She lingered by the marble stair
till it was full night
and the dew had soaked her stockings
quite through.
Waiting for what?
As it turned out,
only to sit at her window later
watching the moon go down.
He said we would meet
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Tag Archives: poetry
I Shall Certainly Need New Clothes
I was going to write a poem that would be
lighthearted as fuck, oldfashioned
as a villanelle or a sonnet after Petrarch,
and the title was going to be something
tongue in cheek, especially if you knew me,
but even the hypothetical reader most innocent of me
still would have a solid idea
of what it really meant, because after all
there’s nothing wrong with being obvious
which is an oldfashioned virtue.
Anyway the poem I was going to write
was probably going to be titled
I Shall Certainly Need New Clothes
or something along those lines, something
insouciant and fatalistic at once,
blind to neither the rising seas
nor the beauty of the plum trees
that are blossoming earlier every year.
A Trick
(a translation from the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges)
Fifty-two cards push real life aside:
flimsy, parti-colored charms
that make us forget where we’re bound to end up in the end.
And who cares where? —we’ve stolen this time, anyway,
let’s build a house of cards,
decorate it, move in, and then play
as we were always meant to play.
Nothing beyond the table’s edges
carries any weight.
Inside, it’s a foreign land
where bluff and bid are high affairs of state:
The Ace of Spades swaggers authoritatively
like Lord Byron, capable of anything;
the nine of diamonds glitters like a pirate’s dream.
A headlong rush of lethargy
slacks conversation to a drawl:
our slow words come and go
the while chance exalts some, lays others low;
the while the players echo and re-echo all the tricks they know:
until it seems that they’re returned—or nearly so:
the crones and cronies and their bony friends
who showed us what it meant to be true Americans
with the same old songs, the same old works for idle hands.
The Toy
It was a witch’s toy,
that’s what they said.
She made it, they said,
and so everything that happened must have been her doing.
Some people said it was made of darkness and old clothes.
Some said the wind whistled through it.
Some said it had old dry bones in it,
some said they were human bones.
She not being a witch, so she said,
it was no witch’s toy, whatever it was.
She had seen her son playing with just such a toy,
that’s the reason she made it, she said.
He was playing with it as he ran and laughed
between the green grass
and the blue, blue, blue sky
—oh, it was so blue!
That was how it was, she said,
after he died
and she danced and danced.
That was what she saw, she said, just before the vision
ended like a snapped-off twig
Winchester Station
1.
This train platform
so skillful in the daytime
to lie flat, soak up heat
and breathe it out gently
into shimmering air
by night hardly knows its own name.
2.
It seems like daytime
always comes around again.
3.
There was this kid
was smoking this pack of cigarettes
all the way to the bottom
kept his back to the tracks
refusing all destinations.
4.
They’re inside the train
You know what I mean?
I mean they’ll never understand.
I mean it’s different
and they’ll never understand.
I mean the question is
which is it goes by
you or the world?
The Poet Speaks the Same
Robert Ranke Graves
Had a voice like the waves.
Its falling and rising
Was rarely surprising.
To Tempt Spring to Return
After Han Yu
The low grasses, the tall trees: which of them tempts spring to return?
In fall, the trees flaunted their dying leaves; the grasses withered, leaving us melancholy.
Now they vie in beauty, tempting spring to return.
Even the poplar and the subtle elm offer up their pallid blossoms to the wind
To overflow the sky, to fly like snow, to tempt spring to return.
a small room
Poetry is
about to take form, become an animal;
poetry is
a shorter, heavier word.
The poem’s a small room;
poetry
will gain access.
From this height one sees everything
(after Li Po)
A younger me would have stood on his head
To prove the earth and sky are of a size
Then seeing beneath his feet the sunlit clouds
Strode off upon that opalescent path.
These days the sun has turned her face from me.
The autumn wind flings tiny knives of frost.
Far down below, the slow east river flows
Beset with whitecaps, fishing boats, and gulls.
Yes, younger, I’d have turned things upside-down:
The sparrows and the swallows at their nests,
The small birds perched among the date tree’s thorns,
All would have stopped, and quirked their heads to see!
But these days I’m no gymnast, me.
Sundown, I’ll sling my sword upon my back;
I’ll set my feet upon the dusty road
And head off down the mountain, muttering of home.
I gazed into my wine cup
(After Li Po)
I gazed into my wine cup
Till after darkness fell.
Out of that dark pool
The vines grew up
Twining me around
And the wine was in me
And I was the wine.
Then I dreamed I stood,
Lost in the wine’s dreaming,
And the moon was there
Beneath my feet, there
Where I walked, midstream.
Somewhere an owl hooted
But nobody was there
To wake me.
Bag of Anything 