left: some clothes and letters
chips on dishes memories
her sisters neighbours
who shared recipes chat
memories of her some
like yours
there was a gap between you
you wanted others in
yet that deep work-a-day back-porch
wordless closeness
pulls you to her -
you die too
now she becomes herself
work struggle worry gone
her crisp voice, sense fill
silent shared rooms
a boy carved his initials
way up high
I'll be a knight he said
a poet lover sage
but they cut
the tree down
he worked dreamed mated
gave birth and lost a child
to death
had a profession comfort
used wood to burn
cosy night fires
flame-coloured flowers
and letters flew
around the room
chastising burning
beside the graves we speak
of new-born children
loudly, laughing where the dead
are deaf the living
clutching them in realms
too gross to hear them
heavy-hearted in warm spring
flowering gay brilliance
black limousines wind slowly
with their grave mourners past the
dark pines piled with
fresh flowers flowers
for life for transience for
beauty to tell of
the dead's latency
as living we walk pushing
They leave us so to the way we took,
As two in whom they were proved mistaken,
That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,
With mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look,
And try if we cannot feel forsaken.
The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
"Look, dearest, this shall be my flower!" she said,
"This starry jasmine." And she thrust a spray
For me to smell. "Remember!" Ah, today
I see her buoyant loveliness—her red
Sweet lips. In one brief twelvemonth she was dead.
Last night wind wailed. December's first snow lay
Upon the ground. Too unresigned to pray,
Too torn with racking grief to sleep, I fed
My misery on remembrance. "Love," I cried,
"Come back to me—come back! No heaven, no tomb
Can keep you from me. Come—my own, my own!"
And as I ceased the gloom was glorified—
I was aware that I was not alone—
A sudden scent of jasmine filled the room.
I would sing a song
but I have no words
I would hum a tune
but I have no melody
success
like grains of brown sand
at the sea-shore
slips through my nerveless fingers
the world
has not time
even to laugh.
A great oak brown face, a strange face with inch and a half eyes placed three inches above two mustache guarded lips has Joe, a seller of hotdogs on State Street
A seventy year old voice has this man of fifty . . . his eyes seldom see what they gaze upon . . . he appreciates words unspoken better—much better—than those one says
Joe swims in a sea of yesterdays . . . memories of better times beat against his mind like a lash . . . his lips tell tales while his hands make a living
Through bushes half obscured, a marble slab
Peers out like a pale face. Inscribed upon
Its weathered surface that the lichen growth
And winter’s storms have blurred, a few brief words
The curious eye may spell with labored care.
To “H” and “M” - perhaps - and the terse phrase
So haunting in its stark simplicity
And pathos, - “Lost at sea.” The changeless gulfs
Of ocean knew the dead man mentioned here
Where bushes riot o’er an empty grave,
But what old friend remembers him today?
Ofttimes, no doubt, upon the wet sea sand
He traced his name in childhood, while the waves
Erased the halting script. Another hand
Has etched that name in form more durable;
But year by year, the ceaseless ebb and flow
It is harvest time in the teeming sea
And the surges labor tirelessly
Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam
They garner the harvest and carry it home,
Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat
As they strew it in windrows at our feet.
Slender strands like a whip lash, tear
At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair
And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps
All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps
Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow
From sunken glens where the sea things grow.
Eel grass rolled by the waves at play
In fresh cut swaths like the new mown hay;
Lettuce that glints with a fragile sheen:
And Irish moss with its mottled green
Lichen, mistletoe, aloft
In the dying croft,
Leaf the winter trees.