We're marching in our wellingtons,
Tramp, tramp, tramp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
We won't get damp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
Stamp, Stamp, stamp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
We won't get damp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
Tramp, tramp, tramp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
We won't get damp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
Stamp, Stamp, stamp!
We're marching in our wellingtons,
We won't get damp!
All day she stands before her loom;
The flying shuttles come and go:
By grassy fields, and trees in bloom,
She sees the winding river flow:
And fancy’ s shuttle flieth wide,
And faster than the waters glide.
Thou God, whose high, eternal Love
Is the only blue sky of our life,
Clear all the Heaven that bends above
The life-road of this man and wife.
May these two lives be but one note
In the world’ s strange-sounding harmony,
Whose sacred music e’ er shall float
Through every discord up to Thee.
As when from separate stars two beams
Unite to form one tender ray:
As when two sweet but shadowy dreams
Explain each other in the day:
So may these two dear hearts one light
Emit, and each interpret each.
The morning breaks like a pomegranate
In a shining crack of red,
Ah, when tomorrow the dawn comes late
Whitening across the bed,
It will find me watching at the marriage gate
And waiting while light is shed
On him who is sleeping satiate,
With a sunk, abandoned head.
Yesterday afternoon, I hung a framed print in the living room —
a task that took two head-throbbing hours.
It’ s a wedding portrait that we love: Frida and Diego Rivera.
I wonder how two people could consistently hurt each other,
but still feel love so deeply as their bones turned into dust?
Before Frida died, she painted a watermelon still life;
before his death, Diego did too.
I want to believe that those paintings were composed
during parallel moments because of their undying devotion.
He went to the city and goosed all the girls
With a stall on his finger for whittling the wills
To a clause in his favour and Come to me Sally,
One head in my chambers and one up your alley
And I am as old as my master.
Rather than hold his hands properly
arched off the keys, like cats
with their backs up,
Monk, playing block chords,
hit the keys with his fingertips well
above his wrists,
shoulders up, wrists down, scarce
room for the pencil, ground
freshly to a point,
piano teachers love to poke
into the palms of junior
pianists with lazy hands.
A field of thistles, díscharging
concentric waves of negative
theology, on a mountainside,
2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide),
would certainly
suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not
enough sought
state of subtle shock
if he’ d close
this computer
and walk up the summit road
until the sea’ s in view. And maybe in
At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’ s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’ s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.
I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.
That was not the summer of aspic
and cold veal. It was so hot
the car seat stung my thighs
and the rearview mirror swam
with mirage. In the back seat
the leather grip was noosed by twine.
We were not poor but we had
the troubles of the poor.
She who had been that soft snore
beside the Nytol, open-mouthed,
was gone, somewhere, somewhere
there was a bay, there was a boat,
