Tinkling treble, Rolling bass, High noon teeth In a midnight face, Great long fingers On great big hands, Screaming pedals Where his twelve-shoe lands,
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber
A Night Piece (July, 1863) No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain—a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage.
Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard
When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore, put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your planes and you’ll understand. Here.
They sing their dearest songs— He, she, all of them—yea, Treble and tenor and bass, And one to play; With the candles mooning each face. . . . Ah, no; the years O! How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss— Elders and juniors—aye, Making the pathways neat And the garden gay; And they build a shady seat. . . . Ah, no; the years, the years, See, the white storm-birds wing across.
Soft songs, like birds, die in poison air So my song cannot now be candy. Anger rots the oak and elm; roses are rare, Seldom seen through blind despair.
And my murmur cannot be heard Above the din and damn. The night is full Of buggers and bastards; no moon or stars Light the sky. And my candy is deferred
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