Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
To bow and accept the end
Of a love or or a season?
*****
She always had to burn a light
Beside her attic bed at night.
It gave bad dreams and troubled sleep,
But helped the Lord her soul to keep.
Good gloom on her was thrown away.
It is on me by night or day,
Who have, as I foresee, ahead
The darkest of it still to dread.
Sunbake
Burn
Auburn burn
sunbake redclay
sunbake
The sun doesn’t peer
it stares
and stares
Angry glare, so angry no one
dares
return it
We crouch behind colored lenses
sunbake photogrey
sunbake
“You look to the sun, for he is your taskmaster,
and by him you know the measure of the work
that you have done, and the measure of the work
that remains for you to do”: thus Kinglake.
My daughter, ten or eleven
child of memory eternified: “Dad, it’s hot.”
She hankers for icecream
sunbake milkshake
sunbake
Cooled by the malt
of mercy.
Whomsoever there are–
Whether enemies, than which there is several,
Or friends, than which there is few–
Here me of what I am speak of,
Leaving me promulge.
A great amt. of beauties emplenish the world,
Wherein I would o’erglance upon.
There are those which you go out and exclaim:
“Why! How brim-brim!”
I shall be concerning sank ships
Throughout the entire Endure-Myself,
And may my foes become stumbled.
But I want you should, my dear, transpire–
Always transpire, grace-full thanlike one.
You, most prettier sing-rabbit,
And by never,
And lessermost from beneath not–
Prith, give on’t.
YES!!!
I took a picture of this poem in a volume in a bookstore and have now forgotten the name of the poet, a woman. Anyone know who she is? (The closing parenthesis is wonderful, isn’t it, despite its awfulness?)
mouse turds
not best of mouse
but best sign
of mouse
about this human specimen
know this one
honest thing
about him:
so crooked
he even found a way
to forge
his own signature
a rabbit’s tracks
are straighter
and if he is
where he says he is
you can be sure
he’s lying
Night is fair Virtue’s immemorial friend.
The conscious moon through every distant age
Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall
On Contemplation’s eye her purging ray.
The famed Athenian, he who wooed from heaven
Philosophy the fair, to dwell with men,
And form their manners, not inflame their pride;
While o’er his head, as fearful to molest
His laboring mind, the stars in silence slide,
And seem all gazing on their future guest,
See him soliciting his ardent suit,
In private audience; all the livelong night
Rigid in thought, and motionless he stands,
Nor quits his theme or posture, till the sun
Disturbs his nobler intellectual beam,
And gives him to the tumult of the world.
Eliot had his Ash Wednesday,
But I had his Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,
And a Wednesday of my own.
Volcanic ash farted by some
Unnameable Icelandic volcano (April 2010)
Grounds flyers
In the UK, intending no prophecy, I quote Hecuba’s words as the ash cloud drifts
South and east:
“Nunc trahor exul, inops.”
Clouds of unknowing
Reveal my deordinate self—
Anxiety quietly unmans me.
Aboard a bus, a coach
On a carriage-way,
13 hours, Manchester to Amsterdam
white tulips in a lamplit English village
stretch and harden into white cliffs at Dover
We ferry to Calais.
Conferring in Crewe
Take-away northern industrial village
Ordinary language (philosophy)
In a place consternatingly plain.
No pile of Galaxy chocolate
Can sweeten this ashy mess
Nothing colligates these loose ends.
(“Get me off of this English Roundabout!”)
Oh, Eliot!
“Teach us to care and not to care:
Teach us to sit still
Even among these ashes,
Our peace in his will.”
Well, not so much.
I would like to ask that dumb ox, Thomas
Aquinas, why it is, that when you have said
Something — you said it — then they ask you
A month later if it is true? Of course it is!
It is something about them I think. They think
It is something about me. It adds up
To my thinking I must be what I don’t
Know . . .
— The park is certainly
Tranquil tonight: lovers, like ants
Are scurrying into any old darkness,
Covert for kisses. It makes me feel
Old and lonely. I wish that I were
All of them, not with any one,
Would I exchange my lot, but the entire
Scene has a certain Breughel quality
I would participate in. —
Do I have to repeat
Myself. I really mean it.
I am not saying it again to convince myself
But to convince the repressed conviction
Of yourself. I think. I think. I think it.
When you cannot go further
It is time to go back and wrest
Out of failure some
Thing shining.
As when a child I sat
On the stoop and spoke
The state licenses, the makes
Of autos going somewhere–
To others I leave the fleeting
Memory of myself.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 