When the Kings come to royal hunting-seats
To find the royal joys of summer days,
The servants on the lofty watch tower raise
A banner, whose swift token warning greets
The country. Threatening stern, and armed man meets
Each stranger, who, by pleasant forest-ways,
All unawares, has rambled till he strays
Too close to paths where, in the noonday heats,
The King, uncrowned, lies down to sleep. Such law
As this the human soul sets heart and face
And hand, when once its King has come. In awe,
And gladness too, all men behold what grace

Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked,
both fell to the floor. A gesture
gone sadly awry. This was close to fact
and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur
in Florida, where she was surrounded
by rotting abundance and greedy insects.
One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand
alighting on solid furniture,
a casual shift of weight,
the next, undignified splayed legs.
The shell of the table
proved to be stuffed with termite eggs.
True, it was a fall from no great height—
merely the height of herself,

In a barren land I wander,
And no tree, nor house I spy;
Lead me to a Rock for refuge,
Rock that higher is than I.

Fierce the sun has beat upon me
From a burning, cloudless sky;
Friendly shadow now I long for,
Rock that higher is than I.

Strange and wild the scenes around me,
And no help from man is nigh;
But a shelter Thou canst show me,
Rock that higher is than I.

Treacherous guides have me forsaken,
Many paths deceive my eye;
Thou alone canst guide, and show me
Rock that higher is than I.

Sweet, sweet!
I rise to greet
The sapphire sky
The air slips by
On either side
As up I ride
On mounting wing,
And sing and sing -
Then reach my bliss,
The sun's great kiss;
And poise a space
To see his face,
Sweet, sweet,
In radiant grace,
Ah, sweet! ah, sweet!

Sweet, sweet!
Beneath my feet
My nestlings call:
And down I fall
Unerring, true,
Through heaven's blue;
And haste to fill
Each noisy bill
My brooding breast
Stills their unrest.
Sweet, sweet,
Their quick hearts beat,
Safe in the nest:

Why sing of suns you cannot see, in vain?—
Here where dull day from night scarce diff'rent pales,
And fog as grisly as a dead man's nails
Freezes opaquely at the window pane;

Here where the laughter and the living eye
Of dormant water, blind and mute beneath
The black ice-shell, like spirits after death
Steal unadmired their passage. Down the sky

Like fruitless seed of seasons overblown,
The fluff-winged atomies tumble and amass,
Muffling the pale and sapless winter grass
Under a clammy still oblivion.

I am the fruit of Adams hands, through sin lockt in satans bands,
Destined to deth, the child of ire, a flaming brand of infernall fire:
Borne I was naked and bare, and spend my time in sorowe and care,
And shall returne unto the dust, and be deprived of carnall lust.
Yet thou father didst Jesus send, to pardon them that did offend:
We laud him in the work of might, that we be blessed in his sight.

So now, just suppose that someone wanted to know
if faggots are men—a fair question.
Would I then trot out all the masculinists I have known
who are homosexual
and show how they did and do and will oppress women and
are certainly male supremacist, no less than I,
or should that be no more?—which is not even to speak
of hideous straight men with their most of the most.
And then should I apologize
about how long we've existed and haven't had any
consciousness to speak of
but have allowed them to kill Oscar Wilde with that longdrawnout torture

I just had turned the classic page,
With ancient lore and wisdom fraught,
Which many a hoary-headed sage
Had stamped with never-dying thought;
And many a bard of lofty mind,
With measured lay and tuneful lyre,
And strains too grand for human kind,
All pregnant with celestial fire—
In notes majestic, loud and long,
Had poured the volumed tide of song.
Here Egypt's sages, skilled of yore
In Isis' dark mysterious rites,
Unvailed their find of mystic lore
To eager Grecian neophytes.
And as I sadly musing sat,
Thinking on ages long gone by,

She looked nearly the same
But when I hugged her
There was substantially more
To her—no doubt as with me.
She fibbed as I did at the edge
Of curb under the streetlight
As spiders dropped like tiny
Parachutes—they were difficult
To see. On the periphery
Of good luck, I thought,
Revisiting her quirky habits
And expressions, what I eventually
Found so bothersome. Except
When I glanced at my watch
I discovered I was trembling
Like a small-time embezzler.
I see, she said, you must have
An appointment. The driveways
And hedges funneling back

Take courage, friends, for she hath but been sleeping
These eighteen centuries underneath the snow;
She whom we loved and worshipped long ago
In Hellas, for whose face we have been weeping,
And long look-out the sons of men are keeping,
Shall burn upon us with her early glow
Of sweetest rosy gladness; we shall know
Her resurrection—we who have been reaping
The bitter harvest of her absent shame.
From end to end of our awakened earth
Shall roll upon the wings of morning mirth
The great reverberation of her name,