Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen the white clouds scudding over Lowell and the white birches the bare white birches along the blear night roads
There is no radical shift of light or redwings calling areas of marsh their territories yet, nor plovers probing for copepods. Only a yellow front-end loader laying out a new berm on the beach, from tubes too heavy to be called hoses, its audience one man and his protesting dog. No frosted
I In a far country, and a distant age, Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth, A boy was born of humble parentage; The stars that shone upon his lonely birth Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame— Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
II ’T is said that on the night when he was born, A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room; Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn, And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom;
I GLOOM! An October like November; August a hundred thousand hours, And all September, A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . . And doom! That then was Antwerp. . . In the name of God, How could they do it? Those souls that usually dived Into the dirty caverns of mines; Who usually hived In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;
Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving much Unvisited, endeavour'd to retrace My life through its first years, and measured back The way I travell'd when I first began To love the woods and fields; the passion yet Was in its birth, sustain'd, as might befal, By nourishment that came unsought, for still, From week to week, from month to month, we liv'd A round of tumult: duly were our games Prolong'd in summer till the day-light fail'd; No chair remain'd before the doors, the bench And threshold steps were empty; fast asleep The Labourer, and the old Man who had sate, A later lingerer, yet the revelry Continued, and the loud uproar: at last,
Against the bright grass the white-knickered players, tense, seize, and attend. A moment ago, outfielders and infielders adjusted their clothing, glanced at the sun and settled
You never wrote the small green book like the poems of Edward Thomas. It was a book I dreamed. But watching the green report of your heart on the monitor it came to me as I stood like one of the doctors in my cap and gown, home, where you've lived like a bachelor at the far end of the house, there is a green diary: the book of the deer, the bear and the elk, with snapshots of Julian and Bob and Harry, old hunting friends dead as the game strung up on poles or drooped across fenders.
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete, And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn, Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind, Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines, (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines? Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds, Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.
Down in the fields all prospers well, But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,
So proudly she came into the subway car all who were not reading their newspapers saw the head high and the slow tread— coat wrinkled and her belongings in a paper bag, face unwashed and the grey hair uncombed;
simple soul, who so early in the morning when only the poorest go to work, stood up in the subway and outshouting the noise:
Sprinting across the freeway just ahead of them having set his left foot down directly onto the pavement from the ledge of the cement divide and edging his other leg forward deliberately—caught the way sports pages show an athlete with muscles condensed in the effort of crossing through a particular space—and then she sees the cars coming towards him giving off that early morning shine across their hoods almost colorless but precipitous in the four-lane parallel rush of metal and cannot tell if any driver straining into the distance further ahead has seen him or possibly has caught that glint off the long black flashlight he appears to carry with its up-beam turned on full and faintly visible due to the angle of early sun falling over the midwestern plains fanning out in every direction away from the sudden view of the airport hub’s acclaimed architectural design.
She sees the brief alignment of his body methodically finding its way across the freeway lanes blue baseball cap fit snugly over his head to just above the hairline where now dusky skin of his neck breaks into the picture. He’s made it halfway,
His mother stepped about her kitchen, complaining in a low voice; all day his father sat stooped at a sewing machine. When he went to high school Webber was in his class. Webber lived in a neighborhood where the houses are set in lawns with trees beside the gutters. The boys who live there, after school, take their skates and hockey sticks and play in the streets until nightfall.
1 Who will honor the city without a name If so many are dead and others pan gold Or sell arms in faraway countries?
What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent— Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge?
This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole,
In ’29 before the dust storms sandblasted Indianapolis, we believed in the milk company. Milk came in glass bottles. We spread dye-colored butter, now connected to cancer. We worked seven to seven with no overtime pay;
The coltish horseplay of the locker room, Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls, With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat, Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs, In some such setting of thick basement pipes And janitorial realities
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