Weldon Kees

Then walk the floor, or twist upon your bed

And say, “I will not dream that dream again. I will not dreamOf long-spent whispers vanishing down corridorsThat turn through buildings I have never known;The snap of rubber gloves; the tall child, blind,Who calls my name; the stained sheetsOf another girl. And then a low bell,Sounding through shadows in the cold,Disturbs the screen that is…

For a while

The responsive smile,Though effort goes into it.Across the warm roomShared in candlelight,This look beyond shame,Possible now, at night,Goes out to yours.Hidden by dayAnd shaped by firesGrown dead, gone gray,That burned in other rooms I knewToo long ago to mark,It forms again. I look at youAcross those fires and the dark.

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.

Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the streetConspire and combine toward one community.These are the rooms of Robinson.Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as thoughAll the blurred daybreaks of the springFound an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floorsAnd moonlight of a different kind,He…

When the coal

Burning the books, one by one;First the setOf Bulwer-LyttonAnd then the Walter Scott.They gave a lot of warmth.Toward the end, inFebruary, flamesConsumed the GreekTragedians and Baudelaire,Proust, Robert BurtonAnd the Po-Chu-i. IceThickened on the sills.More for the sake of the cat,We said, than for ourselves,Who huddled, shivering,Against the stoveAll winter long.

Over the river and through the woods

She waits behind the bolted door,Her withered face in thirty pieces,While blood runs thin, and memory,An idiot without a name,Recalls the snows of eighty years,The daughter whose death was unexplained,Darkness, blue veins, and broken leases.Grandmother waits behind the door(Sight dims beyond the curtain folds)With her toothless smile and enuresis.Over the river and through the woodsTo…

Under the bunker, where the reek of kerosene

Imperfect kindling even in this wind, burn on.Someone in uniform hums Brahms. Servants prepareEyewitness stories as the night comes down, as smoking coals awaitBoots on the stone, the occupying troops. Howl ministers.Deep in Kyffhauser Mountain’s underground,The Holy Roman Emperor snores on, in sleep enduringSeven centuries. His long red beardGrows through the table to the floor….

Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants,

and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque,strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date,news of the German Jews, the baseball scores,storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turnthe pages of a thousand books to readthe names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide,Ouspenski; note the terms: obscurantism,factorize, fagaceous, endocarp; descendthe nervous stairs to hear the…

Squat, unshaven, full of gas,

in four large cities, out of work,waits in the darkened underpass.In sanctuary, out of reach,he stares at the fading light outside:the rain beginning: hears the tidethat drums along the empty beach.When drops first fell at six o’clock,the bathers left. The last car’s gone.Sun’s final rays reflect uponthe streaking rain, the rambling dock.He takes an object…