All Kings, and all their favourites, All glory of honours, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass, Is elder by a year now than it was When thou and I first one another saw: All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
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
These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins, Where have ye been? behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long? Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
When silent I So many thousand, thousand years Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears, Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.
With focus sharp as Flemish-painted face In film of varnish brightly fixed And through a polished hand-lens deeply seen, Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air Sees down the street, And in the camera of my eye depicts Row-houses and row-lives: Glass after glass, door after door the same,
Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass
Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once—
A real flower garden overhanging the road (our miniature Babylon). Paths which I helped to lay with Aunt Winifred, riprapped with pebbles; shards of painted delph;
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