Rotting in the wet gray air the railroad depot stands deserted under still green trees. In the fields cold begins an end.
There were other too-long-postponed departures. They left, finally, because of well water gone rank, the smell of fungus, the chill of rain in chimneys.
How did you come How did I come here Now it is ours, how did it come to be In so many presences? Some I know swept from the sea, wind and sea, Took up the right wave in their fins and seal suits, Rode up over the town to this shore Shining and sleek
Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.— Confess. St. August. Earth, ocean, air, belovèd brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember As time W. C. Williams dies and we are Back from a hard two years in Guatemala Where the meager provision of being Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones Of two coffee plantations has managed Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in Horror of bank giving way as she and her
Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland
The messenger runs, not carrying the news of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting, has always been running, the wind before and behind him, across the turning back of earth, leaving his tracks across the plains, his ropes hanging from the ledges of mountains; for centuries, millennia, he has been running carrying whatever it is that cannot be
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,
My mind is like a clamorous market-place. All day in wind, rain, sun, its babel wells; Voice answering to voice in tumult swells. Chaffering and laughing, pushing for a place, My thoughts haste on, gay, strange, poor, simple, base; This one buys dust, and that a bauble sells: But none to any scrutiny hints or tells The haunting secrets hidden in each sad face.
The clamour quietens when the dark draws near; Strange looms the earth in twilight of the West, Lonely with one sweet star serene and clear, Dwelling, when all this place is hushed to rest, On vacant stall, gold, refuse, worst and best, Abandoned utterly in haste and fear.
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
Off Highway 106 At Cherrylog Road I entered The ’34 Ford without wheels, Smothered in kudzu, With a seat pulled out to run Corn whiskey down from the hills,
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them— Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last. And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
They are the same aren’t they, The presumed landscape and the dream of home
There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion, Already old eight hundred years ago. It was abandoned and in disrepair But it was called St. Mary of the Angels For it was known to be the haunt of angels, Often at night the country people Could hear them singing there.
Think not this paper comes with vain pretense To move your pity, or to mourn th’ offense. Too well I know that hard obdurate heart; No softening mercy there will take my part, Nor can a woman’s arguments prevail, When even your patron’s wise example fails. But this last privilege I still retain; Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain.
Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk— Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood Tonite at seven walked out past garbage cans chained to concrete anchors Walked under black painted fire escapes, giant castiron plate covering a hole in ground —Crossed the street, traffic lite red, thirteen bus roaring by liquor store, past corner pharmacy iron grated, past Coca Cola & Mylai posters fading scraped on brick Past Chinese Laundry wood door’d, & broken cement stoop steps For Rent hall painted green & purple Puerto Rican style
All around the altar, huge lianas curled, unfurled the dark green of their leaves to complement the red of blood spilled there—a kind of Christmas decoration, overhung with heavy vines and over them, the stars. When the angels came, messengers like birds but with the oiled flesh of men, they hung
I should like to live in a sunny town like this Where every afternoon is half-day closing And I would wait at the terminal for the one train Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving.
At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye. You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop.
Tropical nights in Central America, with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes and lights from presidential palaces, barracks and sad curfew warnings. "Often while smoking a cigarette I've decided that a man should die," says Ubico smoking a cigarette . . . In his pink-wedding-cake palace
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