Most wonderful and strange it seems, that I
Who but a little time ago was tost
High on the waves of passion and of pain,
With aching heat and wildly throbbing brain,
Who peered into the darkness, deeming vain
All things there found if but One thing were lost,
Thus calm and still and silent here should lie,
Watching and waiting, --waiting passively.
The dark has faded, and before mine eyes
Have long, grey flats expanded, dim and bare;
And through the changing guises all things wear
Inevitable Law I recognise:
Yet in my heart a hint of feeling lies
Which half a hope and half a despair.
SORROW, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow.
One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough
With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,
A rust-red share in an empty furrow.
Hearts that strain at her chain would sever
The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:
All things pass in the world, but never
Sorrow.
HARCOURT, AT THE CHURCH OF STANTON HARCOURT, IN OXFORDSHIRE, 1720.
To this sad shrine, whoe'er thou art, draw near;
Here lies the friend most loved, the son most dear:
Who ne'er knew joy, but friendship might divide,
Or gave his father grief but when he died.
How vain is reason, eloquence how weak!
If Pope must tell what Harcourt cannot speak.
Oh, let thy once-loved friend inscribe thy stone,
And, with a father's sorrows, mix his own!
running over a hare
on the way home
tell me I will be her
tomorrow
and the heart cannot help
a thin ink
no design in the griefs
which make us all
down the anchor
let fall my grief
a poor man glad to have
a lobster with
my wife
I chose for myself
the falseness of a void
but the sun is good
and nature is no creed
and grief runs
through many
paper heart
my wife and I heavy
for the loss of our friend
I find more than ground
or grief under me
among other things the damned
a sea of feathers
plain blood
the legs and body
of a tick
time papers over our grief
our ways of getting by
who is seized and for a quarrel
cut all over the back
the servants they dally with
doing what hands will do
we must fall and everything else
go to sand
she left behind
her road and her doors
her never sit down
her nothing her no
body
the discipline
of her religion
sober and drunk
her living hand
melancholy as a careless gun
her fear her truth
her contract with me
to make whole
Can you believe
how many songs have been committed to stone
& none to the water that wears it down?
How many lines get lifted from the surf–
& none from the living ocean?
I was the dead girl who lay in the coffin
with her corona of hair cut short.
I wasn’t listening to that stranger
whose hands held their fire,
whose teeth trapped dust.
But when the women one
by one stood up to testify
I heard the first rumor of rain.
It was as if I’d awakened precipitously
in the night, forehead filled
with mist & the dreams
noon like a hard note
sealed up in her soul
ear sore with the news
beating in