No Swan So Fine

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1. Aubade JANE, Jane, Tall as a crane, The morning light creaks down again; Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair, Jane, Jane, come down the stair. Each dull blunt wooden stalactite Of rain creaks, hardened by the light, Sounding like an overtone From some lonely world unknown. But the creaking empty light Will never harden into sight, Will never […]...
2. Life Is Fine I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn’t, So I jumped in and sank. I came up once and hollered! I came up twice and cried! If that water hadn’t a-been so cold I might’ve sunk and died. But it was Cold in that water! […]...
3. 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 […]...
4. A Fine Day After all the rain, the sun Shines on hill and grassy mead; Fly into the garden, child, You are very glad indeed. For the days have been so dull, Oh, so special dark and drear, That you told me, “Mr. Sun Has forgotten we live here.” Dew upon the lily lawn, Dew upon the garden […]...
5. Swan Song A bunch of old snakeheads down by the pond Carrying on the swan tradition hissing Inside their white bodies, raising and lowering their heads Like ostriches, regretting only the sad ritual That forced them to waddle back into the water After their life under the rocks, wishing they could lie again in the sun And […]...
6. The Black Swan When the swans turned my sister into a swan I would go to the lake, at night, from milking: The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan, A swan’s red beak; and the beak would open And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon. Out on the lake, a girl […]...
7. Leda And The Swan A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white […]...
8. Sudden Fine Weather Reader! what soul that laoves a verse can see The spring return, nor glow like you and me? Hear the quick birds, and see the landscape fill, Nor long to utter his melodious will? This more than ever leaps into the veins, When spring has been delay’d by winds and rains, And coming with a […]...
9. THE SWAN ANDROMACHE, I think of you! The stream, The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief, The lying Simoпs flooded by your tears, Made all my fertile memory blossom forth As I passed by the new-built Carrousel. Old Paris is no more (a town, alas, Changes more quickly […]...
10. An Old-Fashioned Garden Strange, is it not? She was making her garden, Planting the old-fashioned flowers that day- Bleeding-hearts tender and bachelors-buttons- Spreading the seeds in the old-fashioned way. Just in the old fashioned way, too, our quarrel Grew until, angrily, she set me free- Planting, indeed, bleeding hearts for the two of us,- Ordaining bachelor’s buttons for […]...
11. The Swan Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air – An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned Into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air […]...
12. The Swan This laboring through what is still undone, As though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way, Is like the akward walking of the swan. And dying-to let go, no longer feel The solid ground we stand on every day- Is like anxious letting himself fall Into waters, which receive him gently And which, as though […]...
13. Come On In, The Senility Is Fine People live forever in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg and Tampa, But you don’t have to live forever to become a grampa. The entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild, You only have to live until your child has a child. From that point on you start looking both ways over your shoulder, Because sometimes you […]...
14. Love The Wild Swan “I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting Flash, of the splendor of things. Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets […]...
15. Turtle, Swan Because the road to our house Is a back road, meadowlands punctuated By gravel quarry and lumberyard, There are unexpected travelers Some nights on our way home from work. Once, on the lawn of the Tool And Die Company, a swan; The word doesn’t convey the shock Of the thing, white architecture Rippling like a […]...
16. The Swan At Edgewater Park Isn’t one of your prissy richpeoples’ swans Wouldn’t be at home on some pristine pond Chooses the whole stinking shoreline, candy wrappers, condoms in its tidal fringe Prefers to curve its muscular, slightly grubby neck into the body of a Great Lake, Swilling whatever it is swans swill, Chardonnay of algae with bouquet of crud, […]...
17. A FINE MADNESS Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out? Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation Contractors’ morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Valйry. London has everything except my bardic inspiration I’ve only to step off the […]...
18. On a Fine Morning Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being, Not from noting Life’s conditions, Nor from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem. II Thus do I this heyday, holding Shadows but as lights unfolding, As no specious show this […]...
19. De M. Antonio NOW Antoninus, in a smiling age, Counts of his life the fifteenth finished stage. The rounded days and the safe years he sees, Nor fears death’s water mounting round his knees. To him remembering not one day is sad, Not one but that its memory makes him glad. So good men lengthen life; and to […]...
20. Fine Apricot Lodge Fine apricot cut for roofbeam Fragrant cogongrass tie for eaves Not know ridgepole in cloud Go make people among rain Fine apricot was cut for the roofbeam, Fragrant cogongrass tied for the eaves. I know not when the cloud from this house Will go to make rain among the people....
21. Once, I knew a fine song Once, I knew a fine song, It is true, believe me It was all of birds, And I held them in a basket; When I opened the wicket, Heavens! They all flew away. I cried, “Come back, little thoughts!” But they only laughed. They flew on Until they were as sand Thrown between me and […]...
22. Budapest Museum of Fine Arts a Memo from the Past This is to compliment those Who have made us petrified And conjured up evidence of our sufferings Into what they call a tourist’s attraction...
23. Dream Song 8: The weather was fine. They took away his teeth The weather was fine. They took away his teeth, White & helpful; bothered his backhand; Halved his green hair. They blew out his loves, his interests. ‘Underneath,’ (they called in iron voices) ‘understand, Is nothing. So there.’ The weather was very fine. They lifted off His covers till he showed, and cringed & pled To […]...
24. Heritage Now the dead past seems vividly alive, And in this shining moment I can trace, Down through the vista of the vanished years, Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face. And suddenly some secret spring’s released, And unawares a riddle is revealed, And I can read like large, black-lettered print, What seemed before a thing […]...
25. To My Name-Child 1 Some day soon this rhyming volume, if you learn with proper speed, Little Louis Sanchez, will be given you to read. Then you shall discover, that your name was printed down By the English printers, long before, in London town. In the great and busy city where the East and West are met, All […]...
26. Katie Drummond My Louis loved me oh so well And spiered me for his wife; He would have haled me from the hell That was my bawdy life: The mother of his bairns to be, Daftlike he saw in me. But I, a hizzie of the town Just telt him we must part; Loving too well to […]...
27. 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 […]...
28. Lodged The rain to the wind said, ‘You push and I’ll pelt.’ They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged though not dead. I know how the flowers felt....
29. It Is March It is March and black dust falls out of the books Soon I will be gone The tall spirit who lodged here has Left already On the avenues the colorless thread lies under Old prices When you look back there is always the past Even when it has vanished But when you look forward With […]...
30. A Spell before Winter After the red leaf and the gold have gone, Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain Bruised and discolored, when October’s flame Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade. There is a knowledge in the look of things, The old hills hunch before the […]...
31. To His Two Children In the land of Wu the mulberry leaves are green, And thrice the silkworms have gone to sleep. In East Luh where my family stay, I wonder who is sowing those fields of ours. I cannot be back in time for the spring doings, Yet I can help nothing, traveling on the river. The south […]...
32. German Faith Once for the sceptre of Germany, fought with Bavarian Louis Frederick, of Hapsburg descent, both being called to the throne. But the envious fortune of war delivered the Austrian Into the hands of the foe, who overcame him in fight. With the throne he purchased his freedom, pledging his honor For the victor to draw […]...
33. Sandpipers Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes. Homes for sandpipers-the script of their feet is on the sea shingles-they write in the morning, it is gone at noon-they write at noon, it is gone at night. Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anything but the sandpiper’s wire legs and […]...
34. 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 […]...
35. Exiles Her brown falcon perches above the sink As steaming water forks over my hands. Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink. I am in exile in my own land. Her half-grown cats scuffle across the floor Trailing a slime of blood from where they fed. I lock the door. They claw under the door. […]...
36. Dilton Marsh Halt Was it worth keeping the Halt open, We thought as we looked at the sky Red through the spread of the cedar-tree, With the evening train gone by? Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it, Two and sometimes three Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches To Westbury, home […]...
37. The Red Shirt “…his poems that no one reads anymore become dust, wind, nothing, Like the insolent colored shirt he bought to die in.” -Vargas Llosa If I gave 5 birds Each 4 eyes I would be blind Unto the 3rd Generation, if I Gave no one a word For a day And let the day Grow into […]...
38. Drumnotes DAYS of the dead men, Danny. Drum for the dead, drum on your remembering heart. Jaurès, a great love-heart of France, a slug of lead in the red valves. Kitchener of Khartoum, tall, cold, proud, a shark’s mouthful. Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg fathers, moths […]...
39. Song from Aella O SING unto my roundelay, O drop the briny tear with me; Dance no more at holyday, Like a running river be: My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed All under the willow-tree. Black his cryne as the winter night, White his rode as the summer snow, Red his face as the morning light, […]...
40. Drying Their Wings What the Carpenter Said THE moon’s a cottage with a door. Some folks can see it plain. Look, you may catch a glint of light, A sparkle through the pane, Showing the place is brighter still Within, though bright without. There, at a cosy open fire Strange babes are grouped about. The children of the […]...