That sends all else skittering to thecurb,Redness, brass, ladders and hats hurlpast,Blurring to sheer verb,Shift at the corner into uproarious gearAnd make it around the turn in a squallof traction,The headlong bell maintaining sure andclear,Thought is degraded action!Beautiful, heavy, unweary, loud,obvious thing!I stand here purged of nuance, mymind a blank.All I was brooding upon has…
From the soft street the rooms of houses showA gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thinAnd still allows some stirring down within.I’ve known the wind by water banks to shakeThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fellAnd held in ice as dancers in a spellFluttered all winter long into a…
In wet dull pastures where I strolledWas something I could not believe.Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,Though still too frozen-flat to stir,And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.What was this rippling of the land?Was matter getting out of handAnd making free with natural law?I stopped and blinked, and then I sawA fact as…
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepareA night of gnashings and enormous moan.His tearful sight can hardly reach to whereThe pale-faced figure with bitumen eyesReturns him such a God-forsaken stareAs outcast Adam gave to paradise.The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,Having no wish to go inside and die.Still, he is moved to see…
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,You strove to leave some line of verse behindLike still fresh tracks across a field of snow,Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stareOf uncontested summer all things raisePlainly their seeming into seamless air.Then your love looked as simple and entireAs that picked pear you tossed me, and your faceAs legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,Which promise always wine, by mottled fireMore fatal fleshed than ever human grace.And your gay…
