477
No Man can compass a Despair—
As round a Goalless Road
No faster than a Mile at once
The Traveller proceed—
Unconscious of the Width—
Unconscious that the Sun
Be setting on His progress—
So accurate the One
At estimating Pain—
Whose own—has just begun—
His ignorance—the Angel
That pilot Him along—
Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.
Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.
Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
To the great archer--not to him
To meet whom flies the sun,
And who is wont his features dim
With clouds to overrun--
But to the boy be vow'd these rhymes,
Who 'mongst the roses plays,
Who hear us, and at proper times
To pierce fair hearts essays.
Through him the gloomy winter night,
Of yore so cold and drear,
Brings many a loved friend to our sight,
And many a woman dear.
Henceforward shall his image fair
Stand in yon starry skies,
Red o’er the forest peers the setting sun;
The line of yellow light dies fast away
That crown’d the eastern copse; and chill and dun
Falls on the moor the brief November day.
Now the tired hunter winds a parting note,
And Echo bids good-night from every glade;
Yet wait awhile and see the calm leaves float
Each to his rest beneath their parent shade.
How like decaying life they seem to glide
And yet no second spring have they in store;
And where they fall, forgotten to abide
The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.
Notice what this poem is not doing.
A house, a house, a barn, the old
quarry, where the river shrugs--
how much of this place is yours?
Notice what this poem is not doing.
Every person gone has taken a stone
to hold, and catch the sun. The carving
says, "Not here, but called away."
Notice what this poem is not doing.
after Rene Char
Let's agree that the night is a blank canvas, a station
break, a bridge of a song.
Let's agree further that activities at night—movies,
campfires, reading by a lamp—are all
basically an homage to the day.
I have come to regard these two statements as
contradictory. Let me explain.
First, set aside that one could see a movie, torch a fire,
and read with the sun blazing over us.
The in-between aspect of night need not spark a flurry of
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
Perhaps we go with wind and cloud and sun,
Into the free companionship of air;
Perhaps with sunsets when the day is done,
All's one to me -- I do not greatly care;
So long as there are brown hills -- and a tree
Like a mad prophet in a land of dearth --
And I can lie and hear eternally
The vast monotonous breathing of the earth.
I have known hours, slow and golden-glowing,
Lovely with laughter and suffused with light,
O Lord, in such a time appoint my going,
Under the high unclouded sun
That makes the ship and shadow one,
I sail away as from the fort
Booms sullenly the noonday gun.
The odorous airs blow thin and fine,
The sparkling waves like emeralds shine,
The lustre of the coral reefs
Gleams whitely through the tepid brine.
And glitters o'er the liquid miles
The jewelled ring of verdant isles,
Where generous Nature holds her court
Of ripened bloom and sunny smiles.
Encinctured by the faithful seas
They say her words were like balloons
with strings I could not hold,
that her love was something in a shop
cheap and far too quickly sold;
but the tree does not price its apples
nor the sun its selling power
the rain does not gossip
or speak of where it goes.
