water

IT fell on a day, and a bonnie simmer day,
   When green grew aits and barley,
That there fell out a great dispute
   Between Argyll and Airlie.

Argyll has raised an hunder men,
   An hunder harness'd rarely,
And he 's awa' by the back of Dunkell,
   To plunder the castle of Airlie.

Lady Ogilvie looks o'er her bower-window,
   And O but she looks warely!
And there she spied the great Argyll,
   Come to plunder the bonnie house of Airlie.

'Come down, come down, my Lady Ogilvie,

The brook leaps riotous with its life just found,
That freshets from the mountain rains have fed,
Beats at the boulders in its hindered bed,
And fills the valley with its triumphing sound.
The strong unthirsty tarn sunk in deep ground
Has never a sigh wherewith its wealth is said,
Has no more ripples than the May-flies tread:
Silence of waters is where they abound.

And love, whatever love, sure, makes small boast:
'Tis the new lovers tell, in wonder yet.
Oh happy need! Enriched stream's jubilant gush!

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

Air -- "The Fierce Discharge"

I
In the late rebellion war,
Grand Rapids did send out
As brave and noble volunteers
As ever went down south:
Among them were the brave Page boys --
Five brothers there were in all;
They enlisted and went down south,
To obey their country's call.
II
John S. Page was the eldest son --
He went down south afar,
And enlisted in the Mechanics,
And served his time in the war.
Fernando Page the second son;
Served in the Infantry;

THE BRIDLE reins hang loose in the hold of his lean left hand;
As the tether gives, the horse bends browsing down to the sand,
On the pommel the right hand rests with a smoking briar black,
Whose thin rings rise and break as he gazes from the track.

Already the sun is aslope, high still in a pale hot sky,
And the afternoon is fierce, in its glare the wide plains lie
Empty as heaven and silent, smit with a vast despair,
The face of a Titan bound, for whom is no hope nor care.

Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,
His wife he cabin'd with him and his boy,
And seem'd that life laborious to enjoy:
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
He left his trade upon the sabbath-day,
And took young Peter in his hand to pray:
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,
At first refused, then added his abuse:
His father's love he scorn'd, his power defied,
But being drunk, wept sorely when he died.

'Twas in the village of Ruily there lived a bonnie lass
With red, pouting lips which few lasses could surpass,
And her eyes were as azure the blue sky,
Which caused Donald McNeill to heave many a love sigh

Beyond the township of Ruily she never had been,
This pretty maid with tiny feet and aged eighteen;
And when Donald would ask her to be his wife,
"No," she would say, "I'm not going to stay here all my life."

"I'm sick of this life," she said to Donald one day,

A serious moment for the water is
when it boils
And though one usually regards it
merely as a convenience
To have the boiling water
available for bath or table
Occasionally there is someone
around who understands
The importance of this moment
for the water—maybe a saint,
Maybe a poet, maybe a crazy
man, or just someone
temporarily disturbed
With his mind 'floating'in a
sense, away from his deepest
Personal concerns to more
'unreal' things...

A serious moment for the island

God had called us, and we came;
Our loved Earth to ashes left;
Heaven was a neighbor's house,
Open to us, bereft.

Gay the lights of Heaven showed,
And 'twas God who walked ahead;
Yet I wept along the road,
Wanting my own house instead.

Wept unseen, unheeded cried,
"All you things my eyes have kissed,
Fare you well! We meet no more,
Lovely, lovely tattered mist!

Weary wings that rise and fall
All day long above the fire!"—
Red with heat was every wall,

Across the millstream below the bridge
Seven blue swallows divide the air
In shapes invisible and evanescent,
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s
Or memory’s power to keep them there.

“History is where tensions were,”
“Form is the diagram of forces.”
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,
While gazing down upon those birds—
How strange, to be above the birds!—
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web,
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs