Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks:
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
"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!
41 His classic studies made a little puzzle, Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses, Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle, But never put on pantaloons or bodices; His reverend tutors had at times a tussle, And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys, Were forced to make an odd sort of apology, For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology.
42 Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him, Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample,
As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic?
NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd To sit indulgent, and with him partake Rural repast, permitting him the while Venial discourse unblam'd: I now must change Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt, And disobedience: On the part of Heav'n
I put my hand Into the dream That falls upon The air. It Touches me a little, But I don’t complain. I’m almost asleep When I get there. Where Byron Lost the scent of his Life, over there, Where the dreams are. It’s always Hot, like The eyes of the
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
That night the moon drifted over the pond, turning the water to milk, and under the boughs of the trees, the blue trees, a young woman walked, and for an instant
the future came to her: rain falling on her husband’s grave, rain falling on the lawns of her children, her own mouth filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,
I set forth one misted white day of June Beneath the great Atlantic rainway, and heard: “Honestly you smite worlds of truth, but Lose your own trains of thought, like a pigeon. Did you once ride in Kenneth’s machine?” “Yes, I rode there, an old man in shorts, blind, Who had lost his way in the filling station; Kenneth was kind.” “Did he fill your motionless ears with resonance and stain?”
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