February: The Boy Breughel

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1. AFTERNOON IN FEBRUARY The day is ending, The night is descending; The marsh is frozen, The river dead. Through clouds like ashes The red sun flashes On village windows That glimmer red. The snow recommences; The buried fences Mark no longer The road o’er the plain; While through the meadows, Like fearful shadows, Slowly passes A funeral train. […]...
2. Images of snow – february 1996 snow is a thousand flowers The chinese probably said Hundreds and thousands this morning Drop their garlands on my head Last night the festoons started Long before we went to bed Snow is a white-furred rabbit The chinese probably wrote Hedgerows and fields this morning Wear a similar fluffy coat Last night the winter danced […]...
3. Potomac Town in February THE BRIDGE says: Come across, try me; see how good I am. The big rock in the river says: Look at me; learn how to stand up. The white water says: I go on; around, under, over, I go on. A kneeling, scraggly pine says: I am here yet; they nearly got me last year. […]...
4. You Begin You begin this way: This is your hand, This is your eye, This is a fish, blue and flat On the paper, almost The shape of an eye This is your mouth, this is an O Or a moon, whichever You like. This is yellow. Outside the window Is the rain, green Because it is […]...
5. Is White a Color? White, pristine, unblemished They say it is not a color I love white mists, clouds Lingering on blue mountains. White, no shades No off white, cream Pure as snow on shimmering peaks Is my favorite sight. Nurses, priests, politicians Are bound, chained to white White nebulous clouds Evoke deep nostalgic thoughts. They swaddled my father […]...
6. Calvin Campbell Ye who are kicking against Fate, Tell me how it is that on this hill-side, Running down to the river, Which fronts the sun and the south-wind, This plant draws from the air and soil Poison and becomes poison ivy? And this plant draws from the same air and soil Sweet elixirs and colors and […]...
7. Summer begins to have the look Summer begins to have the look Peruser of enchanting Book Reluctantly but sure perceives A gain upon the backward leaves Autumn begins to be inferred By millinery of the cloud Or deeper color in the shawl That wraps the everlasting hill. The eye begins its avarice A meditation chastens speech Some Dyer of a distant […]...
8. In The New Sun Filaments of light Slant like windswept rain. The orange seller hawks Into the sky, a man with a hat Stops below my window And shakes his tassels. Awake In Tetuan, the room filling With the first colors, and water running In a tub. * A row of sparkling carp Iced in the new sun, odor […]...
9. First Sight Lambs that learn to walk in snow When their bleating clouds the air Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare. Newly stumbling to and fro All they find, outside the fold, Is a wretched width of cold. As they wait beside the ewe, Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies Hidden round them, […]...
10. February 23 Light rain is falling in Central Park But not on Upper Fifth Avenue or Central Park West Where sun and sky are yellow and blue Winds are gusting on Washington Square Through the arches and on to LaGuardia Place But calm is the corner of 8th Street and Second Avenue Which reminds me of something […]...
11. February Begin, my muse, the imitative lay, Aonian doxies sound the thrumming string; Attempt no number of the plaintive Gay, Let me like midnight cats, or Collins sing. If in the trammels of the doleful line The bounding hail, or drilling rain descend; Come, brooding Melancholy, pow’r divine, And ev’ry unform’d mass of words amend. Now […]...
12. Balmoral Castle Beautiful Balmoral Castle, Most handsome to be seen, Highland home of the Empress of India, Great Britain’s Queen. Your woods and waters and Mountains high are most Beautiful to see, Near by Balmoral Castle And the dark river Dee. Then there’s the hill of Cairngorm To be seen from afar, And the beautiful heathery hills […]...
13. A Calendar of Sonnets: February Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white; And reigns the winter’s pregnant silence still; No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill, And willow stems grow daily red and bright. These are days when ancients held a rite Of expiation for the old year’s ill, And prayer to purify the new year’s will: […]...
14. February: Thinking of Flowers Now wind torments the field, Turning the white surface back On itself, back and back on itself, Like an animal licking a wound. Nothing but white the air, the light; Only one brown milkweed pod Bobbing in the gully, smallest Brown boat on the immense tide. A single green sprouting thing Would restore me. . […]...
15. In Memory of a Happy Day in February Blessed be Thou for all the joy My soul has felt today! O let its memory stay with me And never pass away! I was alone, for those I loved Were far away from me, The sun shone on the withered grass, The wind blew fresh and free. Was it the smile of early spring […]...
16. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. […]...
17. A Musical Instrument What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of […]...
18. The Immortals I killed them, but they would not die. Yea! all the day and all the night For them I could not rest or sleep, Nor guard from them nor hide in flight. Then in my agony I turned And made my hands red in their gore. In vain – for faster than I slew They […]...
19. Come Out with Me There’s sun on the river and sun on the hill. . . You can hear the sea if you stand quite still! There’s eight new puppies at Roundabout Farm- And I saw an old sailor with only one arm! But everyone says, “Run along!” (Run along, run along!) All of them say, “Run along! I’m […]...
20. The Onset Always the same, when on a fated night At last the gathered snow lets down as white As may be in dark woods, and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, I almost stumble looking up and round, As one who overtaken by the […]...
21. Snow In the gloom of whiteness, In the great silence of snow, A child was sighing And bitterly saying: “Oh, They have killed a white bird up there on her nest, The down is fluttering from her breast!” And still it fell through that dusky brightness On the child crying for the bird of the snow....
22. Song We know where deepest lies the snow, And where the frost-winds keenest blow, O’er every mountain’s brow, We long have known and learnt to bear The wandering outlaw’s toil and care, But where we late were hunted, there Our foes are hunted now. We have their princely homes, and they To our wild haunts are […]...
23. Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down As you descend, slowly, falling faster past You this snow, Ghostly, some flakes bio- Luminescent (you plunge, And this lit snow doesn’t land At your feet but keeps falling below You): single-cell-plant chains, shreds Of zooplankton’s mucus food traps, Fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts, Sand grains, pollen….And inside These jagged falling islands Live more microlives, […]...
24. Rosie Roberts I was sick, but more than that, I was mad At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life. So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria: “I am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River, Gradually wasting away. But come and take me, I killed the son Of the merchant […]...
25. Spring Pools These pools that, though in forests, still reflect The total sky almost without defect, And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone, And yet not out by any brook or river, But up by roots to bring dark foliage on. The trees that have it […]...
26. Where Go the Boats? Dark brown is the river, Golden is the sand. It flows along for ever, With trees on either hand. Green leaves a-floating, Castles of the foam, Boats of mine a-boating – Where will all come home? On goes the river And out past the mill, Away down the valley, Away down the hill. Away down […]...
27. Noon I bend to the ground To catch Something whispered, Urgent, drifting Across the ditches. The heaviness of Flies stuttering In orbit, dirt Ripening, the sweat Of eggs. There are Small streams The width ofa thumb Running in the villages Of sheaves, whole Eras of grain Wakening on The stalks, a roof That breathes over My […]...
28. 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 […]...
29. Night Words after Juan Ramon A child wakens in a cold apartment. The windows are frosted. Outside he hears Words rising from the streets, words he cannot Understand, and then the semis gear down For the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps Again and dreams of another city On a high hill above a wide river Bathed […]...
30. When I'm Killed When I’m killed, don’t think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there’s one thing that I know well, I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell! So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, […]...
31. The Snow-Storm Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates […]...
32. The river at whitebrook the winding wye Curls into my senses Feliniously There’s no such word But no such river Merely exists Where this river slivers Between the dream And the time i camped by it Has left a furmark On my inward skin It takes only a wet thought For hunchbacked woods And a drift of mist Lifting […]...
33. The Way Through the Woods They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove […]...
34. Helga THE WISHES on this child’s mouth Came like snow on marsh cranberries; The tamarack kept something for her; The wind is ready to help her shoes. The north has loved her; she will be A grandmother feeding geese on frosty Mornings; she will understand Early snow on the cranberries Better and better then....
35. Woods in Winter When winter winds are piercing chill, And through the hawthorn blows the gale, With solemn feet I tread the hill, That overbrows the lonely vale. O’er the bare upland, and away Through the long reach of desert woods, The embracing sunbeams chastely play, And gladden these deep solitudes. Where, twisted round the barren oak, The […]...
36. Me prove it now Whoever doubt Me prove it now Whoever doubt Me stop to prove it now Make haste the Scruple! Death be scant For Opportunity The River reaches to my feet As yet My Heart be dry Oh Lover Life could not convince Might Death enable Thee The River reaches to My Breast Still still My Hands above Proclaim […]...
37. Poem For My 43rd Birthday To end up alone In a tomb of a room Without cigarettes Or wine Just a lightbulb And a potbelly, Grayhaired, And glad to have The room. …in the morning They’re out there Making money: Judges, carpenters, Plumbers, doctors, Newsboys, policemen, Barbers, carwashers, Dentists, florists, Waitresses, cooks, Cabdrivers… And you turn over To your left […]...
38. 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 […]...
39. The Voice Safe in the magic of my woods I lay, and watched the dying light. Faint in the pale high solitudes, And washed with rain and veiled by night, Silver and blue and green were showing. And the dark woods grew darker still; And birds were hushed; and peace was growing; And quietness crept up the […]...
40. It seldom snowed – Part II It seldom snowed in Camp they said, on the mountains, yes, And in the Styx, aka zone six. That’s where we were afoot In alpine grass, garbed to test our winter skills, Tramp the craggy hills and camp a night or two, Spy a special site, an outing planned To ready us for troop command. […]...