The town is old and very steep A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers, And black-clad people walking in their sleep— A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers To her new grave; and watched from end to end By the great Church above, through the still hours: But in the morning and the early dark The children wake to dart from doors and call
Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling Captive to consciousness, he summons light To all its duties, and assumes the world Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns Like history’s corrosive on his living tree. But all the monsters of his sleep’s dark sea Are tame familiars in the morning sun.
I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha, Red leather wing chair, pony skin trunk under my feet, Sky light above me, Chinese and Indian rugs on the floor. 1 March, 1998, where to begin again?
Over there's the ur-photograph, Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead, Looking hard at four objects— Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase, A universe of form and structure,
The universe constricting in front of his eyes, angelic orders And applications scraped down
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds. Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door. The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red. This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.
Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down. Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor and the French pinball addicts. I am leading a quiet life on lower East Broadway. I am an American.
Dawn comes later and later now, and I, who only a month ago could sit with coffee every morning watching the light walk down the hill to the edge of the pond and place a doe there, shyly drinking,
then see the light step out upon the water, sowing reflections
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
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