Argument

Related poetry:

1. The Argument Of His Book I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers. I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. I write of youth, of love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness. I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by […]...
2. None can experience sting None can experience sting Who Bounty have not known The fact of Famine could not be Except for Fact of Corn Want is a meagre Art Acquired by Reverse The Poverty that was not Wealth Cannot be Indigence....
3. My Calendar From off my calendar today A leaf I tear; So swiftly passes smiling May Without a care. And now the gentleness of June Will fleetly fly And I will greet the glamour moon Of lush July. Beloved months so soon to pass, Alas, I see The slim sand silvering the glass Of Time for me; […]...
4. The Landlady This is the lair of the landlady She is A raw voice Loose in the rooms beneath me. The continuous henyard Squabble going on below Thought in this house like The bicker of blood through the head. She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells That bulge in under my doorsill; She presides over my Meagre […]...
5. The Argument Said Jock McBrown to Tam McSmith, “A little bet I’m game to take on, That I can scotch this Shakespeare myth And prove Will just a stoodge for Bacon.” Said Tam McSmith to Jock McBrown, “Ye gyke, I canna let ye rave on. See here, I put a shilling down: My betting’s on the Bard […]...
6. An Argument I. THE VOICE OF THE MAN IMPATIENT WITH VISIONS AND UTOPIAS We find your soft Utopias as white As new-cut bread, and dull as life in cells, O, scribes who dare forget how wild we are How human breasts adore alarum bells. You house us in a hive of prigs and saints Communal, frugal, clean […]...
7. An Argument I’ve oft been told by learned friars, That wishing and the crime are one, And Heaven punishes desires As much as if the deed were done. If wishing damns us, you and I Are damned to all our heart’s content; Come, then, at least we may enjoy Some pleasure for our punishment!...
8. The Suicide's Argument Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no No question was asked me it could not be so! If the life was the question, a thing sent to try And to live on be YES; what can NO be? to die. NATURE’S ANSWER Is’t returned, as ’twas sent? Is’t no worse […]...
9. Tonight I Can Write Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, ‘The night is starry And the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’ The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I […]...
10. Willard Fluke My wife lost her health, And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds. Then that woman, whom the men Styled Cleopatra, came along. And we we married ones All broke our vows, myself among the rest. Years passed and one by one Death claimed them all in some hideous form, And I was borne along […]...
11. The Lift The wonderful thing About being with You in this hotel Lift in London full Of people is that none Of them knows what you And I are about to do In bed or possibly On the floor in fact not Even you realize yet How much you’re going To enjoy this act for Which we […]...
12. A Distance From The Sea To Ernest Brace “And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was About to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto Me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and Write them not.” REVELATIONS, x, 4. That raft we rigged up, under the water, Was just the item: […]...
13. Invention Tonight the moon is a cracker, With a bite out of it Floating in the night, And in a week or so According to the calendar It will probably look Like a silver football, And nine, maybe ten days ago It reminded me of a thin bright claw. But eventually By the end of the […]...
14. THE OLD CLOCK ON THE STAIRS L’eternite est une pendule, dont le balancier dit et redit sans Cesse ces deux mots seulement dans le silence des tombeaux: “Toujours! jamais! Jamais! toujours!” JACQUES BRIDAINE. Somewhat back from the village street Stands the old-fashioned country-seat. Across its antique portico Tall poplar-trees their shadows throw; And from its station in the hall An ancient […]...
15. 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 […]...
16. Justice Arnett It is true, fellow citizens, That my old docket lying there for years On a shelf above my head and over The seat of justice, I say it is true That docket had an iron rim Which gashed my baldness when it fell (Somehow I think it was shaken loose By the heave of the […]...
17. Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think Praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting For paintings to sigh is science. In another […]...
18. How noteless Men, and Pleiads, stand How noteless Men, and Pleiads, stand, Until a sudden sky Reveals the fact that One is rapt Forever from the Eye Members of the Invisible, Existing, while we stare, In Leagueless Opportunity, O’ertakenless, as the Air Why didn’t we detain Them? The Heavens with a smile, Sweep by our disappointed Heads Without a syllable...
19. Cosmopolities without a plea Cosmopolities without a plea Alight in every Land The compliments of Paradise From those within my Hand Their dappled Journey to themselves A compensation fair Knock and it shall be opened Is their Theology...
20. The Refugees In the shabby train no seat is vacant. The child in the ripped mask Sprawls undisturbed in the waste Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant? They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed That they were willing to trade for this? The dried blood sparkles along the mask Of […]...
21. Unlyric Love Song It is time to give that-of-myself which I could not at first: To offer you now at last my least and my worst: Minor, absurd preserves, The shell’s end-curves, A document kept at the back of a drawer, A tin hidden under the floor, Recalcitrant prides and hesitations: To pile them carefully in a desparate […]...
22. Summer has two Beginnings Summer has two Beginnings Beginning once in June Beginning in October Affectingly again Without, perhaps, the Riot But graphicker for Grace As finer is a going Than a remaining Face Departing then forever Forever until May Forever is deciduous Except to those who die...
23. Saddest Poem I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars, And the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.” The night wind whirls in the sky and sings. I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. On nights […]...
24. Walt Whitman The master-songs are ended, and the man That sang them is a name. And so is God A name; and so is love, and life, and death, And everything. But we, who are too blind To read what we have written, or what faith Has written for us, do not understand: We only blink, and […]...
25. Withered Grave Forever yours My dearly beloved one Carved in stone, many years ago. Underneath those loving words, a resting body Far too young, left by it’s soul. A few lonely flowers come back every year, But it’s apparent, no living soul is tending here. From the date, by now, forever must also be gone. But where […]...
26. Invocation This is for Elsa, also known as Liz, An ample-bosomed gospel singer: five Discrete malignancies in one full breast. This is for auburn Jacqueline, who is Celebrating fifty years alive, One since she finished chemotherapy. With fireworks on the fifteenth of July. This is for June, whose words are lean and mean As she is, […]...
27. Philology Recapitulates Ontology, Poetry Is Ontology Faithful to your commandments, o consciousness, o Holy bird of words soaring ever whether to nothingness or to inconceivable fulfillment slowly: And still I follow you, awkward as that dandy of ontology and as awkward as his albatross and as Another dandy of ontology before him, another shepherd and watchdog of being, the one who […]...
28. A Woman’s Reason I’m Sure every Word that you say is Absurd; I Say it’s All Gummidge and Twaddle; You may Argue away till the 19th of May, But I don’t like the Sound of the Moddle!...
29. I Wait For You I wait for you. The years in silence pass And as the image, one, I wait for you again. The distance is in flame and clear one as glass, I, silent, wait with sadness, love and pain. The distance is in flame, and you are coming fast, But I’m afraid that you will change your […]...
30. The Hosts Purged, with the life they left, of all That makes life paltry and mean and small, In their new dedication charged With something heightened, enriched, enlarged, That lends a light to their lusty brows And a song to the rhythm of their tramping feet, These are the men that have taken vows, These are the […]...
31. TO WILLIAM E. CHANNING The pages of thy book I read, And as I closed each one, My heart, responding, ever said, “Servant of God! well done!” Well done! Thy words are great and bold; At times they seem to me, Like Luther’s, in the days of old, Half-battles for the free. Go on, until this land revokes The […]...
32. The missing the way loss seeps Into neck hollows And curls at temples Sits between front teeth Cavity Empty and waiting For mourning to open The way mourning stays Forever shadowing vision Shaping lives with memory A drawer won’t close Sleep elusive Smile illusive The only real is grief Forever counting the days Minutes missing without knowing […]...
33. June 11 It’s my birtday I’ve got an empty Stomach and the desire to be Lazy in the hammock and maybe Go for a cool swim on a hot day With the trombone in Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” In my head and then to break for Lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi With plenty […]...
34. The Mole Said he: “I’ll dive deep in the Past, And write a book of direful days When summer skies were overcast With smoke of humble hearths ablaze; When War was rampant in the land, And poor folk cowered in the night, While ruin gaped on every hand – Of ravishing and wrath I’ll write.” Ten years […]...
35. Matins You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending To be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling Clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence My life will change, though It takes forever, checking Each […]...
36. Epilogue Those blessиd structures, plot and rhyme Why are they no help to me now I want to make Something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write With the threadbare art of my eye […]...
37. The Song of the Oak The Druids waved their golden knives And danced around the Oak When they had sacrificed a man; But though the learned search and scan No single modern person can Entirely see the joke. But though they cut the throats of men They cut not down the tree, And from the blood the saplings spring Of […]...
38. Poetry it Takes A lot of Desperation Dissatisfaction And Disillusion To Write A Few Good Poems. It’s not For Everybody Either to Write It Or even to Read It....
39. Cacoethes Scribendi If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for […]...
40. A Confession To: I At the risk of being customary I wish to make a confession Not that it may be true They do not love that do not show it But because it’s true That to deny it is to argue with reality...