February 17, 2024
Three Poems
I. From Venice was that afternoonThough our own land’s canal we viewed.There willows clove the bluish heatBy dropping leaf or two, gold green,And every tuft of hill beyondStood bright, distinct, […]
January 1, 1945
Behind the Lines
She: Leave me, for I hear the guard Approaching on his midnight round. He: Nonsense, for I struck so hard He will not hear another sound. She: Leave me, for I see the […]
January 1, 1945
Poems
1. The air was then so rarefied that love As young as only ours could breathe, and hot Upon the cheek and in the skull, a heat Of lean young […]
January 1, 1945
Concept of Freedom on the Sea Floor
Casting accurate sand in careless seas Oyster and clam elect their own pattern But, as two grains of sand have freedom In lover’s embrace and become prisoners Of frail tempests, […]
January 1, 1945
Of Deed, Love, Death
The soul dividing like an annalid Suggests a remorseless possibility — For our inclination is always the business unfinished, The evening star’s rising above the evening star’s zenith distance, A […]
January 1, 1945
The Last Man on Earth
By stumbling when they walked, By doubting when they knew, By nodding when they talked As if it all were true, By feigning to be man And being but a […]
September 17, 1941
Page Torn from a Note-Book
Not as though storks were sorry that they’d brought the childBut just as summer clouds gather and graySo did the friendship waver, so did time delayIts final shot too long, […]
September 17, 1941
[How Slightly Earned, the Body]
How slightly earned, the body,body’s first attraction,faint and fierce,how little warranted, its angerof insistence, longing clamber,deprivation, and repose. … We lie, we grow two arms;we anchor cheek, we kiss;we bid our […]
September 17, 1941
Coup d’Etat
A tremor, like magnitude, shook the world,It was an end-day, a beginning-hour.The front lawns of the suburbs were not glad of it,But the birds carolled endlessly, as ever. The world […]
September 17, 1941
Forever Flight
When on a pewter-painted dawnLight folds half around the trees,East flamingo, the rest brownAs if once smoked by a night’s navies, What’s to prevent the pick-shaped duckIn mounting green and […]
September 17, 1941
Fable for Easter 1941
He was the last man freeThe rest were spiesHe knew it by their handsTheir lips their eyes And knew they watched him closeAll day all nightHis life a prime conjectureIn […]
September 17, 1941
Waterwall Blues
I gnarled me where the spinster treeUnwound its green hosannaAnd built its sorrow leaf by knee,A lachrymal cabana. The self same night I cracked my cowl,Unwound myself with Anna:Speech by […]