I tell thee, Dick, where I have been, Where I the rarest things have seen; Oh, things without compare! Such sights again cannot be found In any place on English ground, Be it at wake, or fair.
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket. You are here; your name on a postal box; entrance into another place like vapor. No one knows you. No one speaks to you. All of their cocks stare down their pant legs at the ground. Their cunts are blind. They barely let you through the check-out line. Have a nice day. Plastic or paper?
The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp, And salty light reveals the Mayan School. The Irish hope their names are on the harp, We see the sheep's advertisement for wool, Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp, From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule. Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again.
I Put a sun in Sunday, Sunday. Eleven please ten hoop. Hoop. Cousin coarse in coarse in soap. Cousin coarse in soap sew up. soap. Cousin coarse in sew up soap.
There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!
Whatever city or country road you two are on there are nettles, and the dark invisible elements cling to your skin though you do not cry and you do not scratch your arms at forty-five degree angles
The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more. In one whole year I haven’t learned A blessed thing they pay you for. The blossoms snow down in my hair; The trees and I will soon be bare.
The trees have more than I to spare. The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold; Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told, Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile, And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while. Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest— then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate.
I have had enough— border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress.
We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable— But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
A smudge for the horizon that, on a clear day, shows the hard edge of hills and buildings on the other coast. Anchored boats all head one way: north, where the wind comes from. You can see the storm inflating
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
Those various sounds, consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glasses successively at random— the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two fighting-cocks head to head in stone— like sculptured scimitars repeating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes,
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