There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train, And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor, There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain, And the girl who calls for orders at your door. Strong, sensible, and fit, They're out to show their grit, And tackle jobs with energy and knack. No longer caged and penned up, They're going to keep their end up Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.
There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van, There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat, There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man, And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
I must have passed the crest a while ago And now I am going down. Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know— But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.
All the morning I thought how proud it would be To stand there straight as a queen— Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me. But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.
It was nearly level along the beaten track And the brambles caught in my gown— But it’s no use now to think of turning back, The rest of the way will be only going down.
Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings, lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger. What danger on this island in the middle of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel the lift of wind under their iridescent wings, because they were born to fly, because they have nothing else to do, because wind and water are their elements, their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare, and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake, the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes.
In autumn something urges them toward Texas marshes. They follow their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on. The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient to see and hear whatever coming and going is, losing the self to the victory of stones and trees, of bending sandpit lakes, crescent round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self as to know it as it is known
Lady, take care; for in the diamond eyes Of old old men is figured your undoing; Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going. Flesh hangs like the curtains in a house Long unused, damp as cellars without wine; They are the future of us all, when we Will be dried-leaf-thin, the sour whine
Comment form: