Where stone
Doesn’t belong.
What is that old
Man’s public face
Doing sorrowing,
Secretly a little,
A little above and
A little back from
What is that stone
Doing sorrowing
Where stone
Doesn’t belong?
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Along the sprawled body of the derailed Great Northern freight car,
No wind.Beyond town, three heavy white horsesWade all the way to their shouldersIn a silo shadow.Suddenly the freight car lurches.The door slams back, a man with a flashlightCalls me good evening.I nod as I write good evening, lonelyAnd sick for home.
1
On the long stair.On one of those cold white wingsThat the strange fowl provide for us like one hillside of the sea,That cautery of snow that blinds us,Pitiless light,One winter afternoonFair near the place where she sank down with one wing broken,Three friends and I were caughtStalk still in the light.Five of the lights. Why…
The night’s drifts
Slide down the hill, rise again, and buildEerie little dunes on the roof of the house.In the valley below me,Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet,The road lamps glow.They are so cold, they might as well be dark.Trucks and carsCough and drone down there between the goldenCoffins of greenhouses, the startled squawkOf a rooster…
In the Shreve High football stadium,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,Dreaming of heroes.All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.Their women cluck like starved pullets,Dying for love.Therefore,Their sons grow suicidally beautifulAt the beginning of October,And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
They did the deed of darkness
He plucked a gray field mouseSuddenly in the wind.The small dead fly aliveHelplessly in his beak,His cold pride, helpless.All she receives is life.They are terrified. They touch.Life is too much.She flies away sorrowing.Sorrowing, she goes alone.Then her small falcon, gone.Will not rise here again.Smaller than she, he goesClaw beneath claw beneathNeedles and leaning boughs,While she,…
When I went out to kill myself, I caught
Running to spare his suffering, I forgotMy name, my number, how my day began,How soldiers milled around the garden stoneAnd sang amusing songs; how all that dayTheir javelins measured crowds; how I aloneBargained the proper coins, and slipped away.Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my ropeAside, I…