Randall Jarrell

The Refugees

In the shabby train no seat is vacant. The child in the ripped mask Sprawls undisturbed in the waste Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant? They had faces and lives like you.

Cinderella

Her imaginary playmate was a grown-up In sea-coal satin. The flame-blue glances, The wings gauzy as the membrane that the ashes Draw over an old ember as the mother In a jug of cider

The House In The Woods

At the back of the houses there is the wood. While there is a leaf of summer left, the wood Makes sounds I can put somewhere in my song, Has paths I can walk,

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

About suffering, about adoration, the old masters Disagree. When someone suffers, no one else eats Or walks or opens the window no one breathes As the sufferers watch the sufferer. In St. Sebastian Mourned

Gunner

Did they send me away from my cat and my wife To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth, To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent? Did

90 North

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe, I clambered to bed; up the globe’s impossible sides I sailed all night-till at last, with my black beard, My furs and

The Breath Of Night

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling In the ferns by the rotten oak Stare over a marsh and a meadow To the farm’s white wisp of smoke. A spark burns, high in heaven.

Children Selecting Books In A Library

With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright. The child’s head, bent to the book-colored shelves, Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering, Moving in blind grace… yet from the mural, Care The grey-eyed

A Country Life

A bird that I don’t know, Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow, Looks sideways out into the wheat The wind waves under the waves of heat. The field is yellow as egg-bread dough

Losses

It was not dying: everybody died. It was not dying: we had died before In the routine crashes and our fields Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, And the rates rose,

Next Day

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food-gathering flocks Are selves

The Player Piano

I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House Run by a lady my age. She was gay. When I told her that I came from Pasadena She laughed and said, “I lived in

The Olive Garden

(Rainer Maria Rilke) He went up under the gray leaves All gray and lost in the olive lands And laid his forehead, gray with dust, Deep in the dustiness of his hot hands. After

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;

The Elementary Scene

Looking back in my mind I can see The white sun like a tin plate Over the wooden turning of the weeds; The street jerking a wet swing To end by the wall the

Mail Call

The letters always just evade the hand One skates like a stone into a beam, falls like a bird. Surely the past from which the letters rise Is waiting in the future, past the

Jerome

Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon. Der heilige Hieronymus his lion is at the zoo Listens, listens. All the long, soft, summer day Dreams affright his couch, the deep boils like

Hope

The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life. The week is dealt out like a hand That children pick up card by card. One keeps getting the same hand. One keeps getting the same

The Woman At The Washington Zoo

The saris go by me from the embassies. Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. They look back at the leopard like the leopard. And I. . . . this print of mine,

Well Water

What a girl called “the dailiness of life” (Adding an errand to your errand. Saying, “Since you’re up. . .” Making you a means to A means to a means to) is well water

A Sick Child

The postman comes when I am still in bed. “Postman, what do you have for me today?” I say to him. (But really I’m in bed.) Then he says – what shall I have

Eighth Air Force

If, in an odd angle of the hutment, A puppy laps the water from a can Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving Whistles O Paradiso! shall I say that man Is not as

The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black