Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!
Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble’ s edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
There everlasting spring abides,
And never-withering flowers;
Death like a narrow sea divides
This heavenly land from ours.
But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.
Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light
Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.
And when I begin to believe I haven’ t left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke
Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,
Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,
Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it,
my zither on a double looking feeble
as a "promising" first book. Oedipal & reckless,
my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks
ahead, & perhaps the muse would smile
upon me with some ses or some blanks.
Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless
And solitary as Dickens said, but
They have something to say: that there is more
Than one way to yield. The first — and the hardest.
The most nearly hindered — is when you pull
Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge
Sucking them back under the black mud, full
instead of entrance
Goodbye means Avoir
Sved’ s dream said from nowhere
of aliquant angles
some spindle of the sun
empirically facted
deafening skin
open and afterwards
a cough is a couch
idled into
without rain
an island
easily a third worse
Indigo with a flame-red tongue
Greenland’ s icy mountains are fascinating and grand,
And wondrously created by the Almighty’ s command;
And the works of the Almighty there’ s few can understand:
Who knows but it might be a part of Fairyland?
Because there are churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass,
And for scenic grandeur there’ s nothing can it surpass,
Besides there’ s monuments and spires, also ruins,
Which serve for a safe retreat from the wild bruins.
’ Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
So the monster whale did sport and play
Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,
Until he was seen by some men one day,
And they resolved to catch him without delay.
Blood-drop, lung of fire setting past
the sea bell and wave; why am I separate
from that giant burrowing into further life?
The body breathes and rides
a heavy-netted ocean swollen
by the tide. Under the half-moon
it’ s the lighthouse light that turns
the rest of me to early nightfall,
headland, home. I send it back,
a mirrored flickering across cold waters.
We allow ourselves the crest that breaks
above the surface then re-forms.
Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted
Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through
The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed,
Implex; thou, awagabu.
Every burrower, each flier
Came for the name he had to give:
Gay, first work, ever to be prior,
Not yet sunk to primitive.
