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Miscellaneous POems
WANDERERS MORGENLIED
The context of this poem and translation of German lines
are given in Memoir 14.
Jussi Björling sings to me of falling night,
With Goethe’s words and Schubert’s song.
I drive to work in driving rain
That sweeps the road and slows me near to stop.
Über allen Gipfeln ist ruh.
The roar of morning traffic drains away
Into the blinding, drenching torrent
That makes my morning dark as dusk.
In allen Wipfeln spürest du, spürest du
Kaum … einen … Hauch.
A breathless, broken, feathered form
Lies still beside the busy road.
Kaum … einen … Hauch.
Her torn-out feathers float away
On puddling waters by the berme.
I leave the roadway sad in silence
To find the tar-black parking lot
Now turned into a shallow sea
That streams in sheets and flows away
Inchoate and disordered and confused.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
A mallard drake is dashing back and forth,
Searching aimless in the flood
Before me, quacking with a passion
Known to all who’ve lost a love.
His cries resound from tarmac to the trees;
He cannot stop, nor can he find
Surcease from sorrow on this mournful morn.
Warte nur, warte nur
Balde, balde, ruhest du auch.
Each duckish cry brings forth a tear;
I weep aloud like one whose wounds
Will never, ever heal,
Whose grief will never end
’Till blood no longer courses in his brain.
The desolation of the duck, his grief
Engulfs me as I sink into a silence
That dilates to reach infinities
Of cosmic time and endless space.
Warte nur, warte nur, Balde … balde …
Ruhest du auch.
are given in Memoir 14.
Jussi Björling sings to me of falling night,
With Goethe’s words and Schubert’s song.
I drive to work in driving rain
That sweeps the road and slows me near to stop.
Über allen Gipfeln ist ruh.
The roar of morning traffic drains away
Into the blinding, drenching torrent
That makes my morning dark as dusk.
In allen Wipfeln spürest du, spürest du
Kaum … einen … Hauch.
A breathless, broken, feathered form
Lies still beside the busy road.
Kaum … einen … Hauch.
Her torn-out feathers float away
On puddling waters by the berme.
I leave the roadway sad in silence
To find the tar-black parking lot
Now turned into a shallow sea
That streams in sheets and flows away
Inchoate and disordered and confused.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
A mallard drake is dashing back and forth,
Searching aimless in the flood
Before me, quacking with a passion
Known to all who’ve lost a love.
His cries resound from tarmac to the trees;
He cannot stop, nor can he find
Surcease from sorrow on this mournful morn.
Warte nur, warte nur
Balde, balde, ruhest du auch.
Each duckish cry brings forth a tear;
I weep aloud like one whose wounds
Will never, ever heal,
Whose grief will never end
’Till blood no longer courses in his brain.
The desolation of the duck, his grief
Engulfs me as I sink into a silence
That dilates to reach infinities
Of cosmic time and endless space.
Warte nur, warte nur, Balde … balde …
Ruhest du auch.
THE DEATHBED OF MISS MARY LOUISE WILLIAMS
The context of this poem is given in Memoir 9.
I heard you sobbing before I came into your room.
They put you in your bed with railings up,
And you are trapped.
You see me,
And you stretch your arms to me,
And you cry.
Opened wide in agony, your mouth reveals
They didn’t give you back your teeth;
Perhaps they couldn’t.
The aides have left your room;
They do not understand;
They dare not care.
You clutch my hand with your frail fingers:
No hiding, now, the hand that has no thumb.
You cry, you moan, you try to talk.
ou, who taught me thirty years ago
The skill to speak in public,
Are rendered speechless, now, and dumb.
Somewhere inside your brain
An artery renounced its ordination,
Now a mordant tongue strains fain to speak.
You implore me without words to understand—
To understand that I alone can save you.
You berate me with your frown
Because I know not what it is
That I can do to save you.
Your grief seems not to end, and I
Can’t guess what I should say,
Or fathom what to do.
I find the nurse’s stubby pencil and a tablet
So you may write the words you cannot say.
You grasp the pencil and attack the paper.
Slowly and with labor
Words appear:
“THERE’S NOBODY.”
Not even I exist.
I leave the flowers by your bed;
I kiss you on the forehead,
And I slip away.
I heard you sobbing before I came into your room.
They put you in your bed with railings up,
And you are trapped.
You see me,
And you stretch your arms to me,
And you cry.
Opened wide in agony, your mouth reveals
They didn’t give you back your teeth;
Perhaps they couldn’t.
The aides have left your room;
They do not understand;
They dare not care.
You clutch my hand with your frail fingers:
No hiding, now, the hand that has no thumb.
You cry, you moan, you try to talk.
ou, who taught me thirty years ago
The skill to speak in public,
Are rendered speechless, now, and dumb.
Somewhere inside your brain
An artery renounced its ordination,
Now a mordant tongue strains fain to speak.
You implore me without words to understand—
To understand that I alone can save you.
You berate me with your frown
Because I know not what it is
That I can do to save you.
Your grief seems not to end, and I
Can’t guess what I should say,
Or fathom what to do.
I find the nurse’s stubby pencil and a tablet
So you may write the words you cannot say.
You grasp the pencil and attack the paper.
Slowly and with labor
Words appear:
“THERE’S NOBODY.”
Not even I exist.
I leave the flowers by your bed;
I kiss you on the forehead,
And I slip away.
MISS WILLIAMS' LAST GOOD-BYE
The context and explication of this poem
are given in Memoir 9.
The book that built your harbor midst the spindrift
On the seashore of an ocean filled with time--
The book that reified your thoughts
And strengthened them to build
An island fastness in a swirling solvent sea--
That dusty book lies mummified and lone
High up upon my study’s top-most shelf.
For twenty years or more it’s held you
Motionless without a tongue until
This unexpected, mystic moment--
This moment
When I prize it from its perch;
This moment
When I blow away
The sediment of time;
This moment
When I think anew
The thoughts you thought
When you essayed to write
A discourse for this tattered tome.
Unbidden, your sad spirit creeps
Inside the back door of my mind
To scold me for my craven flight
That dismal day of mourning--
That day I fled the fading focus
Of your fast-dissolving sight--
That winter morn so long ago--
That day on which I realized
That I too would grow old.
Stern admonitions from your heavy house
Make me regret and rue
My failing, flawed, and faltering memories
Of the short cortège that bore you
In your velvet-quiet, darkened hearse
To the damp and deeper darkness
Of a near-forgotten, weed-grown graveyard
Where scabs of stone had knitted tight
The wounds and lacerations that your kith and kin
Had scratched into a wet and windy hillside
Near the farm where you were born.
Have you granted absolution
For the days, the weeks, the years
When memories of you
Slept far below my waking mind,
When other lives and other loves
Made you retire from my thoughts?
Have you pardoned my distraction
From the life of endless mourning
That perhaps you thought I’d lead
From that day of parting forward—
When I wept my heart’s farewell,
When I said my last good-by?
How many eyes have searched your book?
Will mine now be the last?
Are there yet copies hid on shelves
In darkling chambers past my ken,
Or volumes ’midst the treasures
That other builders of this book
Bequeathed to scions who, as I,
From time to desultory time pick up
Their copies of this yellowed treatise
And, while wandering through its brittle pages,
Arrest their curious eyes to read
The words you wrote when I was young?
The reprints you bestowed
In answer to these postcards--
Pressed mute between closed lips of pages,
Yet begging still a boon from you--
Where are they now?
Do they inspire thought this hour
In brains that never knew you,
In minds I’ll never meet?
I sadly think
That isn’t so.
An envelope addressed to you
Marks out the starting page
Where, trapped immobilized in ink,
Your words await my gaze.
The note inside, from Doris,
Thanks you for your lecture
On Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means
That her literary guild enjoyed
One sunlit afternoon in spring.
Was that before the time … or after--
Do you remember when
I drove you to Chicago
So you could hear your idol speak
And you could speak with him
Of doors and windows of perception
And planetary peace?
My memory fails, and you can’t speak
Doris surely now is dead--
So too the others you inspired
By your passion-filled recital.
I am the last one now alive
Who knows of that lost mental moment
When you engaged the intellects
Of earnest, lace-draped ladies
Who fain would build a better world.
While reading through this well-scribed note
Do I now hear a muffled last-trump call
Connecting my fast-fleeting now
With long-forgotten then—
A last-trump reveille
To rouse from gray oblivion’s bed
And kindle into consciousness
One last and termin’d time
Miss Doris and her guild?
You lived your life behind a mask--
A mask that hid your withered hand
But hid your heart as well.
Your favorite in your English class,
Accepted as your family at the end—
You let me step behind the screen
To touch your sinewed, spinster soul.
The wardrobe that you willed to me—
Your proper garments, chaste and drab—
I gave as dower to a woman who
Had never read a book entire
But needed clothing nonetheless
And couldn’t care what style.
All your books, except this one,
I’m certain you’ll be glad to know
Went up for sale to aid and fund
The libraries you loved.
This book, some fragile photographs,
This note, some fading memories,
This Christmas card I sent you
In the wintertime of fifty-five--
They total up what’s left of you.
And when I die?
When I shall die, this book, this note,
Shall pass mortmain to serve and save
Another muse’s dwelling place;
And someone whom you never knew,
Someone innominate to me,
Will find this note and might,
Before it’s cast away,
Yet read of “Mary Lou,” and Huxley,
Of Doris, and her guild.
But no one after me shall ever know
That Mary Lou was you.
I am the last beneath the blue
With living memory of you.
And when I die?
When I shall die, you’ll die again
And slip beyond retrieve or call
From Memory’s shuttered sepulcher—
Completely lost, dissolved forever
From the spindrift that was blown
Upon the narrow coast of time.
And that will be our last farewell,
Our ultimate good-by.
are given in Memoir 9.
The book that built your harbor midst the spindrift
On the seashore of an ocean filled with time--
The book that reified your thoughts
And strengthened them to build
An island fastness in a swirling solvent sea--
That dusty book lies mummified and lone
High up upon my study’s top-most shelf.
For twenty years or more it’s held you
Motionless without a tongue until
This unexpected, mystic moment--
This moment
When I prize it from its perch;
This moment
When I blow away
The sediment of time;
This moment
When I think anew
The thoughts you thought
When you essayed to write
A discourse for this tattered tome.
Unbidden, your sad spirit creeps
Inside the back door of my mind
To scold me for my craven flight
That dismal day of mourning--
That day I fled the fading focus
Of your fast-dissolving sight--
That winter morn so long ago--
That day on which I realized
That I too would grow old.
Stern admonitions from your heavy house
Make me regret and rue
My failing, flawed, and faltering memories
Of the short cortège that bore you
In your velvet-quiet, darkened hearse
To the damp and deeper darkness
Of a near-forgotten, weed-grown graveyard
Where scabs of stone had knitted tight
The wounds and lacerations that your kith and kin
Had scratched into a wet and windy hillside
Near the farm where you were born.
Have you granted absolution
For the days, the weeks, the years
When memories of you
Slept far below my waking mind,
When other lives and other loves
Made you retire from my thoughts?
Have you pardoned my distraction
From the life of endless mourning
That perhaps you thought I’d lead
From that day of parting forward—
When I wept my heart’s farewell,
When I said my last good-by?
How many eyes have searched your book?
Will mine now be the last?
Are there yet copies hid on shelves
In darkling chambers past my ken,
Or volumes ’midst the treasures
That other builders of this book
Bequeathed to scions who, as I,
From time to desultory time pick up
Their copies of this yellowed treatise
And, while wandering through its brittle pages,
Arrest their curious eyes to read
The words you wrote when I was young?
The reprints you bestowed
In answer to these postcards--
Pressed mute between closed lips of pages,
Yet begging still a boon from you--
Where are they now?
Do they inspire thought this hour
In brains that never knew you,
In minds I’ll never meet?
I sadly think
That isn’t so.
An envelope addressed to you
Marks out the starting page
Where, trapped immobilized in ink,
Your words await my gaze.
The note inside, from Doris,
Thanks you for your lecture
On Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means
That her literary guild enjoyed
One sunlit afternoon in spring.
Was that before the time … or after--
Do you remember when
I drove you to Chicago
So you could hear your idol speak
And you could speak with him
Of doors and windows of perception
And planetary peace?
My memory fails, and you can’t speak
Doris surely now is dead--
So too the others you inspired
By your passion-filled recital.
I am the last one now alive
Who knows of that lost mental moment
When you engaged the intellects
Of earnest, lace-draped ladies
Who fain would build a better world.
While reading through this well-scribed note
Do I now hear a muffled last-trump call
Connecting my fast-fleeting now
With long-forgotten then—
A last-trump reveille
To rouse from gray oblivion’s bed
And kindle into consciousness
One last and termin’d time
Miss Doris and her guild?
You lived your life behind a mask--
A mask that hid your withered hand
But hid your heart as well.
Your favorite in your English class,
Accepted as your family at the end—
You let me step behind the screen
To touch your sinewed, spinster soul.
The wardrobe that you willed to me—
Your proper garments, chaste and drab—
I gave as dower to a woman who
Had never read a book entire
But needed clothing nonetheless
And couldn’t care what style.
All your books, except this one,
I’m certain you’ll be glad to know
Went up for sale to aid and fund
The libraries you loved.
This book, some fragile photographs,
This note, some fading memories,
This Christmas card I sent you
In the wintertime of fifty-five--
They total up what’s left of you.
And when I die?
When I shall die, this book, this note,
Shall pass mortmain to serve and save
Another muse’s dwelling place;
And someone whom you never knew,
Someone innominate to me,
Will find this note and might,
Before it’s cast away,
Yet read of “Mary Lou,” and Huxley,
Of Doris, and her guild.
But no one after me shall ever know
That Mary Lou was you.
I am the last beneath the blue
With living memory of you.
And when I die?
When I shall die, you’ll die again
And slip beyond retrieve or call
From Memory’s shuttered sepulcher—
Completely lost, dissolved forever
From the spindrift that was blown
Upon the narrow coast of time.
And that will be our last farewell,
Our ultimate good-by.
FIGHT'N FOR THE FREE WORLD
For Joan Baez
We’re fight’n for the free world,
For Chiang Kai-shek and Thieu,
For law and order places,
Things red and white and blue.
Only traitors will not understand
That our beliefs are true.
We’re fight’n for the free world,
Things red and white and blue.
Chorus
We will make a desolation,
We will make a desolation
We will make a desolation,
And then we’ll call it peace.
With only ashes to oppose us
And coffins to enclose us,
We will make a desolation,
And then we’ll call it peace.
We’re fight’n for the free world,
For Chiang Kai-shek and Thieu,
For law and order places,
Things red and white and blue.
Only traitors will not understand
That our beliefs are true.
We’re fight’n for the free world,
Things red and white and blue.
Chorus
We will make a desolation,
We will make a desolation
We will make a desolation,
And then we’ll call it peace.
With only ashes to oppose us
And coffins to enclose us,
We will make a desolation,
And then we’ll call it peace.
The Dark Age Comes
Written after a disturbing decision of S.C.O.T.U.S.
and astronauts orbiting the moon
broadcast the opening lines of Genesis
The Dark Age comes:
Shadows form, and shadows fall
Upon the threshing-floor of thought.
Free reason’s radius is shrunk
To fit prescribed Procrustean spheres,
While black-robed paladins
Of highest justice drowse –
Their Grecian hall a sepulchre
Where stalk, immured, the ghosts
Of freedoms, dearly won so long ago,
That now are naught but softly rattling relics
In the memories of the old
Or out-of-style.
Guardians of the torch of learning nod,
Their eyes grown heavy in the fading light
Of art and ethic, sense and science.
The odor of dead dreams
Hangs heavy in the air.
At every side the supernatural
Billows up like darkling cuttle-fish’s clouds,
As hope and heart are come undone,
As wisdom dims and science sleeps.
Words fall upon us from the Christmas moon–
Prating of the phantom worlds
Created anciently by fear-filled men
When first they fled the lightning,
Or quailed before the storm.
With nowhere enemy in sight,
Without a battlefield, without a war,
The credulous, the timorous,
The Great God Demos and his mob
Sound everywhere the trumpet of retreat.
They flee the field wherein, near-ripe,
Truth’s greatest harvest stands:
Glorious, gold, ungathered,
Exposed to locusts of illogic
And rodents of deceit.
Back, backward from the border
Of the known they slink.
Solemnly, in B-flat minor,
They creep back to the womb of faith
Where once, without one reasoned thought,
They slept a thousand years --
Through demon-haunted nights,
And plague-infected days.
But then at last the shocks of science
Convulsed the womb and purged the gloom,
Inducing sleepers to be born again.
Emergent from Faith’s tomb of thought,
Believing sleepers roused themselves
And came to sense and then to see
A bright-lit world beyond Faith’s ken,
A world undreamed of
During epochs-lasting slumber.
Frightened by reality,
Alarmed by liberty,
Disavowing all responsibility,
Recalling now an age-long nightmare
As though ’t were really just
A pleasant dream,
They seek again the matrix comfort
Of their ancient mother, Faith.
So let us sleep, then,
Let us sleep.
The spark of science sears the eyes,
And burning eyes must close,
And tired eyes must sleep.
More pleasant is the world of dream
And easier attained
Than worlds we sought to build.
What deuced bore, how tiring,
The freedom that we gained!
How frightening is our brave, new world.
Though bought with brains and blood,
It rivals not the fantasies of Faith –
That specter which, when sense submits,
Draws shut thick curtains o’er the mind
And lets an inner play proceed.
Enshroud, proud universities, and sleep.
Your hard-won wisdom is not wanted.
Somnambulists possess the power
And habit not the world you mapped.
Their shadows darken every path,
And all horizons fade to black.
Cocoon yourselves, secrete your treasures,
Endure the stellar twilight chill.
Copernicus and Galileo:
Where light their stars today?
Has Darwin’s star gone down as well?
Their light first scattered,
Then occulted by the crowd,
One-by-one, the lamps burn out.
One-by-one, the shades are drawn.
And, one-by-one,
The sentries slip away to sleep.
The shadows form, the shadows creep.
And darkness deep enfolds the sheep.
The Dark Age comes again.
The Dark Age comes.
and astronauts orbiting the moon
broadcast the opening lines of Genesis
The Dark Age comes:
Shadows form, and shadows fall
Upon the threshing-floor of thought.
Free reason’s radius is shrunk
To fit prescribed Procrustean spheres,
While black-robed paladins
Of highest justice drowse –
Their Grecian hall a sepulchre
Where stalk, immured, the ghosts
Of freedoms, dearly won so long ago,
That now are naught but softly rattling relics
In the memories of the old
Or out-of-style.
Guardians of the torch of learning nod,
Their eyes grown heavy in the fading light
Of art and ethic, sense and science.
The odor of dead dreams
Hangs heavy in the air.
At every side the supernatural
Billows up like darkling cuttle-fish’s clouds,
As hope and heart are come undone,
As wisdom dims and science sleeps.
Words fall upon us from the Christmas moon–
Prating of the phantom worlds
Created anciently by fear-filled men
When first they fled the lightning,
Or quailed before the storm.
With nowhere enemy in sight,
Without a battlefield, without a war,
The credulous, the timorous,
The Great God Demos and his mob
Sound everywhere the trumpet of retreat.
They flee the field wherein, near-ripe,
Truth’s greatest harvest stands:
Glorious, gold, ungathered,
Exposed to locusts of illogic
And rodents of deceit.
Back, backward from the border
Of the known they slink.
Solemnly, in B-flat minor,
They creep back to the womb of faith
Where once, without one reasoned thought,
They slept a thousand years --
Through demon-haunted nights,
And plague-infected days.
But then at last the shocks of science
Convulsed the womb and purged the gloom,
Inducing sleepers to be born again.
Emergent from Faith’s tomb of thought,
Believing sleepers roused themselves
And came to sense and then to see
A bright-lit world beyond Faith’s ken,
A world undreamed of
During epochs-lasting slumber.
Frightened by reality,
Alarmed by liberty,
Disavowing all responsibility,
Recalling now an age-long nightmare
As though ’t were really just
A pleasant dream,
They seek again the matrix comfort
Of their ancient mother, Faith.
So let us sleep, then,
Let us sleep.
The spark of science sears the eyes,
And burning eyes must close,
And tired eyes must sleep.
More pleasant is the world of dream
And easier attained
Than worlds we sought to build.
What deuced bore, how tiring,
The freedom that we gained!
How frightening is our brave, new world.
Though bought with brains and blood,
It rivals not the fantasies of Faith –
That specter which, when sense submits,
Draws shut thick curtains o’er the mind
And lets an inner play proceed.
Enshroud, proud universities, and sleep.
Your hard-won wisdom is not wanted.
Somnambulists possess the power
And habit not the world you mapped.
Their shadows darken every path,
And all horizons fade to black.
Cocoon yourselves, secrete your treasures,
Endure the stellar twilight chill.
Copernicus and Galileo:
Where light their stars today?
Has Darwin’s star gone down as well?
Their light first scattered,
Then occulted by the crowd,
One-by-one, the lamps burn out.
One-by-one, the shades are drawn.
And, one-by-one,
The sentries slip away to sleep.
The shadows form, the shadows creep.
And darkness deep enfolds the sheep.
The Dark Age comes again.
The Dark Age comes.
On Hearing an Étude
by
Moscheles on the Radio
Moscheles!
You live again
But know it not.
Your music surges, swells, and sinks
Into my song-starved brain.
Alas, you cannot know
What transport you engender
In one who habits now
A world of prodigies and marvels,
Of wonders that would steal your breath
And astound your nerves to stone.
Moscheles!
Could you but slip unhindered
Through the tunnel that is time
And hear how unseen fingers
Using ivoried chisels carve
An image of your soul in sound!
The mind that was your music
Now journeys through the aether
To resound in glens and gardens,
In phaëtons and carriages.
You live again in me.
Moscheles!
Your soul is resurrected
And your spirit speaks again.
Moscheles!
Dextrous hands
That once would dance
On ivory keys
Complying with your wish and will
Are now replaced by other hands
That yet with joy do still obey
And bend to your own wishes
And bow to your own will.
Moscheles!
How did you stray?
How did you lose your way,
When finally in Leipzig
You lay down last
And traveled on no more?
How were you lost?
Why was your candle not relumed
To flame in every heart
Whose beating could persist
At your quick tempo
Through darkling nights
And winters of our hunger?
Why was your music muted?
Moscheles, Moscheles…
Not you, but we it is
Who passed through Lethe’s stream
And hung your faceless portrait
On oblivion’s gallery wall.
’Twas we, not you,
Who damped the echo
Of your melody and quenched it
At life’s gray closing gate.
Moscheles, Moscheles, Moscheles…
’Twas we to blame, not you.
’Twas we who scribed your name upon
Decayed, time-dusted chronicles
And hid them high on mantelshelves
Where memories drift to dream;
And you became a footnote—
Fallen to the base of silent pages,
Writ in print too small to see.
You live again
But know it not.
Your music surges, swells, and sinks
Into my song-starved brain.
Alas, you cannot know
What transport you engender
In one who habits now
A world of prodigies and marvels,
Of wonders that would steal your breath
And astound your nerves to stone.
Moscheles!
Could you but slip unhindered
Through the tunnel that is time
And hear how unseen fingers
Using ivoried chisels carve
An image of your soul in sound!
The mind that was your music
Now journeys through the aether
To resound in glens and gardens,
In phaëtons and carriages.
You live again in me.
Moscheles!
Your soul is resurrected
And your spirit speaks again.
Moscheles!
Dextrous hands
That once would dance
On ivory keys
Complying with your wish and will
Are now replaced by other hands
That yet with joy do still obey
And bend to your own wishes
And bow to your own will.
Moscheles!
How did you stray?
How did you lose your way,
When finally in Leipzig
You lay down last
And traveled on no more?
How were you lost?
Why was your candle not relumed
To flame in every heart
Whose beating could persist
At your quick tempo
Through darkling nights
And winters of our hunger?
Why was your music muted?
Moscheles, Moscheles…
Not you, but we it is
Who passed through Lethe’s stream
And hung your faceless portrait
On oblivion’s gallery wall.
’Twas we, not you,
Who damped the echo
Of your melody and quenched it
At life’s gray closing gate.
Moscheles, Moscheles, Moscheles…
’Twas we to blame, not you.
’Twas we who scribed your name upon
Decayed, time-dusted chronicles
And hid them high on mantelshelves
Where memories drift to dream;
And you became a footnote—
Fallen to the base of silent pages,
Writ in print too small to see.
VICTROLA ROLLS
MICROMEGAS
These haiku-like poems contrast
the macrocosm and the microcosm
in a single image.
The pilot light of the stove
Burns throughout the night.
The family has gone out.
The pilot light of the stove
Flickers and goes out.
No one sees it die.
Stiffly, the dark-chilled toad
Crawls to clutch the midline
Of the still-warm road.
Stiffly, the toad crawls
Onto a road that goes
Where he can never go.
The tombstone speaks
Of love that ne’er will die.
Where lives it now?
The tombstone speaks
Of glory that will never fade.
Who was this, by the way?
Great pain was suffered here--
Too great for love to bear.
It’s over now.
Great pain was suffered here--
Too great for life to bear.
When will the memory die?
A tree falls in the woods.
A squirrel hears it;
The flower it crushes doesn’t.
A tree has fallen in the woods
Onto fire-blackened earth.
No echo of the sound it made.
The storms that formed
This glacier’s melting ice
Have ended now forever.
The storms that formed
This glacier’s melting ice
Were never felt by humans.
Somewhere in the Milky Way
On a speck within a speck,
Someone loves me.
Somewhere in the Milky Way
On a speck within a speck
A speck thinks of itself.
The firefly flashes her light
Into the summer night.
How far will it fly?
The firefly flashes her light
Into the summer night.
She’s one of hope-filled many.
Hopeful, she totters
To her mailbox ’cross the road.
Empty, again.
Hopeful, she totters
To her mailbox ’cross the road.
Empty yet again!
A filament flashes
Unseen inside the fuse-box,
Spreading darkness through the house.
A filament flashes
Unseen inside the fuse-box.
Where did that bright light go?
One spark in a glass fuse:
Wire-hung poles stand gaunt--
Alone in a dark wood.
Through leafless silence
Winter fog stalks through the woods.
Corpses of elms.
The Ferris wheel creaks
In the howling storm.
No one rides it now.
The Ferris wheel creaks
In the howling storm.
I hear no children’s laughter.
In the vast night sky
I see the stars.
They don’t see me.
In the vast night sky
I see the stars.
They don’t seem to care.
Where went the worms
That lacerated leaves
On this my lovely linden?
Where went the worms
That stripped the bones
Inside this granite box?
This oak that grows unplanted
’Midst my flowers:
Where live its sire and dam?
These fruitful oaks
Are thriving in a garden
Tilled by squirrels.
This oxygen I breathe:
When was it last in orchids?
When last was it in kings?
This carbon in my brain:
What magic does it conjure
To make me write these words?
This iron in my blood:
What supernova died
So I could bleed?
When set the suns
That lit the leaves that lie
Within this lump of coal?
Whither the perfume of the blossoms
Whose pollen hides inside
This lump of ancient mud?
the macrocosm and the microcosm
in a single image.
The pilot light of the stove
Burns throughout the night.
The family has gone out.
The pilot light of the stove
Flickers and goes out.
No one sees it die.
Stiffly, the dark-chilled toad
Crawls to clutch the midline
Of the still-warm road.
Stiffly, the toad crawls
Onto a road that goes
Where he can never go.
The tombstone speaks
Of love that ne’er will die.
Where lives it now?
The tombstone speaks
Of glory that will never fade.
Who was this, by the way?
Great pain was suffered here--
Too great for love to bear.
It’s over now.
Great pain was suffered here--
Too great for life to bear.
When will the memory die?
A tree falls in the woods.
A squirrel hears it;
The flower it crushes doesn’t.
A tree has fallen in the woods
Onto fire-blackened earth.
No echo of the sound it made.
The storms that formed
This glacier’s melting ice
Have ended now forever.
The storms that formed
This glacier’s melting ice
Were never felt by humans.
Somewhere in the Milky Way
On a speck within a speck,
Someone loves me.
Somewhere in the Milky Way
On a speck within a speck
A speck thinks of itself.
The firefly flashes her light
Into the summer night.
How far will it fly?
The firefly flashes her light
Into the summer night.
She’s one of hope-filled many.
Hopeful, she totters
To her mailbox ’cross the road.
Empty, again.
Hopeful, she totters
To her mailbox ’cross the road.
Empty yet again!
A filament flashes
Unseen inside the fuse-box,
Spreading darkness through the house.
A filament flashes
Unseen inside the fuse-box.
Where did that bright light go?
One spark in a glass fuse:
Wire-hung poles stand gaunt--
Alone in a dark wood.
Through leafless silence
Winter fog stalks through the woods.
Corpses of elms.
The Ferris wheel creaks
In the howling storm.
No one rides it now.
The Ferris wheel creaks
In the howling storm.
I hear no children’s laughter.
In the vast night sky
I see the stars.
They don’t see me.
In the vast night sky
I see the stars.
They don’t seem to care.
Where went the worms
That lacerated leaves
On this my lovely linden?
Where went the worms
That stripped the bones
Inside this granite box?
This oak that grows unplanted
’Midst my flowers:
Where live its sire and dam?
These fruitful oaks
Are thriving in a garden
Tilled by squirrels.
This oxygen I breathe:
When was it last in orchids?
When last was it in kings?
This carbon in my brain:
What magic does it conjure
To make me write these words?
This iron in my blood:
What supernova died
So I could bleed?
When set the suns
That lit the leaves that lie
Within this lump of coal?
Whither the perfume of the blossoms
Whose pollen hides inside
This lump of ancient mud?