I came here, being stricken, stumbling out At last from streets; the sun, decreasing, took me For days, the time being the last of autumn, The thickets not yet stark, but quivering With tiny colors, like some brush strokes in The manner of the pointillists; small yellows Dart shaped, little reds in different pattern, Clicks and notches of color on threaded bushes,
August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then. We walk
1 Take your boulevards, your Locust Street, Your Chestnut, Pine, your Olive, Take your Forest Park and Shaw’s Garden, Your avenues that lead past street-corner violence, Past your West End, past your Limit, To shabby suburban crime, Vandalism in the parking-lot,
Ce qui est beau à Leningrad, c’est Saint Petersbourg. What fellow traveller returned from the U.S.S.R., Burdened with souvenirs in the form of second thoughts, said That, rephrasing the Slavic platitude as a reactionary epigram? Thence One must count oneself privileged to have escaped empty-handed, Frisked in exit by the incompetent customs of the country Who got everything backwards, inspecting my papers with a glass: Bourgeois formalism apart, my handwriting looks like a decadent cipher.
In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak. Alive, active. What had been distance was memory. Dusk came, Pushed us forward,emptying the laboratoryeach night undisturbed by Erasure.
In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the window, street lamps at the single tree.
Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare, There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear. He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse, Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way.
The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.
Such pejorative deformities of sound Without meaningful speech or musical equipoise, Annoyances none but hoi polloi enjoys, Through our winding whispering galleries resound Unwelcome, & like a tedious siege surround Us with that ubiquitous nuisance, noise, Which may take the shape of inflated reputation, Able neither to stun, astonish nor astound Those whom obscene publicity annoys, Who prefer the decent obscurity of publication.
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Regardless of the weird world’s disregard, These works may be devoted to the wastebasket
New life! Will he toe out like Dolly, like John? Will her eyes be fires? Blue and green, like Papa's, the ocean at the shore? Will she sing in the bath? Play piano in her diapers? Will her heart leap at large machinery? Will he say, "Dribe dribe," to his daddy, entering the tunnel? Will his hair be red? Will her hair curl? Will her little face have the circumflex eyebrows of her mother? The pointed chin? Her hair be fair, bright blonde? Will she frown at the light by the river?
For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000 in five days My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus, Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous Mexican male who prodigally claims
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