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
The Old And The New Masters
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;