Flying Fish
I HAVE lived in many half-worlds myself… and so I know you. I leaned at a deck rail watching a monotonous sea, the same circling birds and the same plunge of furrows carved by
Theme In Yellow
I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins. On the last of October When dusk is fallen Children
Troths
YELLOW dust on a bumble Bee’s wing, Grey lights in a woman’s Asking eyes, Red ruins in the changing Sunset embers: I take you and pile high The memories. Death will break her claws
Mask
Fling your red scarf faster and faster, dancer. It is summer and the sun loves a million green leaves, masses of green. Your red scarf flashes across them calling and a-calling. The silk and
Sketch
THE shadows of the ships Rock on the crest In the low blue lustre Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide. A long brown bar at the dip of the sky Puts an
People With Proud Chins
I TELL them where the wind comes from, Where the music goes when the fiddle is in the box. Kids-I saw one with a proud chin, a sleepyhead, And the moonline creeping white on
Fish Crier
I KNOW a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a Voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble In January. He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing A joy identical with
Baltic Fog Notes
(Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas. I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff. Fog and fog and no stars, sun,
John Ericsson Day Memorial, 1918
INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings
Dusty Doors
CHILD of the Aztec gods, How long must we listen here, How long before we go? The dust is deep on the lintels. The dust is dark on the doors. If the dreams shake
Broken-face Gargoyles
ALL I can give you is broken-face gargoyles. It is too early to sing and dance at funerals, Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming a lullaby and
They All Want to Play Hamlet
THEY all want to play Hamlet. They have not exactly seen their fathers killed Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill, Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart, Not exactly
Soup
I SAW a famous man eating soup. I say he was lifting a fat broth Into his mouth with a spoon. His name was in the newspapers that day Spelled out in tall black
Plaster
“I KNEW a real man once,” says Agatha in the splendor of a shagbark hickory tree. Did a man touch his lips to Agatha? Did a man hold her in his arms? Did a
Aprons of Silence
MANY things I might have said today. And I kept my mouth shut. So many times I was asked To come and say the same things Everybody was saying, no end To the yes-yes,