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To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm. Your reputation for saying things of interest Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics, Nor will the delicate web of human trust Be ruptured by that airy fabrication. Later, however, talking with toxic zest Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice, You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing Above your head the shrug of unreal wings. Not that the world is tiresome in itself: We know what boredom is: it is a dull Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do. In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light: Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof, Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones Beginning now to tug their shadows in And track the air with glitter. All these things Are there before us; there before we look Or fail to look; there to be seen or not By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes, According to our means and purposes. So too with strangeness not to be ignored, Total eclipse or snow upon the rose, And so with that most rare conception, nothing. What is it, after all, but something missed? It is the water of a dried-up well Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador. There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung From Hell to probe with intellectual sight The cells and heavens of a given world Which he could take but as another prison: Small wonder that, pretending not to be, He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden In a black mist low creeping, dragging down And darkening with moody self-absorption What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues. Closer to making than the deftest fraud Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray, Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still, How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed To one side on a backlit chopping-board And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail. Odd that a thing is most itself when likened: The eye mists over, basil hints of clove, The river glazes toward the dam and spills To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet, And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile Some great thing is tormented. Either it is A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast Which tries again, and once again, to rise. What, though for pain there is no other word, Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile? It is something in us like the catbird’s song From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord, Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant Of the first springs, and it is tributary To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre, Or of the garden where we first mislaid Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting Out of what cognate splendor all things came To take their scattering names; and nonetheless That matter of a baggage-train surprised By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees Which, having worked three centuries and more In the dark caves of France, poured out at last The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

Lying in bed I think about you, your ugly empty airless apartment and your eyes. It’s noon, and tired I look into the rest of the awake day incapable of even awe, just a presence of particle and wave, just that closed and deliberate human observance. Your thin fingers and the dissolution of all ability. Lay open now to only me that white body, and I will, as the awkward butterfly, land quietly upon you. A grace and staying. A sight and ease. A spell entangled. A span. I am inside you. And so both projected, we are now part of a garden, that is part of a landscape, that is part of a world that no one believes in.

His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain,

grandma you flew once over mount taranaki and landed on fanthams peak before the snow fell all over your city and when they looked up they thought they saw an angel but it was just you on your way home from the supermarket and your feet needed a rest

“i” has not found, started, finished “i’s” morning poem, the poem “i” was writing about “i” having sex with the man “i” left her husband for the night before or maybe just this morning. a sex poem, so to speak, so to say, so as to lay... a foundation for... what???????? SEX i lost my sex /poem! how did it go? i know it was called SEX something about my bosky acres, my unshrubb’d down ‘bout all being tight and yare (bring in tiresias?) did you say soothe? tiresias, who lies fucking more? whoops. who likes fucking more ? (“bring in // the old thought //(allen grossman doing yeats) that life prepares us for//what never happens”) today (the color of )

for Sappho Let my music be found wanting in comparison to yours (as it must) let me be found loving (as you were) extravagantly the beautiful let me find you and the song (forever) between us in these terrible times

Alone I list In the leafy tryst; Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep— Silent the phantom wood in waters deep: No footfall of a wind along the pass Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass. Yonder the wandering weeds, Enchanted in the light, Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white; Yonder are plumy reeds, Dusking the border of the clear lagoon; Far off the silver clifts Hang in ethereal light below the moon; Far off the ocean lifts, Tossing its billows in the misty beam, And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream: I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken: This is the valley: here the branches darken The silver-lighted stream. Hark— That rapture in the leafy dark! Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing, Waking the upland and the valley under? What carols, like the blazon of a king, Fill all the dawn with wonder? Oh, hush, It is the thrush, In the deep and woody glen! Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung, When the old Earth was young; That rapture rang, When the first morning on the mountains sprang: And now he shouts, and the world is young again! Carol, my king, On your bough aswing! Thou art not of these evil days— Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth: Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth— How to find God upon these hungry ways; Tell of the golden prime, When bird and beast could make a man their friend ; When men beheld swift deities descend, Before the race was left alone with Time, Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end; Before great Pan was dead, Before the naiads fled; When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold, With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold, Startled the still dawn— Shone in upon the mountains and were gone, Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old. Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways, Before the weird earth-hunger of these days, When there was rippling mirth, When justice was on Earth, And light and grandeur of the Golden Age; When never a heart was sad, When all from king to herdsman had A penny for a wage. Ah, that old time has faded to a dream— The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream; Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let The exiled race not utterly forget; Publish thy revelation on the lawns— Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns; Sometime, in some sweet year, These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear. But hark again, From the secret glen, That voice of rapture and ethereal youth Now laden with despair. Forbear, O bird, forbear: Is life not terrible enough forsooth? Cease, cease the mystic song— No more, no more, the passion and the pain: It wakes my life to fret against the chain; It makes me think of all the agéd wrong— Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all— Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall. Ah, ah, that voice again! It makes me think of all these restless men Called into time—their progress and their goal; And now, oh now, it sends into my soul Dreams of a love that might have been for me— That might have been—and now can never be. Tell me no more of these— Tell me of trancéd trees; (The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare) Show me the leafy home of the wild bees; Show me the snowy summits dim in air; Tell me of things afar In valleys silent under moon and star: Dim hollows hushed with night, The lofty cedars misty in the light, Wild clusters of the vine, Wild odors of the pine, The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon— High places where on quiet afternoon A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream. Ha, now He springs from the bough, It flickers—he is lost! Out of the copse he sprang; This is the floating briar where he tossed: The leaves are yet atremble where he sang Here a long vista opens—look! This is the way he took, Through the pale poplars by the pond: Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond. Ho, there he goes Through the alder close! He leaves me here behind him in his flight, And yet my heart goes with him out of sight! What whispered spell Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell? I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream— Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on the fading stream. Lead on—you know the way Lead on to Arcady, O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim; Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim; By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome, Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam. I follow where you lead, Down winding paths, across the flowery mead, Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows, Up water-courses scented by the rose. I follow the wandering voice— I follow, I rejoice, I fade away into the Age of Gold— We two together lost in forest old.- O ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn, Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod! O souls that are weary and are heavy laden, Here is the peace of God ! Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way: Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray; From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run, With sudden apprehension of the sun; A light wind stirs The filmy tops of delicate dim firs, And on the river border blows, Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose. Sing out, O throstle, sing: I follow on, my king: Lead me forever through the crimson dawn— Till the world ends, lead me on! Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now, Upspringing from the bough, Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground, Without a sound He drops into a valley and is gone!

Outside the Party Thick throng the snow-flakes, the evening is dreary, Glad rings the music in yonder gay hall; On her who listens here, friendless and weary, Heavier chill than the winter’s doth fall. At yon clear window, light-opened before me, Glances the face I have worshipped so well: There’s the fine gentleman, grand in his glory; There, the fair smile by whose sweetness I fell. This is akin to him, shunned and forsaken, That at my bosom sobs low, without bread; Had not such pleading my marble heart shaken, I had been quiet, long since, with the dead. Oh! Could I enter there, ghastly and squalid, Stand in men’s eyes with my spirit o’erborne, Show them where roses bloomed, crushed now and pallid, What he found innocent, leaving forlorn,— How the fair ladies would fail from their dances, Trembling, aghast at my horrible tale! How would he shrink from my words and my glances! How would they shrink from him, swooning and pale! This is the hair that was soft to enchain him; Snakelike, it snarls on my beautiless brow: These are the hands that were fond to detain him With a sense-magic then, powerless now! No: could I come, like a ghost, to affright him, How should that heal my wound, silence my pain? Had I the wrath of God’s lightning to smite him, That could not bring me my lost peace again. Ne’er let him grieve while good fortunes betide him, Ne’er count again the poor game lost of old; When he comes forth, with his young bride beside him, Here shall they find us both, dead in the cold.

Street Yarn Roses caged in windows, heighten Your faint blooms today; Silks and sheeny satins, brighten; He has passed this way! Could ye keep his fleeting presence Gone beyond recall, But a little of his essence, I would have you all. Arabesque so quaint and shady, That mightst catch his eye To adorn a stately lady Ere her hour went by, Canst assure me that his glancing Rested on they fold? Did that set your purples dancing? Wake the sleepy gold? Ye neglected apple-venders Mouldering in the street, Did he curse between your tenders, Spurning with his feet? Then must I an alms deliver For his graceless pride; Could I buy his sins forever, I’d not be denied. Paying patiently his ransom Never conscience-pricked; Cheating Justice of her handsome Heartless derelict. Did he view thee, ancient steeple, With thy weird clock-face, Frowning down on sinful people Passing out of grace? Nay, respond not to my question With thy prate of time: Things to which my soul must hasten Lie beyond thy chime. With no circumstance to screen us, We must meet again: I shall bid God judge between us, Answering Amen.