Zeroing In

Related poetry:

1. The Touch For months my hand was sealed off In a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings. Perhaps it is bruised, I thought, And that is why they have locked it up. You could tell time by this, I thought, Like a clock, by its five knuckles And the thin underground veins. It lay […]...
2. Deer Enclosure Empty hill not see person Yet hear person voice sound Return scene enter deep forest Duplicate light green moss on Hills are empty, no man is seen, Yet the sound of people’s voices is heard. Light is cast into the deep forest, And shines again on green moss....
3. I Remember Galileo I remember Galileo describing the mind As a piece of paper blown around by the wind, And I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree, Or jumping into the backseat of a car, And for years I watched paper leap through my cities; But yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught […]...
4. The Meteorite Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone. Thus easily can Earth digest A cinder of sidereal fire, And make her translunary guest The native of an English shire. Nor is it strange these wanderers Find in her […]...
5. REQUIESCAM (May I lie in peace) Let there be grass and trees to blow And fold me in their shadow Branches to shake and leaves Turn brown, fall and lie fallow. Let there be moorlands swept by wind And raked by rain, purple splashes of heather In autumn and sturdy boulders our forefathers Carved their names […]...
6. Sestina I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow, To the short day and to the whitening hills, When the colour is all lost from the grass, Though my desire will not lose its green, So rooted is it in this hardest stone, That speaks and feels as though it were a woman. And […]...
7. City That Does Not Sleep In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins. The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream, And the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner The unbelievable alligator […]...
8. The Floods The rain it rains without a stay In the hills above us, in the hills; And presently the floods break way Whose strength is in the hills. The trees they suck from every cloud, The valley brooks they roar aloud Bank-high for the lowlands, lowlands, Lowlands under the hills! The first wood down is sere […]...
9. Innermost One He it is, the innermost one, Who awakens my being with his deep hidden touches. He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes And joyfully plays on the chords of my heart In varied cadence of pleasure and pain. He it is who weaves the web of this maya In evanescent hues of […]...
10. A Study Light cloud pavilion light rain Dark yard day weary open Sit look green moss colour About to on person clothes come There’s light cloud, and drizzle round the pavilion, In the dark yard, I wearily open a gate. I sit and look at the colour of green moss, Ready for people’s clothing to pick up....
11. Metaphors Of A Magnifico Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village. This is old song That will not declare itself. . . Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village. […]...
12. The Lost Pilot for my father, 1922-1944 Your face did not rot Like the others the co-pilot, For example, I saw him Yesterday. His face is corn- Mush: his wife and daughter, The poor ignorant people, stare As if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot Like the others […]...
13. The Bridge In his travels he comes to a bridge made entirely of bones. Before crossing he writes a letter to his mother: Dear mother, Guess what? the ape accidentally bit off one of his hands while Eating a banana. Just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I Shall be crossing it shortly. […]...
14. The Fawn There it was I saw what I shall never forget And never retrieve. Monstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to believe, He lay, yet there he lay, Asleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft small ebony hoves, The child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer. Surely his mother […]...
15. The Heavenly Hills of Holland The heavenly hills of Holland, How wondrously they rise Above the smooth green pastures Into the azure skies! With blue and purple hollows, With peaks of dazzling snow, Along the far horizon The clouds are marching slow. No mortal foot has trodden The summits of that range, Nor walked those mystic valleys Whose colors ever […]...
16. The Hideous Chair This hideous, Upholstered in gift-wrap fabric, chromed In places, design possibility For the future canned ham. Its genius Wonderful, circa I993. I’ve assumed a great many things: The perversity of choices, affairs I did or did not have. But let the record show That I was happy. O let the hideous chair Stand! For the […]...
17. The Hill Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley, The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter? All, all, are sleeping on the hill. One passed in a fever, One was burned in a mine, One was killed in a brawl, One died in jail, One fell from a bridge […]...
18. Like Men and Women Shadows walk Like Men and Women Shadows walk Upon the Hills Today With here and there a mighty Bow Or trailing Courtesy To Neighbors doubtless of their own Not quickened to perceive Minuter landscape as Ourselves And Boroughs where we live...
19. Temple Tree Path Narrow path sunless temple locust tree Deep dark much green moss Should gate except meet sweep In case have hill monk come A narrow, sunless path to the temple tree, Deep and dark; abundant green moss. Wait by the gate when finished sweeping the yard, In case a monk should come down from the hill....
20. 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 fire in his hands and they remember him in the years afterward as the fire bringer-they remember or forget-the man whose […]...
21. The Farewell Of A Virginia Slave Mother To Her Daughters Sold Into Southern Bondage Gone, gone, sold and gone To the rice-swamp dank and lone. Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings Where the noisome insect stings Where the fever demon strews Poison with the falling dews Where the sickly sunbeams glare Through the hot and misty air; Gone, […]...
22. Sleeping at last Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over, Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past, Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover, Sleeping at last. No more a tired heart downcast or overcast, No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover, Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep […]...
23. Indignation Jones You would not believe, would you That I came from good Welsh stock? That I was purer blooded than the white trash here? And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River? You would not believe that I had been to school And read some books. You saw me only […]...
24. The West Wind IT’S a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries; I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes. For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills. And April’s in the west wind, and daffodils. It’s a fine land, the west land, for hearts as tired as mine, […]...
25. The Red Son I LOVE your faces I saw the many years I drank your milk and filled my mouth With your home talk, slept in your house And was one of you. But a fire burns in my heart. Under the ribs where pulses thud And flitting between bones of skull Is the push, the endless mysterious […]...
26. Alarm Clocks When Dawn strides out to wake a dewy farm Across green fields and yellow hills of hay The little twittering birds laugh in his way And poise triumphant on his shining arm. He bears a sword of flame but not to harm The wakened life that feels his quickening sway And barnyard voices shrilling “It […]...
27. You'll find it when you try to die You’ll find it when you try to die The Easier to let go For recollecting such as went You could not spare you know. And though their places somewhat filled As did their Marble names With Moss they never grew so full You chose the newer names And when this World sets further back As […]...
28. Sonnet XVII Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, […]...
29. To The Whore Who Took My Poems some say we should keep personal remorse from the Poem, Stay abstract, and there is some reason in this, But jezus; Twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have My Paintings too, my best ones; its stifling: Are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them? Why didn’t you […]...
30. UPON MRS ELIZ. WHEELER, UNDER THE NAME OFAMARILLIS Sweet Amarillis, by a spring’s Soft and soul-melting murmurings, Slept; and thus sleeping, thither flew A Robin-red-breast; who at view, Not seeing her at all to stir, Brought leaves and moss to cover her: But while he, perking, there did pry About the arch of either eye, The lid began to let out day, At […]...
31. A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur- There was the cat slopping its milk all day, Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk And August the most peaceful month. To be, in the grass, in the […]...
32. In the Highlands IN the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes; Where essential silence cheers and blesses, And for ever in the hill-recesses Her more lovely music Broods and dies O to mount again where erst I haunted; Where the old red hills are […]...
33. Wind This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the […]...
34. A Blackbird Singing It seems wrong that out of this bird, Black, bold, a suggestion of dark Places about it, there yet should come Such rich music, as though the notes’ Ore were changed to a rare metal At one touch of that bright bill. You have heard it often, alone at your desk In a green April, […]...
35. Love Song How can I keep my soul in me, so that It doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise It high enough, past you, to other things? I would like to shelter it, among remote Lost objects, in some dark and silent place That doesn’t resonate when your depths resound. Yet everything that touches us, […]...
36. Sonnet VIII: There's Nothing Grieves Me There’s nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste, That in my days I may not see thee old, That where those two clear sparkling eyes are plac’d Only two loop-holes then I might behold; That lovely, arched, ivory, polish’d brow Defac’d with wrinkles that I might but see; Thy dainty hair, so curl’d and […]...
37. All the Hills and Vales Along All the hills and vales along Earth is bursting into song, And the singers are the chaps Who are going to die perhaps. O sing, marching men, Till the valleys ring again. Give your gladness to earth’s keeping, So be glad, when you are sleeping. Cast away regret and rue, Think what you are marching […]...
38. Afterwards When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man who used to notice such things”? If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes […]...
39. Endymion The rising moon has hid the stars; Her level rays, like golden bars, Lie on the landscape green, With shadows brown between. And silver white the river gleams, As if Diana, in her dreams, Had dropt her silver bow Upon the meadows low. On such a tranquil night as this, She woke Endymion with a […]...
40. An Empty Crib Beside a crib that holds a baby’s stocking, A tattered picture book, a broken toy, A sleeping mother dreams that she is rocking Her fair-haired cherub boy. Upon the cradle’s side her light touch keeping, She gently rocks it, crooning low a song; And smiles to think her little one is sleeping, So peacefully and […]...