Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants
'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang,
Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267) While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
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;
We are both strong, dark, bright men, though perhaps you might not notice, finding two figures flat against the landscape like the shadowed backs of mountains.
Which would not be far from wrong, for though we both have on Western clothes and he is seated on a yellow spool of emptied and forgotten telephone cable
I GLOOM! An October like November; August a hundred thousand hours, And all September, A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . . And doom! That then was Antwerp. . . In the name of God, How could they do it? Those souls that usually dived Into the dirty caverns of mines; Who usually hived In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;
I'm sitting here on the old patio beside your absence. It is a black well. We'd be playing, now. . . I can hear Mama yell "Boys! Calm down!" We'd laugh, and off I'd go to hide where you'd never look. . . under the stairs, in the hall, the attic. . . Then you'd do the same. Miguel, we were too good at that game. Everything would always end in tears.
Then was the grown-up world of tall decision, Its beauty of late nights denied a child; World of bewildering gifts, and strange derision, Alien alike whether it frowned or smiled, Yet your least wish was governed by its laws. The landscape and the weather both were odd, Exploding with effects that hid a cause Serene and lonely as the Will of God.
Which represents you, as my bones do, waits, all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come, as it always does, between breaths, between nights of no wind and days of the nulled sun. And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate faceless fields, a white road drawn
Some seventy years later your father, sitting at your table over wine he savors, last rays mellow- ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt, Rifka. “Just naming her shoots rifles off again inside the morning square, rifles she aimed into the air
Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak. This is America calling: The mirroring of state to state, Of voice to voice on the wires, The force of colloquial greetings like golden Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.
In the fog which surrounds the trees, the leaves are stripped—leaves defaced already by slow oxidation, deadened by the sap's out-seeping for flowers' and fruits' gain, since the harsh heats of August made of them a less.
In the bark, vertical furrows crease and slit where dampness drains to the earth's base, indifferent to the living citizens of the trunk.
Flowers scattered, fruit conferred. Since youth, this relinquishing of breathing attributes and body parts has become for the trees a standard practice.
August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then. We walk
My desk is cleared of the litter of ages; Before me glitter the fair white pages; My fountain pen is clean and filled, And the noise of the office has long been stilled. Roget’s Thesaurus is at my hand, And I’m ready to do some work that’s grand, Dignified, eminent, great, momentous, Memorable, worthy of note, portentous, Beautiful, paramount, vital, prime, Stirring, eventful, august, sublime. For this is the way, I have read and heard, That authors look for the fitting word. All of the proud ingredients mine To build, like Marlowe, the mighty line. But never a line from my new-filled pen
This seablue fir that rode the mountain storm Is swaddled here in splints of tin to die. Sofas around in chubby velvet swarm; Onlooking cabinets glitter with flat eye; Here lacquer in the branches runs like rain And resin of treasure starts from every vein.
Light is a dancer here and cannot rest. No tanagers or jays are half so bright
We had a city also. Hand in hand Wandered happy as travellers our own land. Murmured in turn the hearsay of each stone Or, where a legend faltered, lived our own. The far-seen obelisk my father set (Pinning two roads forever where they met) Waved us in wandering circles, turned our tread Where once morass engulfed that passionate head.
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.
Comment form: