Day and Night in Virginia and Boston

D
After three months, Virginia is still a frontier.
Late at night, I close the door
on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills
and the network affiliates sign off one by one.
Now the country stations, tuning up like crickets
on radios in scattered valley kitchens:
Har yall this evenin folks!
(Wanting to say ‘I’m real fine’ I whisper ‘Wow.’)
Got your Green Hill chicory perkin’? An army
of women, straightened and ironed and blued
like Picasso’s ironer—jerking coffeecups
back with one gesture, hips pressed to sinks.
Their suspendered husbands are reading—the paper? the Bible?
And it’s Jesus for you and for me, till midnight—the anthem—
and one soaped hand jerks out, and their lighted lives recede
to kitchens on the moon’s dark side, Mozart rising . . .
Daytimes, in post office, gas station, greasy spoon,
I don’t see them anywhere, it makes me nervous.
Black faces down here look “colored.”
I am afraid of the other, red faces.

Take my first job in Boston,
the outgoing typist said, ‘You’ve got
to know the foms, we use so many foms.’
And I said O why farms?
I thought law firms had torts.
A tort, I thought, was like vous avez tort.
But I was wrong about the farms,
and after the Cardinal’s Vietnam speech
one of the girls said, ‘Think you’re smat with that accent?’

Still, nothing soothes me, sometimes,
like American voices, softened with distance,
with nearness, as murmurs in a darkened Greyhound:
‘It sure has been a scorcher.’ ‘Where you folks from?’
I keep yawning, lightworlds off in the dark . . .
Sometimes my lonesome standard english sleeps:
The varied and ample land, the North and South in the light,
and the voices of Earth and moon swell in my helmet
with prairie inflections, soft twangs of outer speech—
‘You’re looking real good,’ says Earth
‘—ain’t that somethin’?’
‘Roger. No sweat. Out.’
239
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Temporarily in Oxford by Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson
Where they will bury me
I don't know.
Many places might not be
sorry to store me.

The Midwest has right of origin.
Already it has welcomed my mother
to its flat sheets.

The English fens that bore me
Read Poem
0
300
Rating:

Dejection: An Ode by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
(Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence)
I
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Read Poem
0
296
Rating:

His Wish to God by Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick
I would to God, that mine old age might have
Before my last, but here a living grave;
Some one poor almshouse, there to lie, or stir,
Ghost-like, as in my meaner sepulchre;
A little piggin, and a pipkin by,
To hold things fitting my necessity,
Which, rightly us'd, both in their time and place,
Might me excite to fore, and after, grace.
Read Poem
0
289
Rating:

To Lysander by Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn
(On some Verses he writ, and asking more for his Heart than ‘twas worth.) I
Take back that Heart, you with such Caution give,
Take the fond valu’d Trifle back;
I hate Love-Merchants that a Trade wou’d drive
Read Poem
0
288
Rating:

The Tower by William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
I

What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
Read Poem
0
369
Rating:

To J. S. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The wind, that beats the mountain, blows
More softly round the open wold,
And gently comes the world to those
That are cast in gentle mould.

And me this knowledge bolder made,
Or else I had not dare to flow
In these words toward you, and invade
Read Poem
0
284
Rating:

Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning
Robert Browning
But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
Read Poem
0
420
Rating:

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Read Poem
0
325
Rating:

A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
Read Poem
0
354
Rating:

Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
Read Poem
0
310
Rating:

To - by Sarah Helen Whitman
Sarah Helen Whitman
Vainly my heart had with thy sorceries striven:
It had no refuge from thy love,—no Heaven
But in thy fatal presence;—from afar
It owned thy power and trembled like a star
O’erfraught with light and splendor. Could I deem
How dark a shadow should obscure its beam?—
Could I believe that pain could ever dwell
Where thy bright presence cast its blissful spell?
Read Poem
1
525
Rating:

Remarks on Poetry and the Physical World by Mary Barnard
Mary Barnard
After reading Ash Wednesday
she looked once at the baked beans
and fled. Luncheonless, poor girl,
she observed a kind of poetic Lent—
and I had thought I liked poetry
better than she did.

I do. But to me its most endearing
quality is its unsuitableness;
Read Poem
0
313
Rating:

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand
Mark Strand
for Ros Krauss Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
Read Poem
0
402
Rating:

Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet by Lord Byron (George Gordon)
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,
Our embargo's off at last;
Favourable breezes blowing
Bend the canvass o'er the mast.
From aloft the signal's streaming,
Hark! the farewell gun is fir'd;
Women screeching, tars blaspheming,
Tell us that our time's expir'd.
Read Poem
0
250
Rating:

Ode I, 5: To Pyrrha by Horace
Horace
What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou
In wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas
Rough with black winds, and storms
Unwonted shall admire!
Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
Who, always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee, of flattering gales
Unmindful. Hapless they
To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d
Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
Read Poem
0
246
Rating:

Sonnet 84: While one sere leaf, that parting Autumn yields by Anna Seward
Anna Seward
While one sere leaf, that parting Autumn yields,
Trembles upon the thin, and naked spray,
November, dragging on this sunless day,
Lours, cold and sullen, on the watery fields;
And Nature to the waste dominion yields,
Stripped her last robes, with gold and purple gay —
So droops my life, of your soft beams despoiled,
Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smiled;
And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues
Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain
Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain,
More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse
Than Winter’s grey, and desolate domain
Faded like my lost Youth, that no bright Spring renews.
Read Poem
0
337
Rating:

The Flowers by Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:

Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;
Read Poem
0
279
Rating:

Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.
Read Poem
0
295
Rating:

Song by Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Stranger, you who hide my love
In the curved cheek of a smile
And sleep with her upon a tongue
Of soft lies that beguile,
Your paradisal ecstasy
Is justified is justified
By hunger of the beasts beneath
The overhanging cloud
Read Poem
0
282
Rating:

January 22nd, Missolonghi by Lord Byron (George Gordon)
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
Read Poem
0
260
Rating: