SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
i twist and gasp
open and close my mouth
searching for air
whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river
i know
the feel of strange hands touching my body
the struggle
In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl
sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.
She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
This is our welfare half
a duplex with mint green
siding shrugged between
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
(a twelve-tone poem)
trite yap show
rosy twit heap
Who is this black coat and tie?
Christian severity etched in the lines
he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man
who believes in work and mission. See
how he rises from the red velvet chair,
He totaled his blue truck —
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and
everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your
glasses to single out what you know is there because
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
Coin Exhibit, British Museum.
Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,
like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,
It left the fiord for the sea — a host
Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,
You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
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,
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
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.
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
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.
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
