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Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There…
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates…
Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face
little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling
against a dust-storm…
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant, and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Sometimes a voice — have you heard this? —
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
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
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…
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
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;
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,
Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,
Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
A boat, beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
