Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.
Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.
O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, [...]
Browsing the archives for the poetry category
9 Mar 10
7 Mar 10
Do you laugh or cry when you hear the poet sing?
“Out of the first warmth of the spring, and out
Of the shine of the hemlocks…” It’s the hemlocks, then,
Swaying above the grasses in the cemetery,
That encourage us in our affair with the world,
We have secret meetings with moss at night.
When the night-singer sang, did you [...]
28 Feb 10
I
The wind through the box-elder trees
Is like rides at dusk on a white horse,
Wars for your country, and fighting the British.
II
I winder if Washington listened to the trees.
All morning I have been sitting in grass,
Higher than my eyes, beneath the trees,
And listening upward, to the wind in the leaves.
Suddenly I realize there is one thing [...]
22 Feb 10
The Irish sunshine is lovely but a Belfast man
last night made a pass at my wife. Henry, who had passed out,
was horrified
to hear this news when he woke. The Irish sunshine
is lovely as it comes and goes. The country is full of con-men
as well as the lovely good.
Saints throng these shores, & ancient practices
continue in [...]
2 Feb 10
Over my head i see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the [...]
31 Jan 10
Endless train on the rails.
The heartbeat singing cla-shunk cla-shunk,
cla-shunk cla-shunk
across the shifting prairie,
down the pass and into the outstretched West
north of Laramie.
My mind goes out of focus,
the daydream meets the world.
The beat of the collar against my neck
in the merciless wind,
the forever prairie, the infinite cla-shunk,
the towering sky,
incomprehensible.
I bet there are places where the endless [...]
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Posted in new poetry, poetry
30 Jan 10
Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it,
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and [...]
27 Jan 10
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said the farmer.
Then we were on the roof [...]
26 Jan 10
Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,
Walking together in the windless orchard
Where the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier.
Again in the room with the sofa hiding the grate,
Look down to the river when the rain is over,
See him turn to the window, hearing our last
Of Captain Ferguson.
It is seen how excellent hands have [...]
21 Jan 10
But the light continues to grow, the eternal disarray of sunrise, and one can now distinguish certain shapes such as haystacks and a clocktower. So it was true, everything was holding its breath because a surprise was on the way. It has already installed itself and begin to give orders: workmen are struggling to raise [...]
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