Skunk Cabbage

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1. A Flower-Piece By Fantin Heart’s ease or pansy, pleasure or thought, Which would the picture give us of these? Surely the heart that conceived it sought Heart’s ease. Surely by glad and divine degrees The heart impelling the hand that wrought Wrought comfort here for a soul’s disease. Deep flowers, with lustre and darkness fraught, From glass that gleams […]...
2. Skunk Hour For Elizabeth Bishop Nautilus Island’s hermit Heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; Her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer Is first selectman in our village, She’s in her dotage. Thirsting for The hierarchic privacy Of Queen Victoria’s century, She buys up all The eyesores facing her […]...
3. The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some […]...
4. CABBAGE KEY Once Hemingway Sat across this bay And touched the endless sea The gulf-stretched sun Guides everyone Who dreams the dreams like he Through the tropical heat You can hear the beat That sings God’s poetry Just close your eyes Beneath the bright skies On beautiful Cabbage Key And if by chance The ospreys dance Across […]...
5. A Cabbage Patch Folk ask if I’m alive, Most think I’m not; Yet gaily I contrive To till my plot. The world its way can go, I little heed, So long as I can grow The grub I need. For though long overdue, The years to me, Have taught a lesson true, Humility. Such better men than I […]...
6. Prayer For A Prayer Dearest one, when I am dead Never seek to follow me. Never mount the quiet hill Where the copper leaves are still, As my heart is, on the tree Standing at my narrow bed. Only of your tenderness, Pray a little prayer at night. Say: “I have forgiven now- I, so weak and sad; O […]...
7. Domination Of Black At night, by the fire, The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves, Turned in the room, Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks Came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. The colors of their tails Were like the […]...
8. To A Snowflake What heart could have thought you? Past our devisal (O filigree petal!) Fashioned so purely, Fragilely, surely, From what Paradisal Imagineless metal, Too costly for cost? Who hammered you, wrought you, From argentine vapor? “God was my shaper. Passing surmisal, He hammered, He wrought me, From curled silver vapor, To lust of His mind Thou […]...
9. Interior Portrait You don’t survive in me Because of memories; Nor are you mine because Of a lovely longing’s strength. What does make you present Is the ardent detour That a slow tenderness Traces in my blood. I do not need To see you appear; Being born sufficed for me To lose you a little less....
10. The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because Of His Many Moods If this importunate heart trouble your peace With words lighter than air, Or hopes that in mere hoping flicker and cease; Crumple the rose in your hair; And cover your lips with odorous twilight and say, ‘O Hearts of wind-blown flame! O Winds, older than changing of night and day, That murmuring and longing came […]...
11. Don Quixote The knight of immortal youth At the age of fifty found his mind in his heart And on July morning went out to capture The right, the beautiful, the just. Facing him a world of silly and arrogant giants, He on his sad but brave Rocinante. I know what it means to be longing for […]...
12. 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, […]...
13. Clouds 1 Dawn. First light tearing At the rough tongues of the zinnias, At the leaves of the just born. Today it will rain. On the road Black cars are abandoned, but the clouds Ride above, their wisdom intact. They are predictions. They never matter. The jet fighters lift above the flat roofs, Black arrowheads trailing […]...
14. March 26, 1974 R. Frost 100th B’day The air was soft, the ground still cold. In wet dull pastures where I strolled Was something I could not believe. Dead grass appeared to slide and heave, Though still too frozen-flat to stir, And rocks to twitch, and all to blur. What was this rippling of the land? Was matter […]...
15. Unconscious THE WINDS, the stars, and the skies though wrought By the heavenly King yet know it not; And man who moves in the twilight dim Feels not the love that encircles him, Though in heart, on bosom, and eyelids press Lips of an infinite tenderness, He turns away through the dark to roam Nor heeds […]...
16. Lover's Gifts XXXIX: There Is a Looker-On There is a looker-on who sits behind my eyes. I seems he has seen Things in ages and worlds beyond memory’s shore, and those Forgotten sights glisten on the grass and shiver on the leaves. He Has seen under new veils the face of the one beloved, in twilight Hours of many a nameless star. […]...
17. Vegetation O never harm the dreaming world, The world of green, the world of leaves, But let its million palms unfold The adoration of the trees. It is a love in darkness wrought Obedient to the unseen sun, Longer than memory, a thought Deeper than the graves of time. The turning spindles of the cells Weave […]...
18. Prairie States, The A NEWER garden of creation, no primal solitude, Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms, With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one, By all the world contributed-freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s society, The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations, To justify the past....
19. Sabbaths 2001 I He wakes in darkness. All around Are sounds of stones shifting, locks Unlocking. As if some one had lifted Away a great weight, light Falls on him. He has been asleep or simply Gone. He has known a long suffering Of himself, himself sharpen by the pain Of his wound of separation he now […]...
20. Preference NOT in scorn do I reprove thee, Not in pride thy vows I waive, But, believe, I could not love thee, Wert thou prince, and I a slave. These, then, are thine oaths of passion? This, thy tenderness for me? Judged, even, by thine own confession, Thou art steeped in perfidy. Having vanquished, thou wouldst […]...
21. Wood Rides Who hath not felt the influence that so calms The weary mind in summers sultry hours When wandering thickest woods beneath the arms Of ancient oaks and brushing nameless flowers That verge the little ride who hath not made A minutes waste of time and sat him down Upon a pleasant swell to gaze awhile […]...
22. Alabaster LIKE this alabaster box whose art Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart, Carven with delicate dreams and wrought With many a subtle and exquisite thought. Therein I treasure the spice and scent Of rich and passionate memories blent Like odours of cinnamon, sandal and clove, Of song and sorrow and life and love....
23. On Woman May God be praised for woman That gives up all her mind, A man may find in no man A friendship of her kind That covers all he has brought As with her flesh and bone, Nor quarrels with a thought Because it is not her own. Though pedantry denies, It’s plain the Bible means […]...
24. To the Reader As you read, a white bear leisurely Pees, dyeing the snow Saffron, And as you read, many gods Lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian Are watching the generations of leaves, And as you read The sea is turning its dark pages, Turning Its dark pages....
25. Sisters Sisters – Heaviness and Tenderness – you look the same. Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose. Man dies, and the hot sand cools again. Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday’s sun goes. Oh, honeycombs’ heaviness, nets’ tenderness, It’s easier to lift a stone than to say your name! I have one purpose […]...
26. In Hardwood Groves The same leaves over and over again! They fall from giving shade above To make one texture of faded brown And fit the earth like a leather glove. Before the leaves can mount again To fill the trees with another shade, They must go down past things coming up. They must go down into the […]...
27. Leaves Compared With Flowers A tree’s leaves may be ever so good, So may its bar, so may its wood; But unless you put the right thing to its root It never will show much flower or fruit. But I may be one who does not care Ever to have tree bloom or bear. Leaves for smooth and bark […]...
28. Tractor The tractor stands frozen – an agony To think of. All night Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale, A spill of molten ice, smoking snow, Pours into its steel. At white heat of numbness it stands In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness. It defied flesh and won’t start. Hands are like […]...
29. 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 […]...
30. Dream Song 21: Some good people, daring & subtle voices Some good people, daring & subtle voices And their tense faces, as I think of it I see sank underground. I see. My radar digs. I do not dig. Cool their flushing blood, them eyes is shut— Eyes? Appalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded. Without exception! All. ALL. The senior population waits. Come down! […]...
31. Sabbaths, W. I Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday, In all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping Those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore Of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are Selling yellow sulphur stone The burnt banana leaves that used to dance The river whose bed is made of […]...
32. The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XXIII Call to me to the one among your moments That stands against you, ineluctably: Intimate as a dog’s imploring glance But, again, forever, turned away When you think you’ve captured it at last. What seems so far from you is most your own. We are already free, and were dismissed Where we thought we soon […]...
33. To Marguerite Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know. But when the moon their hollows lights, And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, […]...
34. 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 […]...
35. A Landscape By Courbet Low lies the mere beneath the moorside, still And glad of silence: down the wood sweeps clear To the utmost verge where fed with many a rill Low lies the mere. The wind speaks only summer: eye nor ear Sees aught at all of dark, hears aught of shrill, From sound or shadow felt or […]...
36. Adonis 1. Each of us like you Has died once, Has passed through drift of wood-leaves, Cracked and bent And tortured and unbent In the winter-frost, The burnt into gold points, Lighted afresh, Crisp amber, scales of gold-leaf, Gold turned and re-welded In the sun; Each of us like you Has died once, Each of us […]...
37. Water It was a Maine lobster town- Each morning boatloads of hands Pushed off for granite Quarries on the islands, And left dozens of bleak White frame houses stuck Like oyster shells On a hill of rock, And below us, the sea lapped The raw little match-stick Mazes of a weir, Where the fish for bait […]...
38. Fancies Surely the flowers of a hundred springs Are simply the souls of beautiful things! The poppies aflame with gold and red Were the kisses of lovers in days that are fled. The purple pansies with dew-drops pearled Were the rainbow dreams of a youngling world. The lily, white as a star apart, Was the first […]...
39. The Floor The floor is something we must fight against. Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human Stance, it is that place that men fall to. I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse; The pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face. But should I go dizzy I crash down into the […]...
40. The Coming Of Wisdom With Time Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth....