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Elizabeth Madox Roberts
His bridle hung around the post.
The sun and the leaves made spots come down;
I looked close at him through the fence;
The post was drab and he was brown.
His nose was long and hard and still,
And on his lip were specks like chalk.
But once he opened up his eyes,
And he began to talk.
He didn't talk out with his mouth;
He didn't talk with words or noise.
The talk was there along his nose;
It seemed and then it was.
He said the day was hot and slow,
And he said he didn't like the flies;
They made him have to shake his skin,
And they got drowned in his eyes.
You sit there
And look into space
Dreaming of a perfect life
Things more beautiful than here
Or
Dreaming of someone
Someone special to ask you something important
Or
Even anything you can imagine
A dragon,
A fairy,
Princesses and Princes
Anything you can imagine
Anything
Anything at all
I love you has been said before by somebody else.
Someone else could be me or it could be someone else.
I can speak in my own language without having my own voice.
The human animal recognizes her cry as her own and not her.
This is community.
How rooms are occupied and what is left afterwards
is a proper subject for the imagination.
No one will ever know, first hand,
if the scent spread by the lovers remains in the room
after they have walked away. Guessing is easy
but not knowing. We can't be where we aren't.
My thoughts of you do not produce you. I think they do.
How much of my own voice is my own imagination.
How much do I want to love you. How much do I.
Here the imagination is really freed.
The two fighters swing their iron arms.
Right on the button and one goes down.
The hockey players swing their sticks,
The puck goes flying.
The fortune teller's verdict comes through the slot.
The ski balls bounce here, there, then land.
There is nothing like this place in the whole world.
Please open the gray door,
follow lavender light
all the way down
the long blond slope
into the valley checker-boarded
with blue with green.
Stop at the silver silo.
Speak to the brown holy woman
wearing the one enchanted ruby.
Zephyr comes unaware,
And sings underneath my arms :
When it makes a sudden stop,
I will finish the song of its wandering soul.
Zephyr comes like a Beauty
Underneath my arms smiling, smiling.
She looks upon me, and says :
" Shall we hide us from birds and men under the roses ? "
Zephyr comes with doleful heart,
Sighing, sighing, underneath my arms.
I whisper a tale of a Life of Gold,
We fly into the Palace of the Sun.
His seat was by a window. So he dreamed.
How could he study while the sunlight gleamed
In small, sweet shapes, like wild things tame enough
To dart to him and touch his hands for love?
While there were profiles carved in every cloud
To mark as grim or ludicrous or proud,
And agile shadowings to writhe and crawl
Like ghostly spiders up and down the wall,
He could not help but turn their way to look.
His eyes, that would not follow down his book
The muddy trudgings of deliberate words,
Reflected blue and silver flights of birds.
You would not think there was so much to trace
Of wonderment on just a window space.
But once, when a frail scrap of paper moon
Enchanted him from ten o'clock, till noon,
I hear a merry noise indeed:
Is it the geese and ducks that take
Their first plunge in a quiet pond
That into scores of ripples break--
Or children make this merry sound?
I see an oak tree, its strong back
Could not be bent an inch though all
Its leaves were stone, or iron even:
A boy, with many a lusty call,
Rides on a bough bareback through Heaven.
I see two children dig a hole
And plant in it a cherry-stone:
"We'll come to-morrow," one child said--
"And then the tree will be full grown,
And all its boughs have cherries red."
Ah, children, what a life to lead:
The oak-tree in front of my house
Smells different every morning.
Sometimes it smells fresh and wise
Like my mother’s hair.
Sometimes it stands ashamed
Because it doesn’t own the smell
It borrowed from our flower-garden.
Sometimes it has a windy smell,
As though it had come back from a long walk.
The oak-tree in front of my house
Has different smells, like grown up people.
My doll hides behind her pink cheeks,
So that you can’t see when she moves,
But it doesn’t matter because
She always moves when no one is looking,
And that is why people think she is still.
I have the greatest fun at night,
When casement windows are all bright.
I make believe each one’s a square
Of some great quilt up in the air.
The blocks of gold have black between,
Wherever only night is seen.
It surely makes a mammoth quilt--
With bits of dark and checks of gilt--
To cover up the tired day
In such a cozy sort of way.
I climbed up the karaka tree
Into a nest all made of leaves
But soft as feathers.
I made up a song that went on singing all by itself
And hadn’t any words, but got sad at the end.
There were daisies in the grass under the tree.
I said just to try them:
“I’ll bite off your heads and give them to my little children to eat.”
But they didn’t believe I was a bird;
They stayed quite open.
The sky was like a blue nest with white feathers
And the sun was the mother bird keeping it warm.
That’s what my song said: though it hadn’t any words.
Little Brother came up the patch, wheeling his barrow.
I made my dress into wings and kept very quiet.
Then when he was quite near I said: “Sweet, sweet!”
Oh, the days of the week they are constantly seven!
And as certain to stay as the fixed stars in heaven.
But my heart that denies them will wander away
To find a more likeable, well furnished day
That I know exists somewhere, invisible, real,
And shining with moments the seven days steal.
The stocking I've wanted to darn since the spring,
The folk-song, forgotten, that calls me to sing,
The little old lady I hurry to see,
The cumbersome caller, long promised to tea,
Or the half-hidden passion pushed by through the week:
These surely may people the day that I seek.
Sometimes I shall play with a soul never born:
A companion I met on the far side of morn.
I shall nod at the losses I wept for last night,