The Mowed Hollow

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1. The Lobster Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water Running down a glass washboard at one end And siphoned off at the other, and so Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster Is made available to the customer Who may choose whichever one he wants To carry home […]...
2. The Hollow Men Mistah Kurtz he dead. A penny for the Old Guy I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape […]...
3. Now Hollow Fires Burn Out to Black Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack, And leave your friends and go. Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread, Look not to left nor right: In all the endless road you tread There’s nothing but the night....
4. On A Great Hollow Tree Preethee stand still awhile, and view this tree Renown’d and honour’d for antiquitie By all the neighbour twiggs; for such are all The trees adjoyning, bee they nere so tall, Comparde to this: if here Jacke Maypole stood All men would sweare ’twere but a fishing rodde. Mark but the gyant trunk, which when you […]...
5. The Sea's Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart Turn from that road’s beguiling ease; return To your hunger’s turret. Enter, climb the stair Chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time Regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent And the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone To show you how your longing waits alone. What alchemy shines from under that […]...
6. Butter Butter, like love, Seems common enough Yet has so many imitators. I held a brick of it, heavy and cool, And glimpsed what seemed like skin Beneath a corner of its wrap; The decolletage revealed A most attractive fat! And most refined. Not milk, not cream, Not even creme de la creme. It was a […]...
7. Nantucket Flowers through the window Lavender and yellow Changed by white curtains- Smell of cleanliness- Sunshine of late afternoon- On the glass tray A glass pitcher, the tumbler Turned down, by which A key is lying – And the Immaculate white bed...
8. Colours in lamplight Colours in lamplight are previews, Scarcely eschewed as wave-length turbulence Tuned to closeness and friendship. Colours in firelight are skin-warmed Glowings, harbouring contentment, Revealing intuitive insight. Colours in moonlight are barely shown Shy smiles recalled with eidetic Intensity from reservoirs of sight. Colours in candlelight are filigree Reflections, decorative shimmers Of sympathetic enchantment. But in […]...
9. The Way At first a mere thread of a footpath half blotted Out by the grasses Sweeping triumphant across it, it wound between hedges of roses Whose blossoms were poised above leaves as pond lilies float on The water, While hidden by bloom in a hawthorn a bird filled the morning with Singing. It widened a highway, […]...
10. Spring Day Bath The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is A smell of tulips and narcissus In the air. The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and Bores through the water In the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It Cleaves the water Into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright […]...
11. Of the Four Ages of Man Lo, now four other act upon the stage, Childhood and Youth, the Many and Old age: The first son unto phlegm, grandchild to water, Unstable, supple, cold and moist’s his nature The second, frolic, claims his pedigree From blood and air, for hot and moist is he. The third of fire and choler is compos’d, […]...
12. A Country Life A bird that I don’t know, Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow, Looks sideways out into the wheat The wind waves under the waves of heat. The field is yellow as egg-bread dough Except where (just as though they’d let It live for looks) a locust billows In leaf-green and shade-violet, A standing mercy. […]...
13. The Fish wade Through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like An Injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the Sun, Split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices- in and out, […]...
14. Agapanthus – african lily [from agape (love); anthus (flower)] You may not be willing to notice me I have an awkward sense of myself My name can be hard on the tongue I do not grow easily in places Where the sun only fitfully appears I’ve come a long way northwards Gardens do not flatter my needs I am […]...
15. North Country North Country, filled with gesturing wood, With trees that fence, like archers’ volleys, The flanks of hidden valleys Where nothing’s left to hide But verticals and perpendiculars, Like rain gone wooden, fixed in falling, Or fingers blindly feeling For what nobody cares; Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death, Stuck with black staghorns, quietly […]...
16. Barmaid Though, if you ask her name, she says Elise, Being plain Elizabeth, e’en let it pass, And own that, if her aspirates take their ease, She ever makes a point, in washing glass, Handling the engine, turning taps for tots, And countering change, and scorning what men say, Of posing as a dove among the […]...
17. The King's Breakfast The King’s Breakfast The King asked The Queen, and The Queen asked The Dairymaid: “Could we have some butter for The Royal slice of bread?” The Queen asked the Dairymaid, The Dairymaid Said, “Certainly, I’ll go and tell the cow Now Before she goes to bed.” The Dairymaid She curtsied, And went and told The […]...
18. Return This little house sows the degrees By which wood can return to trees. Weather has stained the shingles dark And indistinguishable from bark. Lichen that long ago adjourned Its lodging here has now returned. And if you look in through the door You see a sapling through the floor....
19. Four Days In Vermont Window’s tree trunk’s predominant face A single eye-leveled hole where limb’s torn off Another larger contorts to swell growing in around Imploding wound beside a clutch of thin twigs Hold to one two three four five six dry twisted Yellowish brown leaves flat against the other Gray trees in back stick upright then the glimpse […]...
20. Death Of The Kapowsin Tavern I can’t ridge it back again from char. Not one board left. Only ash a cat explores And shattered glass smoked black and strung About from the explosion I believe In the reports. The white school up for sale For years, most homes abandoned to the rocks Of passing boys the fire, helped by wind […]...
21. The Simple Truth I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, Took them home, boiled them in their jackets And ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields On the edge of town. In middle June the light Hung on in the dark furrows at […]...
22. The Death of the Flowers The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs […]...
23. I Ask You What scene would I want to be enveloped in More than this one, An ordinary night at the kitchen table, Floral wallpaper pressing in, White cabinets full of glass, The telephone silent, A pen tilted back in my hand? It gives me time to think About all that is going on outside Leaves gathering in […]...
24. Colors Passing Through Us Purple as tulips in May, mauve Into lush velvet, purple As the stain blackberries leave On the lips, on the hands, The purple of ripe grapes Sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I will give you a color, Like a new flower in a bud vase On your desk. Every day I will paint […]...
25. The Last Mowing There’s a place called Far-away Meadow We never shall mow in again, Or such is the talk at the farmhouse: The meadow is finished with men. Then now is the chance for the flowers That can’t stand mowers and plowers. It must be now, through, in season Before the not mowing brings trees on, Before […]...
26. Lying Down To the right, the sky, to the left, the sea. And before your eyes, the grass and its flowers. A cloud, the road, follows its vertical way Parallel to the plumb line of the horizon, Parallel to the rider. The horse races towards its imminent fall And the other climbs interminably. How simple and strange […]...
27. The Widow's Lament In Springtime Sorrow is my own yard Where the new grass Flames as it has flamed Often before but not With the cold fire That closes round me this year. Thirtyfive years I lived with my husband. The plumtree is white today With masses of flowers. Masses of flowers Load the cherry branches And color some bushes […]...
28. Her Lips Are Copper Wire whisper of yellow globes Gleaming on lamp-posts that sway Like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog And let your breath be moist against me Like bright beads on yellow globes Telephone the power-house That the main wires are insulate (her words play softly up and down Dewy corridors of billboards) Then with your tongue remove […]...
29. The Gardener XVIII: When Two Sisters When the two sisters go to fetch Water, they come to this spot and They smile. They must be aware of somebody Who stands behind the trees when- Ever they go to fetch water. The two sisters whisper to each Other when they pass this spot. They must have guessed the secret Of that somebody […]...
30. May Morning I lie stretched out upon the window-seat And doze, and read a page or two, and doze, And feel the air like water on me close, Great waves of sunny air that lip and beat With a small noise, monotonous and sweet, Against the window and the scent of cool, Frail flowers by some brown […]...
31. The Flower-School When storm-clouds rumble in the sky and June showers come down. The moist east wind comes marching over the heath to blow its Bagpipes among the bamboos. Then crowds of flowers come out of a sudden, from nobody knows Where, and dance upon the grass in wild glee. Mother, I really think the flowers go […]...
32. Ladies And Gentlemen In Outer Space Here is my philosophy: Everything changes (the word “everything” Has just changed as the Word “change” has: it now Means “no change”) so Quickly that it literally surpasses my belief, Charges right past it Like some of the giant Ideas in this area. I had no beginning and I shall have No end: the beam […]...
33. Each small gleam was a voice Each small gleam was a voice, A lantern voice In little songs of carmine, violet, green, gold. A chorus of colours came over the water; The wondrous leaf-shadow no longer wavered, No pines crooned on the hills, The blue night was elsewhere a silence, When the chorus of colours came over the water, Little songs […]...
34. Nursery Rhyme For A Twenty-First Birthday You cannot see the walls that divide your hand From his or hers or mine when you think you touch it. You cannot see the walls because they are glass, And glass is nothing until you try to pass it. Beat on it if you like, but not too hard, For glass will break you […]...
35. Buttons I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for Advertising in front of the newspaper office. Buttons red and yellow buttons blue and black buttons Are shoved back and forth across the map. A laughing young man, sunny with freckles, Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd, And then fixes […]...
36. Exmoor Lost aboard the roll of Kodac- Olor that was to have super- Seded all need to remember Somerset were: a large flock Of winter-bedcover-thick- Pelted sheep up on the moor; A stile, a church spire, And an excess, at Porlock, Of tenderly barbarous antique Thatch in tandem with flower- Beds, relentlessly pictur- Esque, along every […]...
37. The Coal Picker He perches in the slime, inert, Bedaubed with iridescent dirt. The oil upon the puddles dries To colours like a peacock’s eyes, And half-submerged tomato-cans Shine scaly, as leviathans Oozily crawling through the mud. The ground is here and there bestud With lumps of only part-burned coal. His duty is to glean the whole, To […]...
38. A Meeting She steps into the dark swamp Where the long wait ends. The secret slippery package Drops to the weeds. She leans her long neck and tongues it Between breaths slack with exhaustion And after a while it rises and becomes a creature Like her, but much smaller. So now there are two. And they walk […]...
39. Sacrifices All winter the fire devoured everything Tear-stained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers. When April finally arrived, I opened the woodstove one last time And shoveled the remains of those long cold nights Into a bucket, ash rising Through shafts of sunlight, As swirling in bright, angelic eddies. I shoveled out the charred end of […]...
40. The Fury Of Sunrises Darkness As black as your eyelid, Poketricks of stars, The yellow mouth, The smell of a stranger, Dawn coming up, Dark blue, No stars, The smell of a love, Warmer now As authenic as soap, Wave after wave Of lightness And the birds in their chains Going mad with throat noises, The birds in their […]...