English

Oh, there is morning yonder,
And night and noon again;
And I must up and wander
Away against the rain.

The forests would delay me
With a thousand little leaves;
The hilltops seek to stay me,
And valleys dim with eves.

The mist denies the mountains,
The wind forbids the sea;
But, mist or wind, I go to find
The day that calls to me.

For there are mornings yonder,
And noons that call and call;
And there's a day, with arms outheld,
That waits beyond them all.

A glittering host of starry-lustred names
Shine in our England's annals: men who wrought
To give us golden truths in fairy frames,
Or weave the rich-hued thought.

Great-hearted ones, who changed life's common things
To forms of luminous beauty, and gave forth
Their dream-born splendours on bedazzling wings
To charm the wondering earth:

Investing fleshless phantoms of the brain
With shapes of radiant immortality,
Or threading tender words in some sweet strain
To melt men's hearts for aye.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Making the circle larger, I can include
the green shed fading in the lot. Sometimes I think
we already have it. I think the world's that big.
Then your dog dies, and the planets are more perfectly
imperfectly-shaped than ever. I'm not afraid?
How else explain invention? In that story
where the man wakes up and can't find his wife, now,
suddenly, their bed's a moon, too big and too bright.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 186, no. 3, June 2005. Used with permission.

His army jacket bore the white rectangle
of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute
at the round table where the trip-wire veterans
ate breakfast. They were foxhole buddies
who went stateside without leaving the war.
They had the look of men who held their breath
and now their tongues. What is to say
beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower
and lower as the war went on, spines curving
toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged
with ammo belts enough to make fine lace
of enemy flesh and blood. Now these who survived,

Happy, ye leaves! when as those lilly hands,
Which hold my life in their dead-doing might,
Shall handle you, and hold in love's soft bands,
Lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines! on which, with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to looke,
And reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
Written with teares in harts close-bleeding booke.
And happy rymes! bath'd in the sacred brooke
Of Helicon, whence she derived is;
When ye behold that Angels blessed looke,

Why, lovely LELIA, so depress'd?
With wonted Smiles your Eyes adorn;

Drive gloomy Sorrow from your Breast,
And shine out, beauteous, as the Morn.

The fair PENDARVIS bid me try,
For you to tune my Lyre again,
To your lov'd Presence instant fly,
And sooth you with some joyous Strain.

But if PENDARVIS, born to please,
Does in her native Province fail,
Nor can your anxious Bosom ease;
Alas! how should my Muse prevail?

Shall Heav'n, that form'd thee wond'rous fair,
Behold thee thus repining lie?

I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night;
I went to the window to see the sight;
All the Dead that ever I knew
Going one by one and two by two.

On they pass'd, and on they pass'd;
Townsfellows all, from first to last;
Born in the moonlight of the lane,
Quench'd in the heavy shadow again.

Schoolmates, marching as when we play'd
At soldiers once--but now more staid;
Those were the strangest sight to me
Who were drown'd, I knew, in the awful sea.

Straight and handsome folk; bent and weak too;

Only a few could understand his ways and his outfit queer,
His saddle-horse and his pack-horse as lean as a Winter steer,
As he rode alone on the mesa intent on his endless quest—
Old Tom Bright of the Pecos, a ghost of the vanished West.

His gaze was fixed on the spaces; he never had much to say
When we met him down by the river, or over in Santa Fé.
He favored the open country with its reaches clean and wide,
And called it his “sage-brush garden; the only place left to ride.”

And are ye sure the news is true?
And are ye sure he's weel?
Is this a time to think o' wark?
Mak haste, lay by your wheel;
Is this the time to spin a thread
When Colin's at the door?
Reach me my cloak, I'll to the quay
And see him come ashore.
For there's nae luck about the house,
There's nae luck at a',
There's little pleasure in the house
When our gudeman's awa.

And gie to me my bigonet,
My bishop's satin gown;
For I maun tell the bailie's wife
That Colin's come to town.