I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground. Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting
Take a statement, the same as yesterday’s dictation: Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake. Creative despair and failure have made their patient. Anyway, I’m afraid I have nothing to say. Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper With against the grain ... Taste has turned away her face Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress At table, barely capable but very vague.
I would have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Peniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes i Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things, And died from lock-jaw, an ironical death.
Were it not for that photograph, disaster in its final stages, matchbox houses coming down, rubble of streets, uprooted trees, lives we somehow could not envision, removed from us and not our own, on distant coasts the fall of night,
Bedfordshire A blue bird showing off its undercarriage En route between our oldest universities Was observed slightly off-course above Woburn In the leafy heart of our sleepiest county: Two cyclists in tandem looked up at the same moment, Like a busy footnote to its asterisk.
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way.
The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.
As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal. I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace, And envy them—they are so far away from me! Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule. And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little, Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write
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.
There is a heaviness between us, Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours. What ash has it come to purify? What disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds?
God of my fathers, but not of mine, You are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one. There is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt. What figure of earth and clay would it have me become?
Sunday again, January thaw back big time. The knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls Sit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy Smoking their dun-filtered cigarettes.
I passed him by at first. From the photograph Peered sepia eyes, blindered, unappeased From a lair of brows and beard: one not amazed At anything, as if to have looked enough Then turned aside worked best for him—as if Night vision was the discipline that eased The weight of what he saw. A man’s gaze posed Too long in the sun goes blank; comes to grief.
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