I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards
away from your casket, away from their expert
invasions, kneeling by the order of our births
alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics,
the family at your death keeps to form,
having to act out that love of endings.
When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field,
It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness
That my mother could not console herself to the waste
And insisted on having it picked over with human hands,
Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets
And the hands had long since gone into the factories.
No matter how often my father pointed this out,
She worried it the way I’ ve worried the extra words
How much grit do you think you’ ve got?
Can you quit a thing that you like a lot?
You may talk of pluck; it’ s an easy word,
And where’ er you go it is often heard;
But can you tell to a jot or guess
Just how much courage you now possess?
You may stand to trouble and keep your grin,
But have you tackled self-discipline?
Have you ever issued commands to you
To quit the things that you like to do,
And then, when tempted and sorely swayed,
Those rigid orders have you obeyed?
On rain washed paper dried, ink
still blurs. But all words
are stains. The paper’ s rippled
lunar, mountain and crater,
and seas on the moon, misnomer
of plains that looked like
water once, no-end-to-it shadows,
fractal to fractal. The telescope’ s eye
fooled the eye. From there, does
earth rise and set? Or a thrush,
would it sing its trouble backward? —
the most private tremor first, then
Fame is not fastidious about the lips
which spread it. So long as there are mouths
to reiterate the one name it does not
matter whose they are.
The fact that to the seeker after fame
they are indistinguishable from each other
and are all counted as equal shows that this
passion has its origin in the experience
of crowd manipulation. Names collect
their own crowds. They are greedy, live their own
separate lives, hardly at all connected
with the real natures of the men who bear them.
Fame is not fastidious about the lips
which spread it. So long as there are mouths
to reiterate the one name it does not
matter whose they are.
The fact that to the seeker after fame
they are indistinguishable from each other
and are all counted as equal shows that this
passion has its origin in the experience
of crowd manipulation. Names collect
their own crowds. They are greedy, live their own
separate lives, hardly at all connected
with the real natures of the men who bear them.
“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are
No rhymes)” was just the title, and I only read that far.
That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar
When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions,
And I was scared this hothead would start hedging his assertions
Before I had him dead-to-rights. (A Chekan’ s or a SMERSHian’ s
Lot, you know, is not an happy one.) He might retract.
Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
