You are a friend then, as I make it out, Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us Will put an ass's head in Fairyland As he would add a shilling to more shillings, All most harmonious, — and out of his Miraculous inviolable increase Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen; And I must wonder what you think of him — All you down there where your small Avon flows By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman. Some, for a guess, would have him riding back To be a farrier there, or say a dyer; Or maybe one of your adept surveyors; Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.
Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen the white clouds scudding over Lowell and the white birches the bare white birches along the blear night roads
let elizur rejoice with the partridge Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his keepers. For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the name of the Lord.
Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar.
Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce,
I think very well of Susan but I do not know her name I think very well of Ellen but which is not the same I think very well of Paul I tell him not to do so I think very well of Francis Charles but do I do so I think very well of Thomas but I do not not do so I think very well of not very well of William I think very well of any very well of him I think very well of him.
This plot of ground facing the waters of this inlet is dedicated to the living presence of Emily Dickinson Wellcome who was born in England; married; lost her husband and with her five year old son sailed for New York in a two-master;
Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow, their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:
I The bartender Has eyes the color of ripe apricots Easy to please as a cash register he Enjoys art and good jokes. Squish Goes the painting Squirt Goes the poem He We Laugh.
II It is not easy to remember that other people died
Come To Sunny Prestatyn Laughed the girl on the poster, Kneeling up on the sand In tautened white satin. Behind her, a hunk of coast, a Hotel with palms Seemed to expand from her thighs and Spread breast-lifting arms.
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,
Whom should I consult? Philosophers Are happy in their homes and seminars. See this one with the mischievous bright childlike Gaze going out through walls and air, A tangent to the bent rays of the star. Hear the chalk splutter, hear the groping voice: Conceive the demiurge in his perpetual Strife with the chaos of the universe,
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.
Fear me, virgin whosoever Taking pride from love exempt, Fear me, slighted. Never, never Brave me, nor my fury tempt: Downy wings, but wroth they beat Tempest even in reason's seat.
Behind the house the upland falls With many an odorous tree— White marbles gleaming through green halls— Terrace by terrace, down and down, And meets the star-lit Mediterranean Sea.
Some say that Chattanooga is the Old name for Lookout Mountain To others it is an uncouth name Used only by the uncivilised Our a-historical period sees it As merely a town in Tennessee To old timers of the Volunteer State
When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will Love has been torn in two.
DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera, good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil he classified darkness, females, and so forth. (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)
Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and
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