The Rains

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1. If it ever bloody rains I never said I would, I only said I could Do what you wished, the subtle difference Should have raised a cautious flag; Maybe I bragged out loud, made it sound As if it was intent, I never meant to make It seem that way. So today I wear your Brittle animosity – just out […]...
2. The Rain I hear leaves drinking rain; I hear rich leaves on top Giving the poor beneath Drop after drop; ‘Tis a sweet noise to hear These green leaves drinking near. And when the Sun comes out, After this Rain shall stop, A wondrous Light will fill Each dark, round drop; I hope the Sun shines bright; […]...
3. Wisteria The first purple wisteria I recall from boyhood hung On a wire outside the windows Of the breakfast room next door At the home of Steve Pisaris. I loved his tall, skinny daughter, Or so I thought, and I would wait Beside the back door, prostrate, Begging to be taken in. Perhaps It was only […]...
4. An Ending Early March. The cold beach deserted. My kids Home in a bare house, bundled up And listening to rock music Pirated from England. My wife Waiting for me in a bar, alone For an hour over her sherry, and none Of us knows why I have to pace Back and forth on this flat And […]...
5. Rumpelstiltskin Inside many of us Is a small old man Who wants to get out. No bigger than a two-year-old Whom you’d call lamb chop Yet this one is old and malformed. His head is okay But the rest of him wasn’t Sanforized? He is a monster of despair. He is all decay. He speaks up […]...
6. At Grass The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and main; Then one crops grass, and moves about – The other seeming to look on – And stands anonymous again Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps Two dozen distances surficed To fable them: faint afternoons Of Cups […]...
7. CURFEW I. Solemnly, mournfully, Dealing its dole, The Curfew Bell Is beginning to toll. Cover the embers, And put out the light; Toil comes with the morning, And rest with the night. Dark grow the windows, And quenched is the fire; Sound fades into silence, All footsteps retire. No voice in the chambers, No sound in […]...
8. Flood Goldbrown upon the sated flood The rockvine clusters lift and sway; Vast wings above the lambent waters brood Of sullen day. A waste of waters ruthlessly Sways and uplifts its weedy mane Where brooding day stares down upon the sea In dull disdain. Uplift and sway, O golden vine, Your clustered fruits to love’s full […]...
9. Christ Crucified THY restless feet now cannot go For us and our eternal good, As they were ever wont. What though They swim, alas! in their own flood? Thy hands to give Thou canst not lift, Yet will Thy hand still giving be; It gives, but O, itself’s the gift! It gives tho’ bound, tho’ bound ’tis […]...
10. The Ship of Death I Now it is autumn and the falling fruit And the long journey towards oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew To bruise themselves an exit from themselves. And it is time to go, to bid farewell To one’s own self, and find an exit From the fallen self. II Have you built […]...
11. The World feels Dusty The World feels Dusty When We stop to Die We want the Dew then Honors taste dry Flags vex a Dying face But the least Fan Stirred by a friend’s Hand Cools like the Rain Mine be the Ministry When they Thirst comes And Hybla Balms Dews of Thessaly, to fetch...
12. The Orient Express One looks from the train Almost as one looked as a child. In the sunlight What I see still seems to me plain, I am safe; but at evening As the lands darken, a questioning Precariousness comes over everything. Once after a day of rain I lay longing to be cold; after a while I […]...
13. 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 […]...
14. The Ballad Of The Drover Across the stony ridges, Across the rolling plain, Young Harry Dale, the drover, Comes riding home again. And well his stock-horse bears him, And light of heart is he, And stoutly his old pack-horse Is trotting by his knee. Up Queensland way with cattle He travelled regions vast; And many months have vanished Since home-folk […]...
15. Dark August So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky Of this black August. My sister, the sun, Broods in her yellow room and won’t come out. Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume Like a kettle, rivers overrun; still, She will not rise and turn off the rain. She is in her room, fondling […]...
16. Smoke Last summer, lazing by the sea, I met a most entrancing creature, Her black eyes quite bewildered me – She had a Spanish cast of feature. She often smoked a cigarette, And did it in the cutest fashion. Before a week passed by she set My young heart in a raging passion. I swore I […]...
17. The Greatest Thing In North America This is the greatest thing in North America: Europe is the greatest thing in North America! High in the sky, dark in the heart, and always there Among the natural powers of sunlight and of air, Changing, second by second, shifting and changing the light, Bring fresh rain to the stone of the library steps. […]...
18. The Having To Love Something Else There was a man who would marry his mother, and asked his Father for his mother’s hand in marriage, and was told he could Not marry his mother’s hand because it was attached to all The rest of mother, which was all married to his father; that He’d have to love something else. . . […]...
19. Belle Isle, 1949 We stripped in the first warm spring night And ran down into the Detroit River To baptize ourselves in the brine Of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, Melted snow. I remember going under Hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I’d never seen before, and the cries Our breath made caught at the […]...
20. Repression of War Experience Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth; What silly beggars they are to blunder in And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame – No, no, not that,-it’s bad to think of war, When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you; And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad […]...
21. The Evil Eye It comes oozing Out of flowers at night, It comes out of the rain If a snake looks skyward, It comes out of chairs and tables If you don’t point at them and say their names. It comes into your mouth while you sleep, Pressing in like a washcloth. Beware. Beware. If you meet a […]...
22. The Beach Squat, unshaven, full of gas, Joseph Samuels, former clerk In four large cities, out of work, Waits in the darkened underpass. In sanctuary, out of reach, He stares at the fading light outside: The rain beginning: hears the tide That drums along the empty beach. When drops first fell at six o’clock, The bathers left. […]...
23. Casting The waters deep, the waters dark, Reflect the seekers, hide the sought, Whether in water or in air to drown. Between them curls the silver spark, Barbed, baited, waiting, of a thought Which in the world is upside down, The fish hook or the question mark?...
24. The Stolen Child Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water-rats; There we’ve hid our faery vats, Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For […]...
25. Symptoms of Love Love is universal migraine, A bright stain on the vision Blotting out reason. Symptoms of true love Are leanness, jealousy, Laggard dawns; Are omens and nightmares – Listening for a knock, Waiting for a sign: For a touch of her fingers In a darkened room, For a searching look. Take courage, lover! Could you endure […]...
26. THE FISHERMAN THE waters rush’d, the waters rose, A fisherman sat by, While on his line in calm repose He cast his patient eye. And as he sat, and hearken’d there, The flood was cleft in twain, And, lo! a dripping mermaid fair Sprang from the troubled main. She sang to him, and spake the while: “Why […]...
27. 304. Song-I Murder hate I MURDER hate by flood or field, Tho’ glory’s name may screen us; In wars at home I’ll spend my blood- Life-giving wars of Venus. The deities that I adore Are social Peace and Plenty; I’m better pleas’d to make one more, Than be the death of twenty. I would not die like Socrates, For […]...
28. The Dead A good man is seized by the police And spirited away. Months later Someone brags that he shot him once Through the back of the head With a Walther 7.65, and his life Ended just there. Those who loved Him go on searching the cafés In the Barrio Chino or the bars Near the harbor. […]...
29. Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise The Rain Beloved, let us once more praise the rain. Let us discover some new alphabet, For this, the often praised; and be ourselves, The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf, The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone, And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,- Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion, Beneath […]...
30. Amateurs of Heaven Two lovers to a midnight meadow came High in the hills, to lie there hand and hand Like effigies and look up at the stars, The never-setting ones set in the North To circle the Pole in idiot majesty, And wonder what was given them to wonder. Being amateurs, they knew some of the names […]...
31. Rain Roads not yet glistening, rain slight, Broken clouds darken after thinning away. Where they drift, purple cliffs blacken. And beyond white birds blaze in flight. Sounds of cold-river rain grown familiar, Autumn sun casts moist shadows. Below Our brushwood gate, out to dry at the village Mill: hulled rice, half-wet and fragrant...
32. THE HUDSON O! Und dann wieder dies Bei-sich-selbst-Sein! Diese Stummheiten! Dies Getriebenwerden! ………………………………………………………………………. O! And then to be with – our – very – selves! This muteness! This going adrift! Gottfried Benn When we take her too seriously, Poetry begins to make fun of us: Where is the paper, in what other sky This insect flies because […]...
33. Salts And Oils In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog Believing it was Peking duck. Later, In Tampa I bunked with an insane sailor Who kept a.38 Smith and Wesson in his shorts. In the same room were twins, oilers From Toledo, who argued for hours Each night whose turn it was To get breakfast and should […]...
34. Late Moon 2 a. m. December, and still no mon Rising from the river. My mother Home from the beer garden Stands before the open closet Her hands still burning. She smooths the fur collar, The scarf, opens the gloves Crumpled like letters. Nothing is lost She says to the darkness, nothing. The moon finally above the […]...
35. Bavarian Gentians Not every man has gentians in his house In Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas. Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark Darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom, Ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue Down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day Torch-flower […]...
36. Losers IF I should pass the tomb of Jonah I would stop there and sit for awhile; Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark And came out alive after all. If I pass the burial spot of Nero I shall say to the wind, “Well, well!”- I who have fiddled in a world […]...
37. 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 […]...
38. Another THIS little vault, this narrow room, Of Love and Beauty is the tomb; The dawning beam, that ‘gan to clear Our clouded sky, lies darken’d here, For ever set to us: by Death Sent to enflame the World Beneath. ‘Twas but a bud, yet did contain More sweetness than shall spring again; A budding Star, […]...
39. A rhine-land drinking song If our own life is the life of a flower (And that’s what some sages are thinking), We should moisten the bud with a health-giving flood And ’twill bloom all the sweeter Yes, life’s the completer For drinking, And drinking, And drinking. If it be that our life is a journey (As many wise folk […]...
40. THE PUPIL IN MAGIC I AM now, what joy to hear it! Of the old magician rid; And henceforth shall ev’ry spirit Do whate’er by me is bid; I have watch’d with rigour All he used to do, And will now with vigour Work my wonders too. Wander, wander Onward lightly, So that rightly Flow the torrent, And with […]...