Germs

Related poetry:

1. Assurances I NEED no assurances-I am a man who is preoccupied, of his own Soul; I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside the hands and face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant of-calm and actual faces; I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of […]...
2. What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space What birds plunge through is not the intimate space, In which you see all Forms intensified. (In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself, Would disappear into that vastness.) Space reaches from us and translates Things: To become the very essence of a tree, Throw inner space around it, from that space That lives in […]...
3. On the Beach at Night, Alone ON the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining-I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future. A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids, […]...
4. Winter Complaint Now when I have a cold I am careful with my cold, I consult a physician And I do as I am told. I muffle up my torso In woolly woolly garb, And I quaff great flagons Of sodium bicarb. I munch on aspirin, I lunch on water, And I wouldn’t dream of osculating Anybody’s […]...
5. Night In Iowa Nimbus clouds erasing stars above Lamoni. Jaundiced lights. Silos. Loose dogs. Cows Whose stench infuses the handful of homes, Whose sad voices storm the plains with longing....
6. Fireflies in the Garden Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part....
7. The Father of the Predicaments He came at night to each of us asleep And trained us in the virtues we most lacked. Me he admonished to return his stare Correctly, without fear. Unless I could, Unblinking, more and more incline Toward a deep unblinkingness of his, He would not let me rest. Outside In the dark of the world, […]...
8. Preparation We must not force events, but rather make The heart soil ready for their coming, as The earth spreads carpets for the feet of Spring, Or, with the strengthening tonic of the frost, Prepares for Winter. Should a July noon Burst suddenly upon a frozen world Small joy would follow, even tho’ that world Were […]...
9. Long Odds How many million galaxies there are Who knows? and each has countless stars in it, And each rolls through eternities afar Beneath the threshold of the Infinite. How is it that will all that space to roam I should have found this mote that spins and leaps In what unutterable sunlight, foam Of what unfathomable […]...
10. To the East and to the West TO the East and to the West; To the man of the Seaside State, and of Pennsylvania, To the Kanadian of the North-to the Southerner I love; These, with perfect trust, to depict you as myself-the germs are in all men; I believe the main purport of These States is to found a superb friendship, […]...
11. Turns And Movies: Dancing Adairs Behold me, in my chiffon, gauze, and tinsel, Flitting out of the shadow into the spotlight, And into the shadow again, without a whisper!- Firefly’s my name, I am evanescent. Firefly’s your name. You are evanescent. But I follow you as remorselessly as darkness, And shut you in and enclose you, at last, and always, […]...
12. A March in the Ranks, Hard-prest A MARCH in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown; A route through a heavy wood, with muffled steps in the darkness; Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating; Till after midnight glimmer upon us, the lights of a dim-lighted building; We come to an open space in the woods, and […]...
13. It's Ours there is always that space there Just before they get to us That space That fine relaxer The breather While say Flopping on a bed Thinking of nothing Or say Pouring a glass of water from the Spigot While entranced by Nothing That Gentle pure Space It’s worth Centuries of Existence Say Just to scratch […]...
14. Science-fiction Cradlesong By and by Man will try To get out into the sky, Sailing far beyond the air From Down and Here to Up and There. Stars and sky, sky and stars Make us feel the prison bars. Suppose it done. Now we ride Closed in steel, up there, outside Through our port-holes see the vast […]...
15. 16-bit Intel 8088 chip with an Apple Macintosh You can’t run Radio Shack programs In its disc drive. Nor can a Commodore 64 Drive read a file You have created on an IBM Personal Computer. Both Kaypro and Osborne computers use The CP/M operating system But can’t read each other’s Handwriting For they format (write On) discs in different […]...
16. Septuagesima I dream of the silence The day before Adam came To name the animals, The gold skins newly dropped From God’s bright fingers, still Implicit with the light. A day like this, perhaps: A winter whiteness Haunting the creation, As we are sometimes Haunted by the space We fill, or by the forms We might […]...
17. Human Knowledge Since thou readest in her what thou thyself hast there written, And, to gladden the eye, placest her wonders in groups; Since o’er her boundless expanses thy cords to extend thou art able, Thou dost think that thy mind wonderful Nature can grasp. Thus the astronomer draws his figures over the heavens, So that he […]...
18. Frank Drummer Out of a cell into this darkened space The end at twenty-five! My tongue could not speak what stirred within me, And the village thought me a fool. Yet at the start there was a clear vision, A high and urgent purpose in my soul Which drove me on trying to memorize The Encyclopedia Britannica!...
19. The Naked Land A beast stands at my eye. I cook my senses in a dark fire. The old wombs rot and the new mother Approaches with the footsteps of a world. Who are the people of this unscaled heaven? What beckons? Whose blood hallows this grim land? What slithers along the watershed of my human sleep? The […]...
20. The Virtue Of Woman Man of virtue has need;-into life with boldness he plunges, Entering with fortune more sure into the hazardous strife; But to woman one virtue suffices; it is ever shining Lovingly forth to the heart; so let it shine to the eye!...
21. Dreamland By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule- From a wild clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE – out of TIME. Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, […]...
22. Respectability I. Dear, had the world in its caprice Deigned to proclaim ”I know you both, ”Have recognized your plighted troth, Am sponsor for you: live in peace!” – How many precious months and years Of youth had passed, that speed so fast, Before we found it out at last, The world, and what it fears? […]...
23. Bivouac on a Mountain Side I SEE before me now, a traveling army halting; Below, a fertile valley spread, with barns, and the orchards of summer; Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt in places, rising high; Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes, dingily seen; The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on […]...
24. Darest Thou Now, O Soul 1 DAREST thou now, O Soul, Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region, Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow? 2 No map, there, nor guide, Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand, Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land. 3 I […]...
25. Out from Behind this Mask 1 OUT from behind this bending, rough-cut Mask, (All straighter, liker Masks rejected-this preferr’d,) This common curtain of the face, contain’d in me for me, in you for you, in each for each, (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears-O heaven! The passionate, teeming plays this curtain hid!) This glaze of God’s serenest, purest sky, This film of […]...
26. Beginners HOW they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals;) How dear and dreadful they are to the earth; How they inure to themselves as much as to any-What a paradox appears their age; How people respond to them, yet know them not; How there is something relentless in their fate, all times; How […]...
27. 179. To Miss Ferrier, enclosing Elegy on Sir J. H. Blair NAE heathen name shall I prefix, Frae Pindus or Parnassus; Auld Reekie dings them a’ to sticks, For rhyme-inspiring lasses. Jove’s tunefu’ dochters three times three Made Homer deep their debtor; But, gien the body half an e’e, Nine Ferriers wad done better! Last day my mind was in a bog, Down George’s Street I […]...
28. A Triolet Of all the sickly forms of verse, Commend me to the triolet. It makes bad writers somewhat worse: Of all the sickly forms of verse, That fall beneath a reader’s curse, It is the feeblest jingle yet. Of all the sickly forms of verse, Commend me to the triolet....
29. Escape at Bedtime The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out Through the blinds and the windows and bars; And high overhead and all moving about, There were thousands of millions of stars. There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree, Nor of people in church or the Park, As the crowds of the stars […]...
30. My Antipathy I have a heartfelt aversion for crime, a twofold aversion, Since ’tis the reason why man prates about virtue so much. “What! thou hatest, then, virtue?” I would that by all it were practised, So that, God willing, no man ever need speak of it more....
31. Prisoners Usually at the helipad I see them stumble-dance Across the hot asphalt With crokersacks over their heads, Moving toward the interrogation huts, Thin-framed as box kites Of sticks & black silk Anticipating a hard wind That’ll tug & snatch them Out into space. I think Some must be laughing Under their dust-colored hoods, Knowing rockets […]...
32. Supposing that I should have the courage Supposing that I should have the courage To let a red sword of virtue Plunge into my heart, Letting to the weeds of the ground My sinful blood, What can you offer me? A gardened castle? A flowery kingdom? What? A hope? Then hence with your red sword of virtue....
33. In Excelsis It is half winter, half spring, And Barbara and I are standing Confronting the ocean. Its mouth is open very wide, And it has dug up its green, Throwing it, throwing it at the shore. You say it is angry. I say it is like a kicked Madonna. Its womb collapses, drunk with its fever. […]...
34. To The Author Of Glare There comes a time when the story turns into twenty Different stories and soon after that he academy of shadows Retreats to the cave of a solitary boy in a thriving Metropolis where no one remembers the original story Whic is, of course, a sign of its great success: to be forgotten Implies you were […]...
35. Sonnet XXV: The Wisest Scholar The wisest scholar of the wight most wise By Phoebus’ doom, with sugar’d sentence says, That Virtue, if it once met with our eyes, Strange flames of love it in our souls would raise; But for that man with pain his truth descries, Whiles he each thing in sense’s balance weighs, And so nor will, […]...
36. Quia Absurdum Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless Pool of the stars. (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.) Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman. (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.) Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will. Choose the […]...
37. To the Rev. Dr. Thomas Amory To cultivate in ev’ry noble mind Habitual grace, and sentiments refin’d, Thus while you strive to mend the human heart, Thus while the heav’nly precepts you impart, O may each bosom catch the sacred fire, And youthful minds to Virtue’s throne aspire! When God’s eternal ways you set in sight, And Virtue shines in all […]...
38. Conversation The tumult in the heart Keeps asking questions. And then it stops and undertakes to answer In the same tone of voice. No one could tell the difference. Uninnocent, these conversations start, And then engage the senses, Only half-meaning to. And then there is no choice, And then there is no sense; Until a name […]...
39. So much of Heaven has gone from Earth So much of Heaven has gone from Earth That there must be a Heaven If only to enclose the Saints To Affidavit given. The Missionary to the Mole Must prove there is a Sky Location doubtless he would plead But what excuse have I? Too much of Proof affronts Belief The Turtle will not try […]...
40. The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: I Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete Interchange of our own Essence with world-space. You counterweight In which I rythmically happen. Single wave-motion whose Gradual sea I am: You, most inclusive of all our possible seas- Space has grown warm. How many regions in space have already been Inside me. There are winds that seem like My […]...