Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned, Precedence takes of rosy fingered Spring; And laughing Joy, with wild flowers prank'd, and crown'd, A wild and giddy thing, And Health robust, from every care unbound, Come on the zephyr's wing, And cheer the toiling clown.
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
The moon came late to a lonesome bog, And there sat Goggleky Gluck, the frog. ‘My stars!’ she cried, and veiled her face, ‘What very grand people they have in this place!’
“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.” And so I mocked her in magnificent measure. Or was it that I mocked myself alone? I wish that I might be a thinking stone. The sea of spuming thought foists up again
Local his discourse, not yet exemplary, Nowadays he is old, the translator, So old he is practically transparent.
Good things and otherwise, evils done Come home to him, too close to the bone And so little transformed, Him so transparent, They float in and out of his window.
When in Wisconsin where I once had time the flyway swans came whistling to the rotten Green Bay ice and stayed, not feeding, four days, maybe five, I shouted
and threw stones to see them fly. Blue herons followed, or came first. I shot a bittern’s wing off with my gun. For that my wife could cry.
I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie, Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die — Whether he die in the light o’ day or under the peak-faced moon; In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon; On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw; In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw; By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead — I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead.
Pale, with the blue of high zeniths, shimmered over with silver, brocaded In smooth, running patterns, a soft stuff, with dark knotted fringes, it lies there, Warm from a woman’s soft shoulders, and my fingers close on it, caressing. Where is she, the woman who wore it? The scent of her lingers and drugs me. A languor, fire-shotted, runs through me, and I crush the scarf down on my face, And gulp in the warmth and the blueness, and my eyes swim in cool-tinted heavens. Around me are columns of marble, and a diapered, sun-flickered pavement. Rose-leaves blow and patter against it. Below the stone steps a lute tinkles.
(excerpt) Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but th’ off-scouring of the British sand; And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heav’d the lead;
“What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?” “Fiddle-de-dee’s not English,” Alice replied gravely. “Whoever said it was,” said the Red queen ... What’s the French for “fiddle-de-dee”? But “fiddle-de-dee’s not English” (we
My mother—preferring the strange to the tame: Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, Frog’s belly distended with finny young, Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool, Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves, Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,
Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh.
Every day I will give you a color, like a new flower in a bud vase
I On the top of the Crumpetty Tree The Quangle Wangle sat, But his face you could not see, On account of his Beaver Hat. For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide, With ribbons and bibbons on every side And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
1 Nose only above water; an hour in the ice melt; paw in a beaver trap, northern leaping through— the outlet sieving, setter- retriever staked to her trip, The stake of her young
1 The old watch: their thick eyes puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies.
The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monuments which no one Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces, Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
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