SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
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…
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.”
Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand,
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
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…
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
The train has stopped for no apparent reason
In the wilds;
A frozen lake is level and fretted over
Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour…
I lift the Lord on high,
Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see
The small birds of the forest lingering by
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
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,
How great unto the living seem the dead!
How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;
How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread
A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,
Leaps down beyond black pines.
Behind — a length of yellow light —
The sun goes down, and over all
These barren reaches by the tide
Such unelusive glories fall,
Lord of my heart’s elation,
Spirit of things unseen,
Be thou my aspiration
For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,
Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;
The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,
