angler and a boy they know
Cast lazily into the rippled sun.
They go there, into the dappled grass, shadows
Bickering and falling from the shaken leaves.
His father keeps apart from them, walking
On the beautiful grass that is bright green
In the sunlight of July at 7 p.m.
He sits on the bench beside me, saying
It is a lovely evening, and I rise
From my sorrows, agreeing with him.
His large hand picks tobacco from a tin;
His smile falls at my feet, on the baked earth
Shoes have shuffled over and ungrassed.
It is discourteous to ask about
Accidents, or of the sick, the unfortunate.
I do not need to, for he says ‘Leukaemia’.
We look at the river, his son holding a rod,
The line going downstream in a cloud of flies.
I close my book, the Pensées of Pascal.
I am light with meditation, religiose
And mystic with a day of solitude.
I do not tell him of my own sorrows.
He is bored with misery and premonition.
He has seen the limits of time, asking ‘Why?’
Nature is silent on that question.
A swing squeaks in the distance. Runners jog
Round the perimeter. He is indiscreet.
His son is eight years old, with months to live.
His right hand trembles on his cigarette.
He sees my book, and then he looks at me,
Knowing me for a stranger. I have said
I am sorry. What more is there to say?
He is called over to the riverbank.
I go away, leaving the Park, walking through
The Golf Course, and then a wood, climbing,
And then bracken and gorse, sheep pasturage.
From a panoptic hill I look down on
A little town, its estuary, its bridge,
Its houses, churches, its undramatic streets.
Douglas Dunn
This is the story
of a beautiful
lie, what slips
through my fingers,
your fingers. It’s winter,
it’s far
in the lifespan
of man.
Bareheaded, in a soiled
shirt,
speechless, my friend
is making
lures, his hobby. Flies
so small
he works with tweezers and
a magnifying glass.
They must be
so believable
they’re true – feelers,
antennae,
quick and frantic
as something
drowning. His heart
beats wildly
in his hands. It is
blinding
and who will forgive him
in his tiny
out of hair,
deer hair, because it’s hollow
and floats.
Past death, past sight,
this is
his good idea, what drives
the silly days
together. Better than memory. Better
than love.
Then they are done, a hook
under each pair
of wings, and it’s Spring,
and the men
wade out into the riverbed
at dawn. Above,
the stars still connect-up
their hungry animals.
Soon they’ll be satisfied
and go. Meanwhile
upriver, downriver, imagine, quick
in the air,
in flesh, in a blue
swarm of
flies, our knowledge of
the graceful
deer skips easily across
the surface.
Dismembered, remembered,
it’s finally
alive. Imagine
the body
a part of,
these men along the lush
green banks
trying to slip in
and pass
for the natural world.
Jorie Graham
Said, Pull her up a bit will you, Mac, I want to unload there.
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first serve.
Said, Give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own bumper.
Then the usher came out and got into the act:
Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space, sir.
Said, For God’s sake, is this still a free country or what?
You go back and take care of Gary Cooper’s horse
And leave me handle my own car.
Saw them unloading the lame old lady,
Ducked out under the wheel and gave her an elbow,
Said, All you needed to do was just explain;
Reason, Reason is my middle name.
Josephine Miles
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin – I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Walt Whitman
When my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
(For graves have learned that woman-head
To be to more than one a bed)
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then, he that digs us up, will bring
Us, to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men;
And since at such time, miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.
First, we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what wee loved, nor why,
Difference of sex no more we knew,
Than our guardian angels doe;
Coming and going, wee
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne’r touched the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free:
These miracles we did; but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
John Donne
In paradise the work week is fixed at thirty hours
salaries are higher prices steadily go down
manual labour is not tiring (because of reduced gravity)
chopping wood is no harder than typing
the social system is stable and the rulers are wise
really in paradise one is better off than in whatever country
At first it was to have been different
luminous circles choirs and degrees of abstraction
but they were not able to separate exactly
the soul from the flesh and so it would come here
with a drop of fat a thread of muscle
it was necessary to face the consequences
to mix a grain of the absolute with a grain of clay
one more departure from doctrine the last departure
only John foresaw it: you will be resurrected in the flesh
not many behold God
he is only for those of 100 per cent pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about miracles and floods
some day God will be seen by all
when it will happen nobody knows
As it is now every Saturday at noon
sirens sweetly bellow
and from the factories go the heavenly proletarians
awkwardly under their arms they carry their wings like
violins
Zbigniew Herbert, trans.
by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker
Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can,
An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man;
As an actor, confest without rival to shine,
As a wit, if not first, in the very first line,
Yet with talents like these, and an excellent heart,
The man had his failings, a dupe to his art;
Like an ill judging beauty, his colours he spread,
And beplaister’d, with rouge, his own natural red.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting,
’Twas only that, when he was off, he was acting:
With no reason on earth to go out of his way,
He turn’d and he varied full ten times a day;
Tho’ secure of our hearts, yet confoundedly sick,
If they were not his own by finessing and trick,
He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack;
For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back.
Of praise, a mere glutton, he swallowed what came,
And the puff of a dunce, he mistook it for fame;
’Till his relish grown callous, almost to disease,
Who pepper’d the highest, was surest to please.
But let us be candid, and speak out our mind,
If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind.
Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave,
What a commerce was yours, while you got and you gave?
How did Grub-street re-echo the shouts that you rais’d,
While he was beroscius’d, and you were beprais’d?
But peace to his spirit, wherever it flies,
To act as an angel, and mix with the skies:
Those poets, who owe their best fame to his skill,
Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will.
Old Shakespeare, receive him, with praise and with love,
And Beaumonts and Bens be his Kellys above.
Oliver Goldsmith
Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.
I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
Charles Wright
I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don’t know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.
But this lawn has been leveled for looking,
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?
My feet are the primitives here.
As for the rest – ah, the air now
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing
But news of a breeze.
Rita Dove
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.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
There were three sisters fair and bright,
Jennifer, Gentle and Rosemary,
And they three loved one valiant knight –
As the dow flies over the mulberry-tree.
The eldest sister let him in,
And barr’d the door with a silver pin.
The second sister made his bed,
And placed soft pillows under his head.
The youngest sister that same night
Was resolved for to wed wi’ this valiant knight.
‘And if you can answer questions three,
O then, fair maid, I’ll marry wi’ thee.
‘O what is louder nor a horn,
Or what is sharper nor a thorn?
‘Or what is heavier nor the lead,
Or what is better nor the bread?
‘Or what is longer nor the way,
Or what is deeper nor the sea?’ –
‘O shame is louder nor a horn,
And hunger is sharper nor a thorn.
‘O sin is heavier nor the lead,
The blessing ’s better nor the bread.
‘O the wind is longer nor the way
And love is deeper nor the sea.’
‘You have answer’d aright my questions three,
Jennifer, Gentle and Rosemary;
And now, fair maid, I’ll marry wi’ thee,
As the dow flies over the mulberry-tree.’
Anon.
The road to the burn
Is pails, gossip, gray linen.
The road to the shore
Is salt and tar.
We call the track to the peats
The kestrel road.
The road to the kirk
Is a road of silences.
Ploughmen’s feet
Have beaten a road to the lamp and barrel.
And the road from the shop
Is loaves, sugar, paraffin, newspapers, gossip.
Tinkers and shepherds
Have the whole round hill for a road.
George Mackay Brown
There was this empty birdcage in the garden.
And in it, to amuse myself, I had hung
pseudo-Oriental birds constructed of
glass and tin bits and paper, that squeaked sadly
as the wind sometimes disturbed them. Suspended
in melancholy disillusion they sang
of things that had never happened, and never
could in that cage of artificial existence.
The twittering of these instruments lamenting
their absent lives resembled threnodies
torn from a falling harp, till the cage filled with
engineered regret like moonshining cobwebs
as these constructions grieved over not existing.
The children fed them with flowers. A sudden gust
and without sound lifelessly one would die
scattered in scraps like debris. The wire doors
always hung open, against their improbable
transfiguration into, say, chaffinches
or even more colourful birds. Myself I found
the whole game charming, let alone the children.
And then, one morning – I do not record a
matter of cosmic proportions, I assure you,
not an event to flutter the Volscian dovecotes –
there, askew among those constructed images
like a lost soul electing to die in Rome,
its feverish eye transfixed, both wings fractured,
lay – I assure you, Catullus – a young sparrow.
Not long for this world, so heavily breathing
one might have supposed this cage his destination
after labouring past seas and holy skies
whence, death not being known there, he had flown.
Of course, there was nothing to do. The children
brought breadcrumbs, brought water, brought tears in their
eyes perhaps to restore him, that shivering panic
of useless feathers, that tongue-tied little gossip,
that lying flyer. So there, among its gods
that moaned and whistled in a little wind,
flapping their paper anatomies like windmills,
wheeling and bowing dutifully to the
divine intervention of a child’s forefinger,
there, at rest and at peace among its monstrous
idols, the little bird died. And, for my part,
I hope the whole unimportant affair is
quickly forgotten. The analogies are too trite.
George Barker
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Leigh Hunt
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.
Charlotte Mew
Someone has folded a coat under the boy’s head, someone else, an
Arab businessman in not very good French,
is explaining to the girl, who seems to have discovered, like this, in
the crowded Métro,
her lover is epileptic, that something must be done to keep the boy
from swallowing his tongue:
he works a billfold between the rigidly clenched teeth as the kneeling
girl silently looks on,
her expression of just-contained terror transfiguring her, generalizing
her almost to the mythic,
the very image of our wonder at what can befall the most ordinary
afternoon of early love.
The spasms quiet, the boy, his left ear scarlet from rubbing the wool,
comes to, looks up at the girl,
and she, as the rest of us begin to move away, hesitates, then lays her
cheek lightly on his brow.
C. K. Williams
Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated
Should seem ‘a cuckoo-song,’ as thou dost treat it,
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Belovèd, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, ‘Speak once more – thou lovest!’ Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me – toll
The silver iterance! – only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘This night shall thy soul be required of thee’
My soul is never required of me
It always has to be somebody else of course
Will my soul be required of me tonight perhaps?
(I often wonder what it will be like
To have one’s soul required of one
But all I can think of is the Out-Patients’ Department –
‘Are you Mrs Briggs, dear?’
No, I am Scorpion.)
I should like my soul to be required of me, so as
To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea
I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must
Be no cow, person or house to be seen.
Sea and grass must be quite empty
Other souls can find somewhere else.
O Lord God please come
And require the soul of thy Scorpion
Scorpion so wishes to be gone.
Stevie Smith
Grey mountains, sea and sky. Even the misty
seawind is grey. I walked on lichened rock
in a kind of late assessment, call it peace.
Then the anemones, scarlet, gouts of blood.
There is a word I need, and the earth was speaking.
I cannot hear. These seaflowers are too bright.
Kneeling on rock, I touch them through cold water.
My fingers meet some hungering gentleness.
A newborn child’s lips moved so at my breast.
I woke, once, with my palm across your mouth.
The word is: ever. Why add salt to salt
Blood drop by drop among the rocks they shine.
Anemos, wind. The spirit, where it will.
Not flowers, no, animals that must eat or die.
Gwen Harwood
Instead of burning the book or getting its value
They hid it and were silent, even at home,
So that the history of that lost year
Remained for each one her own delusion.
As the memory faded they had to live.
No one would buy their blood, but they sold
Their hair, the milk from their breasts,
Their signatures on slips of ravelled paper,
The grazing as far as the drawing-room windows
And at last the fresh fine grass
That had started to grow under the first arch
Of the bridge beside the burnt-out paper-mill.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
It is small and no more visible than a cricket
in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade,
as all dwarfs do. It lodges between
granite blocks, between serviceable
truths. It even fits under
a bandage, under adhesive. Neither customs officers
nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between
hymns, between alliances, it hides itself.
It camps in the Rocky Mountains of the skull.
An eternal refugee. It is I and I,
with the fearful hope that I have found at last
a friend, am it. But the self
is so lonely, so distrustful, it does not
accept anyone, even me.
It clings to historical events
no less tightly than water to a glass.
It could fill a Neolithic jar.
It is insatiable, it wants to flow
in aqueducts, it thirsts for newer and newer vessels.
It wants to taste space without walls,
diffuse itself, diffuse itself. Then it fades away
like desire, and in the silence of an August
night you hear only crickets patiently
conversing with the stars.
Adam Zagajewski, trans. by Clare Cavanagh
I wanted to teach him the names of flowers,
Self-heal and centaury; on the long acre
Where cattle never graze, bog asphodel.
Could I love someone so gone in the head
And, as they say, was I leading him on?
He’d slept in the cot until he was twelve
Because of his babyish ways, I suppose,
Or the lack of a bed: hadn’t his father
Gambled away all but rushy pasture?
His skull seemed to be hammered like a wedge
Into his shoulders, and his back was hunched,
Which gave him an almost scholarly air.
But he couldn’t remember the things I taught:
Each name would hover above its flower
Like a butterfly unable to alight.
That day I pulled a cuckoo-pint apart
To release the giddy insects from their cell.
Gently he slipped his hand between my thighs.
I wasn’t frightened; and still I don’t know why,
But I ran from him in tears to tell them.
I heard how every day for one whole week
He was flogged with a blackthorn, then tethered
In the hayfield. I might have been the cow
Whose tail he would later dock with shears,
And he the ram tangled in barbed wire
That he stoned to death when they set him free.
Michael Longley
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D. H. Lawrence
Let us be serious now, says the teacher,
Inserting a pause in the hot afternoon
As she steeples her fingers and waits.
It’s hard not to look at the snow
That prolongs the blue end of the day,
Not to think of it gathered
In alleys and gardens across the flat town
For a footprint, but this is Miss Garvin
And those are her fingers,
And though her long nails are a vanity
None of the sisters approves,
She speaks as they speak, for a power
That means us to answer the serious question
We have not been asked, that we cannot imagine
Or fail to be wrong in attempting:
Therefore we are serious now, as we wonder
Who might be the shameful example
To prove the unspecified point.
It may lie in the fork of a crocus
Or bury a jamjar left out on the step,
Or fall in its passion for detail
On two unburnt coals in the grate,
But the snow cannot help or survive
In the heat of the serious moment,
The void of all content
Where something, as ever, is wrong.
Across the yard the boilers roar.
Good children, we long to be serious well,
To multiply the word on slates,
To raise our voices in its name
And wear its ash with modesty.
We slip our hands behind the pipes
And turn them into gloves of pain.
Sean O’Brien
It is a cramped little state with no foreign policy,
Save to be thought inoffensive. The grammar of the language
Has never been fathomed, owing to the national habit
Of allowing each sentence to trail off in confusion.
Those who have visited Scusi, the capital city,
Report that the railway-route from Schuldig passes
Through country best described as unrelieved.
Sheep are the national product. The faint inscription
Over the city gates may perhaps be rendered,
‘I’m afraid you won’t find much of interest here.’
Census-reports which give the population
As zero are, of course, not to be trusted,
Save as reflecting the natives’ flustered insistence
That they do not count, as well as their modest horror
Of letting one’s sex be known in so many words.
The uniform grey of the nondescript buildings, the absence
Of churches or comfort-stations, have given observers
An odd impression of ostentatious meanness,
And it must be said of the citizens (muttering by
In their ratty sheepskins, shying at cracks in the sidewalk)
That they lack the peace of mind of the truly humble.
The tenor of life is careful, even in the stiff
Unsmiling carelessness of the border-guards
And douaniers, who admit, whenever they can,
Not merely the usual carloads of deodorant
But gypsies, g-strings, hasheesh, and contraband pigments.
Their complete negligence is reserved, however,
For the hoped-for invasion, at which time the happy people
(Sniggering, ruddily naked, and shamelessly drunk)
Will stun the foe by their overwhelming submission,
Corrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff,
Usurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods,
And bring about the collapse of the whole empire.
Richard Wilbur
Perhaps, long hence, when I have passed away,
Some other’s feature, accent, thought like mine,
Will carry you back to what I used to say,
And bring some memory of your love’s decline.
Then you may pause awhile and think, ‘Poor jade!’
And yield a sigh to me – as ample due,
Not as the tittle of a debt unpaid
To one who could resign her all to you
And thus reflecting, you will never see
That your thin thought, in two small words conveyed,
Was no such fleeting phantom-thought to me,
But the Whole Life wherein my part was played;
And you amid its fitful masquerade
A Thought – as I in your life seem to be!
Thomas Hardy
Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pinestraw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say I have heard tell
That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There’s this thing that’s only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can’t live his eyes
Are open but you can’t stand to look
I heard from somebody who …
But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep child may
Be saying saying
I am here, in my father’s house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
Of sobbing of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,
In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring. From dark grass I came straight
To my father’s house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun’s grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields they go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
James Dickey
I dream to save you
I must leap from an ocean pier
into water of uncertain depth
You flail below me in a business suit
Knowing I must jump I frown
Knowing we will drown together
Knowing the dark sea will bloom for a moment
with the red hibiscus I refuse to wear
over either ear
Ellen Gilchrist
O Love, be fed with apples while you may,
And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,
Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:
Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head,
Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,
That shivering glory not to be despised.
Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark – a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.
Robert Graves
O Rose thou art sick
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William Blake
My father used to say,
‘Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat –
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth –
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.’
Nor was he insincere in saying, ‘Make my house your inn’.
Inns are not residences.
Marianne Moore
Slim Greer went to heaven;
St. Peter said, ‘Slim,
You been a right good boy.’
An’ he winked at him.
‘You been a travelin’ rascal
In yo day.
You kin roam once mo’;
Den you comes to stay.
‘Put dese wings on yo’ shoulders,
An’ save yo’ feet.’
Slim grin, and he speak up,
‘Thankye, Pete.’
Den Peter say, ‘Go
To Hell an’ see,
All dat is doing, and
Report to me.
How everything go.’
Slim say, ‘I be seein’ yuh
On de late watch, bo.’
Slim got to cavortin’
Swell as you choose,
Like Lindy in de Spirit
Of St. Louis Blues.
He flew an’ he flew,
Till at last he hit
A hanger wid de sign readin’
DIS IS IT.
Den he parked his wings,
An’ strolled aroun’,
Gittin’ used to his feet
On de solid ground.
Big bloodhound came aroarin’
Like Niagry Falls,
Sicked on by white devils
In overhalls.
Now Slim warn’t scared,
Cross my heart, it’s a fac’,
An de dog went on a bayin’
Some po’ devil’s track.
Den Slim saw a mansion
An’ walked right in;
De Devil looked up
Wid a sickly grin.
Fo’ you, Mr. Greer,
How it happen you comes
To visit here?’
Slim say – ‘Oh, jes’ thought
I’d drop by a spell.’
‘Feel at home, seh, an’ here’s
De keys to hell.’
Den he took Slim around
An’ showed him people
Raisin’ hell as high as
De First Church Steeple.
Lots of folks fightin’
At de roulette wheel,
Like old Rampart Street,
Or leastwise Beale.
Showed him bawdy houses
An’ cabarets,
Slim thought of New Orleans
An’ Memphis days.
Each devil was busy
Wid a devilish broad,
An’ Slim cried, ‘Lawdy,
Lawd, Lawd, Lawd.’
Took him in a room
Where Slim see
De preacher wid a brownskin
On each knee.
Going everywhere,
Wid a passel of devils
Stretched dead drunk there.
Den he took him to de furnace
Dat some devils was firing,
Hot as hell, an’ Slim start
A mean presspirin’.
White devils, wid pitchforks
Threw black devils on,
Slim thought he’d better
Be gittin’ along.
An’ he says – ‘Dis makes
Me think of home –
Vicksburg, Little Rock, Jackson,
Waco and Rome.’
Den de devil gave Slim
De big Ha Ha;
An’ turned into a cracker,
Wid a sheriff’s star.
Slim ran fo’ his wings,
Lit out from de groun’
Hauled it back to St. Peter,
Safety boun’.
St. Peter said, ‘Well,
You got back quick.
How’s de devil? An’ what’s
His latest trick?’
I really cain’t tell,
The place was Dixie
That I took for hell.’
Then Peter say, ‘You must
Be crazy, I vow,
Where’n hell dja think Hell was,
Anyhow?
‘Git on back to de yearth,
Cause I got de fear,
You’se a leetle too dumb,
Fo’ to stay up here … ’
Sterling Brown
In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year;
And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
He will assume that you have Heard –
A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He’ll sigh and give his Branch a Hug;
Then off again to Sleep he goes,
Still swaying gently by his Toes,
And you just know he knows he knows.
Theodore Roethke
My nipples tick
like little bombs of blood.
Someone is walking
in the yard outside.
I don’t know why
Our Lord was crucified.
A really good fuck
makes me feel like custard.
Selima Hill
To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall
The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall,
As if he grew there, house and all,
Together.
Within that house secure he hides
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides
Of Weather.
Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting pow’r is such,
He shrinks into his house with much
Displeasure.
Where’er he dwells, he dwells alone,
Except himself has chatells none,
Well satisfied to be his own
Whole treasure.
Thus hermit-like his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meet one, only feeds
The faster.
Who seeks him, must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combined),
If, finding it, he fail to find
Its master.
William Cowper
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Louis MacNeice
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
H. W. Longfellow
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Soldiers who wish to be a hero
Are practically zero.
But those who wish to be civilians,
Jesus, they run into millions.
Anon.
At midnight tears
Run into your ears.
Louise Bogan
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
e. e. cummings
Frae bank to bank, frae wood to wood I rin
Owrhailit with my feeble fantasie
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree
Or til a read owrblawin with the wind.
Twa gods guides me: the ane of them is blin,
Yea, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The nixt a wife ingenerit of the sea
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.
Unhappie is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air,
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn;
That feedis in his hairt a mad desire,
And follows on a woman throu the fire,
Led by a blin, and teachit by a bairn.
Mark Alexander Boyd
Why so pale and wan fond Lover?
Prithee why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevaile?
Prithee why so pale?
Why so dull and mute young Sinner?
Prithee why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing doo’t?
Prithee why so mute?
Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of her selfe shee will not Love,
Nothing can make her,
The Devill take her.
Sir John Suckling
There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see –
Then he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red,
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England –
So he stood in his shoes
And he wondered
He wondered,
He stood in his Shoes
and he wondered.
John Keats
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos
of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find
the Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
D. H. Lawrence
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
W. B. Yeats
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Czesław Miłosz
Sebastian Arrurruz: 1868–1922
Ten years without you. For so it happens.
Days make their steady progress, a routine
That is merciful and attracts nobody.
Already, like a disciplined scholar,
I piece fragments together, past conjecture
Establishing true sequences of pain;
For so it is proper to find value
In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored:
The long-lost words of choice and valediction.
‘One cannot lose what one has not possessed.’
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.
Oh my dear one, I shall grieve for you
For the rest of my life with slightly
Varying cadence, oh my dear one.
Half-mocking the half-truth, I note
‘The wild brevity of sensual love’.
I am shaken, even by that.
It is to him I write, it is to her
I speak in contained silence. Will they be touched
By the unfamiliar passion between them?
What other men do with other women
Is for me neither orgy nor sacrament
Nor a language of foreign candour
But is mere occasion or chance distance
Out of which you might move and speak my name
As I speak yours, bargaining with sleep’s
Miscellaneous gods for as much
As I can have: an alien landscape,
The dream where you are always to be found.
A workable fancy. Old petulant
Sorrow comes back to us, metamorphosed
And semi-precious. Fortuitous amber.
As though this recompensed our deprivation.
See how each fragment kindles as we turn it,
At the end, into the light of appraisal.
Love, oh my love, it will come
Sure enough. A storm
Broods over the dry earth all day.
At night the shutters throb in its downpour.
The metaphor holds; is a snug house.
You are outside, lost somewhere. I find myself
Devouring verses of stranger passion
And exile. The exact words
Are fed into my blank hunger for you.
I imagine, as I imagine us
Each time more stylized more lovingly
Detailed, that I am not myself
But someone I might have been: sexless,
Indulgent about art, relishing
Let us say the well-schooled
Postures of St Anthony or St Jerome,
Those peaceful hermaphrodite dreams
Through which the excess of memory
Pursues its own abstinence.
There would have been things to say, quietness
That could feed on our lust, refreshed
Trivia, the occurrences of the day;
And at night my tongue in your furrow.
Without you I am mocked by courtesies
And chat, where satisfied women push
Dutifully toward some unneeded guest
Desirable features of conversation.
So, remotely, in your part of the world:
the ripe glandular blooms, and cypresses
shivering with heat (which we have borne
also, in our proper ways) I turn my mind
towards delicate pillage, the provenance
of shards glazed and unglazed, the three
kinds of surviving grain. I hesitate amid
circumstantial disasters. I gaze at the
authentic dead.
Roughly-silvered leaves that are the snow
On Ararat seen through those leaves.
The sun lays down a foliage of shade.
A drinking-fountain pulses its head
Two or three inches from the troughed stone.
An old woman sucks there, gripping the rim.
Why do I have to relive, even now,
Your mouth, and your hand running over me
Deft as a lizard, like a sinew of water?
You ventured occasionally –
As though this were another’s house –
Not intimate but an acquaintance
Flaunting her modest claim; like one
Idly commiserated by new-mated
Lovers rampant in proper delight
When all their guests have gone.
Scarcely speaking: it becomes as a
Coolness between neighbours. Often
There is this orgy of sleep. I wake
To caress propriety with odd words
And enjoy abstinence in a vocation
Of now-almost-meaningless despair.
Geoffrey Hill
O lovely O most charming pug
Thy gracefull air & heavenly mug
The beauties of his mind do shine
And every bit is shaped so fine
Your teeth is whiter than the snow
You are a great buck & a bow
Your eyes are of so fine a shape
More like a christains then an ape
His cheeks is like the roses blume
Your hair is like the ravens plume
His noses cast is of the roman
He is a very pretty weomen
I could not get a rhyme for roman
And was oblidged to call it weoman
Marjory Fleming
The cold transparent ham is on my fork –
It hardly rains – and hark the bell! – ding-dingle –
Away! Three thousand feet at gravel work,
Mocking a Vauxhall shower! – Married and Single
Crush – rush; – Soak’d Silks with wet white Satin mingle.
Hengler! Madame! round whom all bright sparks lurk,
Calls audibly on Mr and Mrs Pringle
To study the Sublime, & c. – (vide Burke)
All Noses are upturn’d! – Whish – ish! – On high
The rocket rushes – trails – just steals in sight –
Then droops and melts in bubbles of blue light –
And Darkness reigns – Then balls flare up and die –
Wheels whiz – smack crackers – serpents twist – and then
Back to the cold transparent ham again!
Thomas Hood
The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved – an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.
Emily Dickinson
Give me back my father walking the halls
of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company
with sawdust clinging to his shoes.
Give me back his tape measure and his keys,
his drafting pencil and his order forms;
give me his daydreams on lined paper.
I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me,
my father, who wanted your business,
would squat down at your side
and sketch you a container for it.
Edward Hirsch
So a new similitude is given us
And we say: The soul may be compared
Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers
Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,
Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime
Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere –
A shooting star going back up the darkness.
It flees him and it burns him all at once
Like the single drop that Dives implored
Falling and falling into a great gulf.
Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero
Laid out amidships above scudding water.
Exit, alternatively, a toy of light
Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.
Seamus Heaney
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my
gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d
wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Walt Whitman
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Now that the winter’s gone, the earth hath lost
Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost
Candies the grasse, or castes an ycie creame
Vpon the silver Lake, or Chrystall streame:
But the warme Sunne thawes the benummed Earth,
And makes it tender, gives a sacred birth
To the dead Swallow; wakes in hollow tree
The drowzie Cuckow, and the Humble-Bee.
Now doe a quire of chirping Minstrels bring
In tryumph to the world, the youthfull Spring.
The Vallies, hills, and woods, in rich araye,
Welcome the comming of the long’d for May.
Now all things smile; onely my Love doth lowre:
Nor hath the scalding Noon-day-Sunne the power,
To melt that marble yce, which still doth hold
Her heart congeald, and makes her pittie cold.
The Oxe which lately did for shelter flie
Into the stall, doth now securely lie
In open fields; and love no more is made
By the fire side; but in the cooler shade
Amyntas now doth with his Cloris sleepe
Vnder a Sycamoure, and all things keepe
Time with the season, only shee doth carry
Iune in her eyes, in her heart Ianuary.
Thomas Carew
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
W. B. Yeats
I had come to the edge of the water,
soothed by just looking, idling over it
as if it were a clear barometer
or a mirror, when his reflection
did not appear but I sensed a presence
entering into my concentration
on not being concentrated as he spoke
my name. And though I was reluctant
I turned to meet his face and the shock
is still in me at what I saw. His brow
was blown open above the eye and blood
had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’
he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw
after a football match … What time it was
when I was wakened up I still don’t know
but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it
scared me, like the phone in the small hours,
so I had the sense not to put on the light
but looked out from behind the curtain.
I saw two customers on the doorstep
and an old landrover with the doors open
parked on the street so I let the curtain drop;
but they must have been waiting for it to move
for they shouted to come down into the shop.
She started to cry then and roll round the bed,
lamenting and lamenting to herself,
not even asking who it was. ‘Is your head
astray, or what’s come over you?’ I roared, more
to bring myself to my senses
than out of any real anger at her
for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,
and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.
All the time they were shouting, ‘Shop!
Shop!’ so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat
and went back to the window and called out,
‘What do you want? Could you quieten the racket
or I’ll not come down at all.’ ‘There’s a child not well.
Open up and see what you have got – pills
or a powder or something in a bottle,’
one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath
so I could see his face in the street lamp
and when the other moved I knew them both.
But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet
hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,
lying dead still, whispering to watch out.
At the bedroom door I switched on the light.
‘It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.
Who are they anyway at this time of the night?’
she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.
‘I know them to see,’ I said, but something
made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed
before I went downstairs into the aisle
of the shop. I stood there, going weak
in the legs. I remember the stale smell
of cooked meat or something coming through
as I went to open up. From then on
you know as much about it as I do.’
‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’
‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’
‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,
shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’
‘Not that it is any consolation
but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’
Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood
forgetful of everything now except
whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,
beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight
since you did your courting in that big Austin
you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’
Through life and death he had hardly aged.
There always was an athlete’s cleanliness
shining off him and except for the ravaged
forehead and the blood, he was still that same
rangy midfielder in a blue jersey
and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,
the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.
‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –
forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’
I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive
my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’
And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him
and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.
Seamus Heaney