I Cannot be Known

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1. Inexpensive Progress Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; Away with gentle willows And all the elmy billows That through your valleys roll. Let’s say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only […]...
2. The Red Blaze is the Morning The Red Blaze is the Morning The Violet is Noon The Yellow Day is falling And after that is none But Miles of Sparks at Evening Reveal the Width that burned The Territory Argent that Never yet consumed...
3. 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 […]...
4. Talking XX And then a scholar said, “Speak of Talking.” And he answered, saying: You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your […]...
5. These are the Signs to Nature's Inns These are the Signs to Nature’s Inns Her invitation broad To Whosoever famishing To taste her mystic Bread These are the rites of Nature’s House The Hospitality That opens with an equal width To Beggar and to Bee For Sureties of her staunch Estate Her undecaying Cheer The Purple in the East is set And […]...
6. 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 […]...
7. The Human Face I. Soon Of all the springtimes of the world This one is the ugliest Of all of my ways of being To be trusting is the best Grass pushes up snow Like the stone of a tomb But I sleep within the storm And awaken eyes bright Slowness, brief time ends Where all streets must […]...
8. The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy […]...
9. There is a solitude of space There is a solitude of space A solitude of sea A solitude of death, but these Society shall be Compared with that profounder site That polar privacy A soul admitted to itself Finite infinity....
10. Unity ONE thing in all things have I seen: One thought has haunted earth and air: Clangour and silence both have been Its palace chambers. Everywhere I saw the mystic vision flow And live in men and woods and streams, Until I could no longer know The dream of life from my own dreams. Sometimes it […]...
11. Shinto When sorrow lays us low For a second we are saved By humble windfalls Of the mindfulness or memory: The taste of a fruit, the taste of water, That face given back to us by a dream, The first jasmine of November, The endless yearning of the compass, A book we thought was lost, The […]...
12. The Cold Clear Spring At Nanyang A pity it is evening, yet I do love the water of this spring Seeing how clear it is, how clean; Rays of sunset gleam on it, Lighting up its ripples, making it One with those who travel The roads; I turn and face The moon; sing it a song, then Listen to the sound […]...
13. Not Love Perhaps This is not Love, perhaps, Love that lays down its life, That many waters cannot quench, Nor the floods drown, But something written in lighter ink, Said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own. A need, at times, to be together and talk, And then the finding we can walk More firmly through […]...
14. Sonnet Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun, We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run Down some close-covered by-way of the air, Some low sweet alley between wind and wind, Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find […]...
15. Palm Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk Only on feelings. That faces upward And in its mirror Receives heavenly roads, which travel Along themselves. That has learned to walk upon water When it scoops, That walks upon wells, Transfiguring every path. That steps into other hands, Changes those that are like it […]...
16. Remorse For Any Death Free of memory and of hope, Limitless, abstract, almost future, The dead man is not a dead man: he is death. Like the God of the mystics, Of Whom anything that could be said must be denied, The dead one, alien everywhere, Is but the ruin and absence of the world. We rob him of […]...
17. The Andante of Snakes They weave a slow andante as in sleep, Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white; With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keep A treachery of silence; infinite Ancestral angers brood in these dull eyes Where the long-lineaged venom of the snake Meditates evil; woven intricacies Of Oriental arabesque awake, Unfold, expand, contract, and raise […]...
18. Somewhere upon the general Earth Somewhere upon the general Earth Itself exist Today The Magic passive but extant That consecrated me Indifferent Seasons doubtless play Where I for right to be Would pay each Atom that I am But Immortality Reserving that but just to prove Another Date of Thee Oh God of Width, do not for us Curtail Eternity!...
19. Amends to Nature I have loved colours, and not flowers; Their motion, not the swallows wings; And wasted more than half my hours Without the comradeship of things. How is it, now, that I can see, With love and wonder and delight, The children of the hedge and tree, The little lords of day and night? How is […]...
20. The house where I was born (09) And then the day came When I heard the extraordinary lines in Keats, The evocation of Ruth “when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” I did not need to search for the meaning Of these words, For it was in me since childhood, I had only to recognize and to […]...
21. THE DEATH OF ART “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” -critic Harold Bloom, who first called slam poetry “the death of art.” I am not a poet. I want to be rich and buy things for my family. Besides, I am sort of popular and can honestly say I’ve had a great […]...
22. 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 […]...
23. Best Society When I was a child, I thought, Casually, that solitude Never needed to be sought. Something everybody had, Like nakedness, it lay at hand, Not specially right or specially wrong, A plentiful and obvious thing Not at all hard to understand. Then, after twenty, it became At once more difficult to get And more desired […]...
24. 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 […]...
25. To Flowers From Italy in Winter Sunned in the South, and here to-day; If all organic things Be sentient, Flowers, as some men say, What are your ponderings? How can you stay, nor vanish quite From this bleak spot of thorn, And birch, and fir, and frozen white Expanse of the forlorn? Frail luckless exiles hither brought! Your dust will not […]...
26. TO DEATH Thou bidst me come away, And I’ll no longer stay, Than for to shed some tears For faults of former years; And to repent some crimes Done in the present times; And next, to take a bit Of bread, and wine with it; To don my robes of love, Fit for the place above; To […]...
27. The End of the World Here, at the end of the world, The flowers bleed As if they were hearts, The hearts ooze a darkness Like india ink, & poets dip their pens in & they write. “Here, at the end of the world,” They write, Not knowing what it means. “Here, where the sky nurses on black milk, Where […]...
28. Peter Strong and slippery, Built for the midnight grass-party Confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away The detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding To the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds Or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units In each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth […]...
29. What Does It Mean It does not know it glitters It does not know it flies It does not know it is this not that. And, more and more often, agape, With my Gauloise dying out, Over a glass of red wine, I muse on the meaning of being this not that. Just as long ago, when I was […]...
30. Dreams Are Best I just think that dreams are best, Just to sit and fancy things; Give your gold no acid test, Try not how your silver rings; Fancy women pure and good, Fancy men upright and true: Fortressed in your solitude, Let Life be a dream to you. For I think that Thought is all; Truth’s a […]...
31. The Road to Roundabout Some say that Guy of Warwick The man that killed the Cow, And brake the mighty Boar alive Beyond the bridge at Slough; Went up against a Loathly Worm That wasted all the Downs, And so the roads they twist and squirm (If a may be allowed the term) From the writhing of the stricken […]...
32. Alone In contact, lo! the flint and steel, By sharp and flame, the thought reveal That he the metal, she the stone, Had cherished secretly alone. Booley Fito....
33. The Gardener XXVIII: Your Questioning Eyes Your questioning eyes are sad. They Seek to know my meaning as the moon Would fathom the sea. I have bared my life before your Eyes from end to end, with nothing Hidden or held back. That is why you Know me not. If it were only a gem, I could break It into a […]...
34. An English Breeze UP with the sun, the breeze arose, Across the talking corn she goes, And smooth she rustles far and wide Through all the voiceful countryside. Through all the land her tale she tells; She spins, she tosses, she compels The kites, the clouds, the windmill sails And all the trees in all the dales. God […]...
35. Suzanne Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river You can hear the boats go by You can spend the night beside her And you know that she’s half crazy But that’s why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges That come all the way from China And just […]...
36. 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 […]...
37. Journey Of The Magi ‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, […]...
38. Answers Why did you travel? Because the house was cold. Why did you travel? Because it is what I have always done between sunset and sunrise. What did you wear? I wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks. What did you wear? I wore nothing. A scarf of pain kept me […]...
39. Head Against The Walls There were only a few of them In all the earth Each one thought he was alone They sang, they were right To sing But they sang the way you sack a city The way you kill yourself. Frayed moist night Shall we endure you Longer Shall we not shake Your cloacal evidence We shall […]...
40. 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, […]...