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Joseph Campbell
How still the night !
The air, a fragrance fallen
from unseen wings ;
The pine-trunks, stones of some dark
and secret temple ;
Venus, a lantern burning without flame.
But my soul is not still.
The wind blows bitterly ;
The pines groan on their rock-nourished
roots ;
The stars are blotted out.
long awake
my mind like a lapwing
all a-flutter
or a lighthouse coursing
away and away
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She’s making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The farm house lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
i throw food out to the
black raw cold
anything is taken
tough rinds hard outer leaves
out there is such vast
wordless hunger
animals hidden
in the dark soundless
waiting staring
the bush breathes sniffs restless
everyone hungry even
in houses fed
The northern woods are delicately sweet,
The lake is folded softly by the shore,
But I am restless for the subway's roar,
The thunder and the hurrying of feet.
I try to sleep, but still my eyelids beat
Against the image of the tower that bore
Me high aloft, as if thru heaven's door
I watched the world from God's unshaken seat.
I would go back and breathe with quickened sense
The tunnel's strong hot breath of powdered steel;
But at the ferries I should leave the tense
Dark air behind, and I should mount and be
One among many who are thrilled to feel
The first keen sea-breath from the open sea.
I want to take a ship and go
Abroad, but where I do not know:
It isn't Paris, London, Rome,
Nagasaki, Naples, Nome,
Honolulu, Teheran,
Servia or Afghanistan;
And yet I want to take a ship
And give the place I'm in the slip —
Lord, tell me where I want to go;
Give a man a decent show!
So we have a face
Cupped by tender insolences,
Half repenting insolences
Teasing their own angers.
Then, a tense exuberance
Brushes them away
And burns a humbly erect
Queen upon her face.
This happens in the space
Between a frown and indecision.
Her face becomes forlornly wild,
And a beggarly impatience
Hovers into furtive shame.
All the supplely intricate flame
Vanishes, and leaves no mark.
Her eyes are violently dark