SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
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
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
ONE
Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
…
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
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
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
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;
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
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.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
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
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
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,
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you’ve taken to supply,
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
