Once, in the city of Kalamazoo, The gods went walking, two and two, With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion, The speaking pony and singing lion. For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart Lived the girl with the innocent heart.
Thenceforth the city of Kalamazoo Was the envied, intimate chum of the sun. He rose from a cave by the principal street. The lions sang, the dawn-horns blew, And the ponies danced on silver feet. He hurled his clouds of love around; Deathless colors of his old heart Draped the houses and dyed the ground.
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills! In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same; The village street its haunted mansion lacks, And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name, And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks— Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
"As certain also of your own poets have said"— (Acts 17.28) Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece")— To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!
Say what you like about Charaxos, that’s a fellow with a fat-bellied ship always in some port or other. What does Zeus care, or the rest of his gang?
Now you’d like me on my knees, crying out to Hera, “Blah, blah, blah, bring him home safe and free of warts,” or blubbering, “Wah, wah, wah, thank you,
I wanted to be sure this was our island so we could walk between the long stars by the sea though your hips are slight and caught in the air like a moth at the end of a river around my arms I am unable to understand the sun your dizzy spells when you form a hand around me on the sand
I offer you my terrible sanity the eternal voice that keeps me from reaching you
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
[Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene: It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth, Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek, And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth, Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi, From Xanthus, my wife's uncle, now at peace: Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name. I may not write it, but I make a cross To show I wait His coming, with the rest, And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.]
I said, "If one should wet his lips with wine, "And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint but the shells came down and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade at 3:30 in the morning, I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan and I went out to live with the rats but the lights were too bright
In prologue let me plainly say I shall not ever come to that discretion where I do not rage to think I grow decrepit, bursten-bellied, bald and toothless, thick of hearing, tremulous of leg, dry and rough-barked as a hemlock slab, the soft rot setting in and all my wheezy dreams the tunnelling
It’s the last day, but I’m keeping the news to myself. If yesterday it made sense for letter carriers To carry letters from door to door, The job still ought to be worth doing. Why tell what I know and risk a walkout? Let firefighters race to the last fire. Let platoons of police set up their last lines So the factions that come to the demonstration Do battle only in words and gestures.
The day is different, but only for me, Knowing as I do that it offers the last chance For a cautious investor to resist his nature enough To back a grocery in a battered district, And the last chance for the would-be grocers
On the secret map the assassins Cloistered, the Moon River was marked Near the eighteen peaks and the city Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending Of the trail among dry, papery leaves Gray-brown quills like thoughts In the melodious but vast mass of today’s Writing through fields and swamps
A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past. B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her. B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men. A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock. A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled. A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed. A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.” A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.
from The Conclusion of a Letter to the Rev. Mr C— When you gain her Affection, take care to preserve it; Lest others persuade her, you do not deserve it.
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