SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
The use of like or as to compare one thing to another, as Michael Ondaatje writes “Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed / through a glass tube.”
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant, and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
dont worry yr eyes
dont worry yr brain man th snow is
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
Sometimes a voice — have you heard this? —
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
Constantly risking absurdity
…
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
The air smells of rhubarb, occasional
Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,
Undulant hurt, so body snaps…
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
its brown warmth now that we recognize them
In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.
Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a…
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and…
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred
What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad…
I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple…
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
O quam te memorem virgo...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,
Leaps down beyond black pines.
Behind — a length of yellow light —
