A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, “I will have a camel for lunch today.” And all morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw his shadow again—and he said, “A mouse will do.”
Of Chesterton, In the County of Huntingdon, Esquire How blessed is he, who leads a Country Life, Unvex’d with anxious Cares, and void of Strife! Who studying Peace, and shunning Civil Rage, Enjoy’d his Youth, and now enjoys his Age:
Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase;
Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him.
On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten it was the turning of autumn and already the mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves
Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back. No one believes in his own life anymore.
The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs.
In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings. They sing songs, and their fingers blear.
And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot
Enter JANUS JANUS Chronos, Chronos, mend thy pace, An hundred times the rolling sun Around the radiant belt has run In his revolving race. Behold, behold, the goal in sight, Spread thy fans, and wing thy flight.
Enter CHRONOS, with a scythe in his hand, and a great globe on his back, which he sets down at his entrance CHRONOS Weary, weary of my weight, Let me, let me drop my freight, And leave the world behind. I could not bear
1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand. That it represents the true direction of the wind. Beach grass, tousled phragmite. Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing. An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery. The cranberry bushes biting down to survive. And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic.
There was once a little animal, No bigger than a fox, And on five toes he scampered Over Tertiary rocks. They called him Eohippus, And they called him very small, And they thought him of no value -- When they thought of him at all;
My father paces the upstairs hall a large confined animal neither wild nor yet domesticated. About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath. My mother is meekly seated at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath age eight-nine-ten by now I understand his right to roar, hers to defy
Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine- printed seed catalogue’s inflorescences— peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line
of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist; his chalky knuckles, his forearm’s crisp, lisse, pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted as a fox terrier’s belly. Yet this pleases, only this—
age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded stemlines’ mauves and verdures on the backlit
It hangs from heaven to earth. There are trees in it, cities, rivers, small pigs and moons. In one corner the snow falling over a charging cavalry, in another women are planting rice.
You can also see: a chicken carried off by a fox, a naked couple on their wedding night,
Androgyne, mon amour, brochette de coeur was plat du jour, (heart lifted on a metal skewer, encore saignante et palpitante) where I dined au solitaire, table intime, one rose vase, lighted dimly, wildly gay,
The western waves of ebbing day Rolled o’er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain. The rocky summits, split and rent,
The hand and foot that stir not, they shall find Sooner than all the rightful place to go; Now in their motion free as roving wind, Though first no snail more limited and slow; I mark them full of labor all the day, Each active motion made in perfect rest; They cannot from their path mistaken stray, Though ’tis not theirs, yet in it they are blest; The bird has not their hidden track found out, Nor cunning fox, though full of art he be; It is the way unseen, the certain route, Where ever bound, yet thou art ever free; The path of Him, whose perfect law of love Bids spheres and atoms in just order move.
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