872 Life poems

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes! How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn! For me wilt thou renew the withered rose, And clear my painful path of pointed thorn? Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest, Like the young hours that lead the tender year Enchantress come! and charm my cares to rest: Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear! A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain, Must I a sad existence still deplore? Lo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain, ‘For me the vernal garland blooms no more.’ Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure, And I will bless thee, who though slow art sure.

This winter's weather it waxeth cold, And frost it freezeth on every hill, And Boreas blows his blast so bold That all our cattle are like to spill. Bell, my wife, she loves no strife; She said unto me quietlye, Rise up, and save cow Crumbock's life! Man, put thine old cloak about thee! He.   O Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte? Thou kens my cloak is very thin: It is so bare and over worn, A crickè thereon cannot renn. Then I'll no longer borrow nor lend; For once I'll new apparell'd be; To-morrow I'll to town and spend; For I'll have a new cloak about me. She.  Cow Crumbock is a very good cow: She has been always true to the pail; She has helped us to butter and cheese, I trow, And other things she will not fail. I would be loth to see her pine. Good husband, counsel take of me: It is not for us to go so fine— Man, take thine old cloak about thee! He.   My cloak it was a very good cloak, It hath been always true to the wear; But now it is not worth a groat: I have had it four and forty year'. Sometime it was of cloth in grain: 'Tis now but a sigh clout, as you may see: It will neither hold out wind nor rain; And I'll have a new cloak about me. She.  It is four and forty years ago Sine the one of us the other did ken; And we have had, betwixt us two, Of children either nine or ten: We have brought them up to women and men: In the fear of God I trow they be. And why wilt thou thyself misken? Man, take thine old cloak about thee! He.   O Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte? Now is now, and then was then: Seek now all the world throughout, Thou kens not clowns from gentlemen: They are clad in black, green, yellow and blue, So far above their own degree. Once in my life I'll take a view; For I'll have a new cloak about me. She. King Stephen was a worthy peer; His breeches cost him but a crown; He held them sixpence all too dear, Therefore he called the tailor 'lown.' He was a king and wore the crown, And thou'se but of a low degree: It's pride that puts this country down: Man, take thy old cloak about thee! He.   Bell my wife, she loves not strife, Yet she will lead me, if she can; And to maintain an easy life I oft must yield, though I'm good-man. It's not for a man with a woman to threap, Unless he first give o'er the plea: As we began, so will we keep, And I'll take my old cloak about me.

Gut eats all day and lechers all the night; So all his meat he tasteth over twice; And, striving so to double his delight, He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice. Thus in his belly can he change a sin: Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in.

Amid the iris and the rose, The honeysuckle and the bay, The wild earth for a moment goes In dust or weed another way. Small though its corner be, the weed Will yet intrude its creeping beard; The harsh blade and the hairy seed Recall the brutal earth we feared. And if no water touch the dust In some far corner, and one dare To breathe upon it, one may trust The spectre on the summer air: The risen dust alive with fire, The fire made visible, a blur Interrate, the pervasive ire Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

I hold my honey and I store my bread In little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, Be firm till I return from hell. I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again. No man can give me any word but Wait, The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in; Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.

It’s common to live properly, to pretend you don’t feel heat or grief: wave nightly at Miss Fugue and Mister Goggles before diving into your nightcap, before reading yourself a bedtime story or watching your beloved sink to the bottom of a lake and noting his absence in your log. The next day you drop his clothes off at Goodwill like a sack of mail from a warplane then hobble back to your hovel like a knight moving only in L s. It is comfortable to be alive this way, especially now, but it makes you so vulnerable to shock — you ignore the mortgage and find a falconer’s glove in your yard, whole hand still inside. Or you arrive home after a long day to discover your children have grown suddenly hideous and unlovable. What I’m trying to say is I think it’s okay to accelerate around corners, to grunt back at the mailman and swallow all your laundry quarters. So much of everything is dumb baffle: water puts out fire, my diseases can become your diseases, and two hounds will fight over a feather because feathers are strange. All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them but secretly I will want that very much.

has crawled out of the ocean to carry us from sleep, like sleep, the gray of outer Sunset portending the gray of inner Sunset. And so on. On the N, one should invent intricate fictions for the lives of the passengers: time is a game. Soon we will be underground. But first, the long lush green of Duboce Park, the happiness of dogs! Good-bye now to their owners eyeing one another. Good-bye to the park's locked men's room, where once a man was found dead, his penis shoved into his own mouth. The world continues, the engine of the world the letter N.

The boat was beating across the bay, we had our backs to Vesuvius, the wind smacked our faces. Naples was an enormous packet of cigarettes you could smoke till you conked out: the cigarettes were never going to run out and nor was the coffee, the drugs, the prostitutes, the locked churches, the scooters, the rice cakes, the evil eye, the boys called Gennaro, the funiculars, the shrines to Madonna, the shrines to Maradona, the bullet holes, the heat, the permanent state of crucifixion. Anyone could be crucified two thousand years ago but to be crucified now, to be crucified in Napoli — lift me up!

The unkempt beard of the fearsome mullah overwhelms the two aging poets from the periphery, the far-flung provinces of Iran and Iraq. They stand tiptoe, toe deep in the master culture, arguing in an emptying, narrowing hallway, in the high imperial language of their poetry, over what became of the muffled, cuffed bulbul or of the straw-stuffed, stone-eyed mynah, over the proper ornithology for the symbols of woe.

It isn't true about the lambs. They are not meek. They are curious and wild, full of the passion of spring. They are lovable, they are not silent when hungry. Tonight the last of the triplet lambs is piercing the quiet with its need. Its siblings are stronger and will not let it eat. I am its keeper, the farmer, its mother, I will go down to it in the dark, in the cold barn, and hold it in my arms. but it will not lie still—it is not meek. I will stand in the open doorway under the weight of watching trees and moon, and care for it as one of my own. But it will not love me—it is not meek. Drink, little one. Take what I can give you. Tonight the whole world prowls the perimeters of your life. Your anger keeps you alive— it's your only chance. So I know what I must do after I have fed you. I will shape my mouth to the shape of the sharpest words, even those bred in silence. I will inhale with words every ear pressed upon open air. I will not be meek. You remind me of the necessity of having more hope than fear, and of sounding out terrible names. I am to cry out loud like a hungry lamb, cry loud enough to waken wolves in the night. No one can be allowed to sleep.