The craving of Samuel Rouse for clearance to create was surely as hot as the iron that buffeted him. His passion for freedom so strong that it molded the smouldering fashions he laced, for how also could a slave plot or counterplot such incomparable shapes,
form or reform, for house after house, the intricate Patio pattern, the delicate Rose and Lyre, the Debutante Settee,
See, Winter comes to rule the varied year, Sullen and sad, with all his rising train— Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme, These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms! Congenial horrors, hail! With frequent foot, Pleas’d have I, in my cheerful morn of life, When nurs’d by careless solitude I liv’d And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, Pleas’d have I wander’d through your rough domain; Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure; Heard the winds roar, and the big torrent burst; Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew’d In the grim evening-sky. Thus pass’d the time, Till through the lucid chambers of the south
I am that which began; Out of me the years roll; Out of me God and man; I am equal and whole; God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.
Before ever land was, Before ever the sea, Or soft hair of the grass, Or fair limbs of the tree, Or the fresh-coloured fruit of my branches, I was, and thy soul was in me.
First life on my sources First drifted and swam; Out of me are the forces
Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel
A 29-year-old stewardess fell ... to her death tonight when she was swept through an emergency door that sud- denly sprang open ... The body ... was found ... three hours after the accident. —New York Times
This is the time lean woods shall spend A steeped-up twilight, and the pale evening drink, And the perilous roe, the leaper to the west brink, Trembling and bright to the caverned cloud descend.
Now shall you see pent oak gone gusty and frantic, Stooped with dry weeping, ruinously unloosing The sparse disheveled leaf, or reared and tossing A dreary scarecrow bough in funeral antic.
I Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!
II Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings, Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
III Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call . . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival: I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all.
When he had suckled there, he began to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms, but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet milk she could not keep from filling her, from pouring into his ravenous mouth, and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was huge, towering above her, the landscape,
Three people come where no people belong any more. They are a woman who would be young And good-looking if these now seemed Real qualities, a child with yellow hair, a man Hardened in desperate humanity. But here are only Dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard. And now this Disagreeable feeling that they were summoned. Sun On the corrugated roof is a horse treading,
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread
If the nose of the pig in the market of Firenze has lost its matte patina, and shines, brassy, even in the half light; if the mosaic saint on the tiles of the Basilica floor is half gone, worn by the gravity of solid soles, the passing of piety; if the arms of Venus have reentered the rubble, taken by time, her perennial lover, mutilating even the memory of beauty; and if the mother, hiding with her child from the death squads of brutality, if she, trying to keep the child quiet, to keep them from being found out, holds her hand over his mouth, holds him against her, tighter and tighter, until he stops
Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms against being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days not to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs?
I have a key-chain zebra I bought at the Thanksgiving fair. How do I know she won't kick, or bite at my crotch? Because she's been murdered, machine-gunned: she's dead.
Also, she's a she: even so crudely carved, you can tell by the sway of her belly a foal's inside her. Even murdered mothers don't hurt people, do they?
And how know she's murdered? Isn't everything murdered? Some dictator's thugs, some rebels, some poachers; some drought, world-drought, world-rot, pollution, extinction.
I don’t belong in this century—who does? In my time, summer came someplace in June— The cutbanks blazing with roses, the birds brazen, and the astonished Pastures frisking with young calves . . . That was in the country— I don’t mean another country, I mean in the country: And the country is lost. I don’t mean just lost to me, Nor in the way of metaphorical loss—it’s lost that way too—
Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels Tap-dance on the water. They pluck the tuna hatchlings As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry, Might once have picked up pearls From a broken necklace.
Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them. Birds from above and big fish from below Rip at the pack until it comes apart Like Poland, with survivors in single figures.
Now he has silver in him. When sometime Death shall boil down unnecessary fat To reach the nub of our identity, When in the run of crime The skull is rifled for the gold in teeth, And chemistry has eaten from the spine Superfluous life and vigor, why then he Will show a richness to be wondered at, And shall be thought a mine Whose claim and stake are stone and floral wreath.
The body burns away, and burning gives Light to the eye and moisture to the lip And warmth to our desires, but it burns Whatever body lives
Music is most sovereign because more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace. —Plato, The Republic
They brought me ambrotypes Of the old pioneers to enlarge. And sometimes one sat for me i Some one who was in being When giant hands from the womb of the world Tore the republic. What was it in their eyes? i For I could never fathom That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids, And the serene sorrow of their eyes. It was like a pool of water, Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest, Where the leaves fall, As you hear the crow of a cock From a far-off farm house, seen near the hills
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