Short Poems

If you have formd a Circle to go into
Go into it yourself & see how you would do

The morning drum-call on my eager ear
Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew
Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
But now I pause at whiles in what I do,
And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear
(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.

I REMEMBER the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness.
And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown.
And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.

Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest. And so am I.

Love flies with bow unstrung when Time appears,
And trembles at the approach of heavy years.
A few bright feathers leaves he in his flight,
Quite beyond call, but not forgotten quite.

If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,
Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime
Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread
Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time.
Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadowy than they.

Limpid river
rippling in dawn light;
green peaks
hugged by strands of cloud.
Who is that
in that boat, alone?
He must have left
the world of men behind.

A jade cave, ten thousand flowering peach trees
of immortality,
towers and terraces like those of Ts'ai Ching's family!
The divine elixir is ready, but who needs to take it now?
Let's give it to the mountain boy to feed to the crows.

In the blue-green shadows
the morning clouds lie smooth.
Wild grasses look like mist,
the gully path is bright.
When can I come here
to build a home in the mountains
and listen forever to the wind in the pines,
the sounds of monkeys and birds?

In ten thousand pine trees
sounds the low roar of the wind
like Master Hu Pa playing his zither once more.
People stroll in and out among the trees
as if they were fish
appearing above the water
then disappearing again.