world

Farewell to one now silenced quite,
Sent out of hearing, out of sight,--
My friend of friends, whom I shall miss,
He is not banished, though, for this,--
Nor he, nor sadness, nor delight.

Though I shall talk with him no more,
A low voice sounds upon the shore.
He must not watch my resting-place,
But who shall drive a mournful face
From the sad winds about my door?

I shall not hear his voice complain,
But who shall stop the patient rain?
His tears must not disturb my heart,

THE COVER FOR

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA



The cover for Trout Fishing in America is a photograph taken

late in the afternoon, a photograph of the Benjamin Franklin

statue in San Francisco's Washington Square.

Born 1706--Died 1790, Benjamin Franklin stands on a

pedestal that looks like a house containing stone furniture.

He holds some papers in one hand and his hat in the other.

Then the statue speaks, saying in marble:

Love of my life, you
Are lost and I am
Young again.

A few years pass.
The air fills
With girlish music;
In the front yard
The apple tree is
Studded with blossoms.

I try to win you back,
That is the point
Of the writing.
But you are gone forever,
As in Russian novels, saying
A few words I don't remember-

How lush the world is,
How full of things that don't belong to me-

I watch the blossoms shatter,
No longer pink,
But old, old, a yellowish white-

Listened but couldn't hear
the subject hissing: looked up to
pages of stuttering rain (it tastes

green), warmer while the song decays
such weather full of precedent
A body made of water

dropped from a stratus
window mists over as it falls,
all hesitating sluice and flume

*

A water-worded book, muttering
foam of nouns, matte adjectives
and artifacts: torn pieces of

the visible, divisible by threes
A lot absorbed in rubble and the day's
debris litters the nocturne

Man, I suck me tooth when I hear
How dem croptime fiddlers lie,
And de wailing, kiss-me-arse flutes
That bring water to me eye!
Oh, when I t'ink how from young
I wasted time at de fetes,
I could bawl in a red-eyed rage
For desire turned to regret,
Not knowing the truth that I sang
At parang and la commette.
Boy, every damned tune them tune
Of love that go last forever
Is the wax and the wane of the moon
Since Adam catch body-fever.

I old, so the young crop won't

Perplexed and troubled at his bad success
The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,
Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hope
So oft, and the persuasive rhetoric
That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,
So little here, nay lost. But Eve was Eve;
This far his over-match, who, self-deceived
And rash, beforehand had no better weighed
The strength he was to cope with, or his own.
But—as a man who had been matchless held
In cunning, over-reached where least he thought,

1.

O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee?

No more the shepherd lads in glee
Throw apples at thy wattled fold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!

Nor through the laurels can one see
Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold,
And what remains to us of thee?

And dull and dead our Thames would be,
For here the winds are chill and cold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!

Then keep the tomb of Helice,

A dove lived in a village.
When it opened its mouth
sweetness came out, sound
like a silver light around
the cherry bough. But
the dove wasn't satisfied.

It saw the villagers
gathered to listen under
the blossoming tree.
It didn't think: I
am higher that they are.
It wanted to wealk among them,
to experience the violence of human feeling,
in part for its song's sake.

So it became human.
It found passion, it found violence,
first conflated, then
as separate emotions

Now, in twilight, on the palace steps
the king asks forgiveness of his lady.

He is not
duplicitous; he has tried to be
true to the moment; is there another way of being
true to the self?

The lady
hides her face, somewhat
assisted by the shadows. She weeps
for her past; when one has a secret life,

one's tears are never explained.

Yet gladly would the king bear
the grief of his lady: his
is the generous heart,
in pain as in joy.

Do you know

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.