Reverie in Open Air
I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don’t know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.
Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
for my love, Charles (1938-2000)
Say: 言
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Rice pudding
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s crying with all her might and main,
And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again —
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain,
And a book about animals — all in vain —
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain;
But, look at her, now she’s beginning again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady on a white horse,
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
Jingle! Jangle! Jingle!
Jingle! Jangle! Jingle!
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady on a white horse,
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
Rider
This time we are getting drunk on retsina
in somebody’ s Italian backyard. We are a long way
from Georgia
and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms
and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself.
My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn;
I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine
my heart is huge and has
little men
Ring a Ring o' Roses
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
Ring Around the Rosie
Ring-a-round the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.
Ring Out Your Bells
Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread;
For Love is dead
All love is dead, infected
With plague of deep disdain;
Worth, as nought worth, rejected,
And Faith fair scorn doth gain.
From so ungrateful fancy,
From such a female franzy,
From them that use men thus,
Good Lord, deliver us!
River Politics
I spit my smack,
Jim slugs his Jack,
Rob stews his lack,
Carey prepares his rack,
herons hunker on blowdowns,
deer wait on high moon for their rounds,
and the campfire
might as well be an empire
we all
watch dissolve
(in the slough, a carp roll, a splash)
into ash.