Between Games

Related poetry:

1. The Fury Of Sunsets Something Cold is in the air, An aura of ice And phlegm. All day I’ve built A lifetime and now The sun sinks to Undo it. The horizon bleeds And sucks its thumb. The little red thumb Goes out of sight. And I wonder about This lifetime with myself, This dream I’m living. I could […]...
2. Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pin rest; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where […]...
3. Mind Games I am a waterfall in the desert. A rain from a cloudless sky. A well known but unborn child. An insistence experience That you never had. I play mind games with your brain. When you strike the keys and remember the sea I come as indefinable memory. When you look at your watch And the […]...
4. Cinema Screen Light’s patterns freeze: Frost on our faces. Light’s pollen sifts Through the lids of our eyes… Light sinks and rusts In water; is broken By glass… rests On deserted dust. Light lies like torn Paper in corners: A rock-pool’s pledge Of the sea’s return. Light, wrenched at the edges By wind, looks down At itself […]...
5. Personality Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau YOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb. You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only One thumb. You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and Win all the world’s honors, but when you come back […]...
6. One Inch Tall If you were only one inch tall, you’d ride a worm to school. The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool. A crumb of cake would be a feast And last you seven days at least, A flea would be a frightening beast If you were one inch tall. If you were […]...
7. The Bagel I stopped to pick up the bagel Rolling away in the wind, Annoyed with myself For having dropped it As if it were a portent. Faster and faster it rolled, With me running after it Bent low, gritting my teeth, And I found myself doubled over And rolling down the street Head over heels, one […]...
8. My Hero Bares His Nerves My hero bares his nerves along my wrist That rules from wrist to shoulder, Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost, Leans on my mortal ruler, The proud spine spurning turn and twist. And these poor nerves so wired to the skull Ache on the lovelorn paper I hug to love with my unruly […]...
9. Old Susan When Susan’s work was done, she’d sit With one fat guttering candle lit, And window opened wide to win The sweet night air to enter in; There, with a thumb to keep her place She’d read, with stern and wrinkled face. Her mild eyes gliding very slow Across the letters to and fro, While wagged […]...
10. Love In The Asylum A stranger has come To share my room in the house not right in the head, A girl mad as birds Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume. Strait in the mazed bed She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room, At large […]...
11. Long highway blues highway dancing During a long day Of running My thumb, Carrying me nowhere Grew tired, A sunset and beauty Carved the sky Her eyes and hair A tattoo upon my soul Wouldn’t let go I had nowhere to run And so, Highway dancing And nowhere To call home. Walking the long black road Alone Believing […]...
12. Dream Song 54: 'NO VISITORS' I thumb the roller to ‘NO VISITORS’ I thumb the roller to And leans against the door. Comfortable in my horseblanket I prop on the costly bed & dream of my wife, My first wife, And my second wife & my son. Insulting, they put guardrails up, As if it were a crib! I growl at the head nurse; we […]...
13. A Brown Girl Dead With two white roses on her breasts, White candles at head and feet, Dark Madonna of the grave she rests; Lord Death has found her sweet. Her mother pawned her wedding ring To lay her out in white; She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing To see herself tonight....
14. My Comrade Out from my window westward I turn full oft my face; But the mountains rebuke the vision That would encompass space; They lift their lofty foreheads To the kiss of the clouds above, And ask, “With all our glory, Can we not win your love?” I answer, “No, oh mountains! I see that you are […]...
15. Birds at Winter Nightfall (Triolet) Around the house the flakes fly faster, And all the berries now are gone From holly and cotoneaster Around the house. The flakes fly! faster Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster We used to see upon the lawn Around the house. The flakes fly faster, And all the berries now are gone!...
16. Looking, Walking, Being “The World is not something to Look at, it is something to be in.” Mark Rudman I look and look. Looking’s a way of being: one becomes, Sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes Dig and burrow into the world. They touch Fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the […]...
17. Sandpipers Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes. Homes for sandpipers-the script of their feet is on the sea shingles-they write in the morning, it is gone at noon-they write at noon, it is gone at night. Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anything but the sandpiper’s wire legs and […]...
18. Songs For A Colored Singer I A washing hangs upon the line, but it’s not mine. None of the things that I can see belong to me. The neighbors got a radio with an aerial; we got a little portable. They got a lot of closet space; we got a suitcase. I say, “Le Roy, just how much are we […]...
19. Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End? Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it. It’s frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds. The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil. The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold. But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white Feet of the trees Whose mouths open. Doesn’t […]...
20. Selecting A Reader First, I would have her be beautiful, And walking carefully up on my poetry At the loneliest moment of an afternoon, Her hair still damp at the neck From washing it. She should be wearing A raincoat, an old one, dirty From not having money enough for the cleaners. She will take out her glasses, […]...
21. 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 […]...
22. Self-Knowledge XVII And a man said, “Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.” And he answered, saying: Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge. You would know in words that which you have always know in thought. You would touch with your […]...
23. By a flower By a letter By a flower By a letter By a nimble love If I weld the Rivet faster Final fast above Never mind my breathless Anvil! Never mind Repose! Never mind the sooty faces Tugging at the Forge!...
24. Anaphora In memory of Marjorie Carr Stevens Each day with so much ceremony Begins, with birds, with bells, With whistles from a factory; Such white-gold skies our eyes First open on, such brilliant walls That for a moment we wonder “Where is the music coming from, the energy? The day was meant for what ineffable creature […]...
25. Faces In The Street They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown; For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet My window-sill is level with the faces in the street Drifting past, drifting past, To the beat of weary feet While I sorrow […]...
26. Carbonara eyes Nicky said I couldn’t write, she’s got a charming Sense of social etiquette – given she’s a bitch (the canine sort, can’t spell for shit or even write A word) but then she has the most expressive eyes. So what she said was no surprise, she’d heard My lamentations, licked my hands, rested forepaws On […]...
27. Tame Cat It rests me to be among beautiful women Why should one always lie about such matters? I repeat: It rests me to converse with beautiful women Even though we talk nothing but nonsense, The purring of the invisible antennae Is both stimulating and delightful....
28. Wedding Each strips his own skin Each bares his own constellation Which has never seen the night Each fills his skin with rocks And plays with it Lit by his own stars Who doesn’t stop till dawn Who doesn’t bat an eyelid or fall Earns his own skin (This game is rarely played)...
29. The End Of The World Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot The armless ambidextrian was lighting A match between his great and second toe, And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb – Quite unexpectedly the top blew off: And […]...
30. Vocation When the gong sounds ten in the morning and I walk to school by our Lane. Every day I meet the hawker crying, “Bangles, crystal Bangles!” There is nothing to hurry him on, there is no road he must Take, no place he must go to, no time when he must come home. I wish […]...
31. Essential Beauty In frames as large as rooms that face all ways And block the ends of streets with giant loaves, Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves Of how life should be. High above the gutter A silver knife sinks into golden butter, A […]...
32. SECOND POEM Morning again, nothing has to be done, maybe buy a piano or make fudge. At least clean the room up for sure like my farther I’ve done flick the ashes & butts over the bed side on the floor. But frist of all wipe my glasses and drink the water to clean the smelly mouth. […]...
33. Travelling on the thumb Travelling on the thumb, it wasn’t hard to do, you took The rides that you could get with no regrets – let shrinkage In the mileage to your goal provide your measures of success, Strode the grassy verges thumb erect and cursed the surly Bastards speeding past so close they near to spun you round. […]...
34. Garden and cradle When our babe he goeth walking in his garden, Around his tinkling feet the sunbeams play; The posies they are good to him, And bow them as they should to him, As fareth he upon his kingly way; And birdlings of the wood to him Make music, gentle music, all the day, When our babe […]...
35. The Last Leaf I saw him once before, As he passed by the door, And again The pavement stones resound, As he totters o’er the ground With his cane. They say that in his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the Crier on his round Through the town. […]...
36. Style Flaubert wanted to write a novel About nothing. It was to have no subject And be sustained upon the style alone, Like the Holy Ghost cruising above The abyss, or like the little animals In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch That breaks, but do not fall Till they look down. He never wrote […]...
37. The Bear The bear puts both arms around the tree above her And draws it down as if it were a lover And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye, Then lets it snap back upright in the sky. Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall (She’s making her cross-country in the fall). Her great […]...
38. May Morning I lie stretched out upon the window-seat And doze, and read a page or two, and doze, And feel the air like water on me close, Great waves of sunny air that lip and beat With a small noise, monotonous and sweet, Against the window and the scent of cool, Frail flowers by some brown […]...
39. The Donkey When forests walked and fishes flew And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood, Then, surely, I was born. With monstrous head and sickening bray And ears like errant wings – The devil’s walking parody Of all four-footed things: The battered outlaw of the earth Of ancient crooked will; Scourge, beat, […]...
40. Gathering Song of Donald the Black Pibroch of Donuil Dhu Pibroch of Donuil Wake thy wild voice anew, Summon Clan Conuil! Come away, come away, Hark to the summons! Come in your war-array, Gentles and commons. Come from deep glen, and From mountain so rocky; The war-pipe and pennon Are at Inverlocky. Come every hill-plaid, and True heart that wears one, […]...