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Contemplative, William Dickey, in English Clear filters

ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

For an Astronomer

After the round red corporate sun has sunk With a glittering smile and smoking a big cigar, And the chimneys stinking like upright bits of punk Have lost their brick assurance of what they are, In the back yard, McConkey, to your work. The long light shakes, but the longer light is steady, That has come down the channels of the dark To find you and your diamond eyepiece ready. After the searchlights glancing through the black Die to red worms, their business being finished, And on the nondescript short order shack The neon "Eat!" flickers and is diminished, In the back yard invite the light that follows Dark stars upon their courses and comes still Singled from the profusion of its fellows
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Where Blind Men Walk

Where blind men walk the buildings tell Their definition to the smell, The ancient, practised stones exude An odor of their latitude, And the familiar living room Exists by its unique perfume. Where blind men walk the streets proclaim That surfaces are not the same, But burst into articulate spines Sharp as the Lunar Appenines, Or murmur to receptive feet Harmonies of musique concrète. Where blind men walk blank spaces show Themselves as perilous vertigo. Green levels of a field of grass Harbor the infinite crevasse,
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Noon

Suddenly, in the sunlight's bitter glare On a marketplace of white, belligerent stone, The sea so blue it petrifies the air, Suddenly, in the most securely known Fixed objects, when the shift of the wind has died And form is form past ambiguity, On the deliberate stroke of a real noontide The scene is less than it was meant to be. And in the merchant's flat, coined-metal eyes Some face before the Caesar face appears, Reflecting past the millenial market-days Time out of hope of measurement by years, Reflecting past the navel of the town, That catches in its cup the ripest sun, A glade by orderly branches overgrown Into a greener equilibrium
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Picture with Ancestors

Let only a faint light shelter in the room, And then if ghosts step on this slanting floor They will be easy ghosts, tacit, demure, Sure of themselves as you were never sure. They will tell you personal histories, they will assume They are the family you have waited for. Only a circumstance of placid light, And out of the past, the paralyzed, the dumb, Glad to forgive you, glad to be at home, Will touch your mouth and diffidently comb The shy hair. What you did was neither right Nor could it be helped; this is what we become, Cunning, and not kind. Who wills the means Wills murder as the word of every day. The hates that willed you from the day you were a boy,
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Father Unknown

The meritor of these verses Shall be a man entire Who has indulged in spending His appetite for fire, Hot as the blazing center Of his domestic hearth, Has scattered himself asunder To the promiscuous earth, Seeing the chaste combustion Man and his wife produce, Has rendered himself in question Past any safe excuse, And shall not have for glory Sweet home in effigy, Nor legal kin embroidered On a meticulous tree,
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Will

It has to find something unyielding enough to push against. A woman or a wall, anything made terse with interior refusal is will's meat, who, likeably uninvolved at cocktail parties, cries, when the gin's done, "I, monument of granite, walk on stone feet, and the earth sinks sensibly beneath my power of conclusion." Take only an eye:
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

After the Romantics

I'll not go hunting In that kind of wood, Where the beasts are all but human, And the water not good; For they look at your arrow With ambiguous eyes, The sooner to make their sorrow In your own heart rise, Rise like the black water Of their tainted springs, That deadens the spurt of laughter With imaginings. If any ask me follow To a wood of that kind, I'll call him bravery's fellow And stay behind
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Resolving Doubts

SHE If to demands of others I agree, Then I will be another, but not me. HE If their requiring voices shake your ear, How will your very spirit help but hear? SHE It will, a bird, desert its builded nest, And in the virgin cloudbank only rest. HE If they have wings like other birds of prey, How will it from those raptors keep away? SHE It will seek out the ocean's whitest curl, And sink within it, and become a pearl. HE But when they dive as glittering fishers dive, Will they not take your luster all alive? SHE Venue shall make no difference to disguise, Nor shall my center open to their eyes. HE But if by chance, by force, by God knows how, You all unguarded should some night allow
ContemplativeWilliam Dickey

Antiquity

It is a day of full Antiquity. The land to a greener surface rearranges Its rows of vines, the plain white temple changes Its Doric force to amiability. Nothing disturbs the lip or the pursed loin. Speech is a honeyed bubble; it rests light On the flashing tongue, and any moment might Translate the imprisoned goddess from the stone. To move either hand into this sacred air Is to meet an answering motion of the wind Beyond which, nothing moves. The sea is kind, And gathers quiet on the empty shore. The light's complete. The lovers, side by side, Ease to the holy center of the kiss. The temple finds its sacrifice in this. The olives leaf. The vines are multiplied.

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