In my father’s garden there are two cages. In one is a lion, whichmy father’s slaves brought from the desert of Ninavah; in the otheris a songless sparrow.
Every day at dawn the sparrow calls to the lion, “Good morrow tothee, brother prisoner.”
No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine To keep me from the eagle and the lion, Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine. This goes to show that if you have the wit To be small, common, cute, and live on shit, Though the cage fret kings, you may make free with it.
Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858
It opens as a long lamplit evening with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings: nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills
of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff
and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered and we barely, down in the forested loam, disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding
At night, alone, the animals came and shone. The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals: The lion the man the calf the eagle saying Sanctus which was and is and is to come.
The sleeper watched the people at the waterless wilderness’ edge; The wilderness was made of granite, of thorn, of death, It was the goat which lightened the people praying. The goat went out with sin on its sunken head.
Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye Stand in a land subdued beyond belief. Belief might lend them life again. I try Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief
To see my spellbound fathers in these men Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere, Show but the postures men affected then
From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn. No light appears, though dark has mostly gone, Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills Down the remoter gulleys; pooled, will stay Too low to melt, not yet alive with day. Below the windows, the lawn, matted deep Under its close-cropped tips with dewy sleep,
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