As I stood by yon roofless tower,
Where the wa'flower scents the dewy air,
Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower,
And tells the midnight moon her care.
The winds were laid, the air was still,
The stars they shot alang the sky;
The fox was howling on the hill,
And the distant echoing glens reply.
The stream, adown its hazelly path,
Was rushing by the ruin'd wa's,
Hasting to join the sweeping Nith,
Whase distant roaring swells and fa's.
PART I
I
In a far country, and a distant age,
Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth,
A boy was born of humble parentage;
The stars that shone upon his lonely birth
Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame —
Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
What she is waiting for never arrives
or arrives so slowly she can't see it:
Like the river
bluing silver
and wearing minutely deeper into its channel,
the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets
beneath the whirling fan
impatient for the train
one comes to language from afar, the ear
fears for its sound-barriers —
but one “comes”; the language “comes” for
The Beckoning Fair One
plant you now, dig you
later, the plaint stirs winter
earth…
air in a hornet’ s nest
over the water makes a
solid, six-sided music…
a few utterly quiet scenes, things
are very far away — “form
is emptiness”
comely, comely, love trembles
and the sweet-shrub
Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine.
Not too close, wait. See the green blurs
stitching the leaves?
Here at the edge of the millennium
I don’ t imagine
you’ d call them anything as archaic as angels.
A white hunter is nearly crazy.
When biting Boreas, fell and doure,
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r;
When Phoebus gies a short-liv'd glow'r,
Far south the lift,
Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r,
Or whirling drift:
Ae night the storm the steeples rocked,
Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked,
While burns, wi' snawy wreeths upchoked,
Wild-eddying swirl,
Or thro' the mining outlet bocked,
Down headlong hurl.
A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw the less he spoke
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?
The shed behind the barn behind the red cottage I wait
for her in the fescue grass the rye I hear it grow over me
Wait for my friends in the distance on fire their full heads
of rust (I love how the clothing drips off them I hear myself say)
If the beekeeper doesn’ t come chasing behind with a hatchet
I’ ll wait behind Cobb’ s barn watching the distant houses
A WOMAN waits for me—she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.
