Selected and annotated by Frank Beck
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That is a human skeleton under the cataract, The jet bones shining in the white noise, The black bones of a man of light. It is a cascade that accepts Human form from the bones That have walked into it, and stand; It must have been his method of death To walk into a waterfall and be washed away, Licked clean down to the jetting bones; And the bones articulate the roar Of the cataract that seems to…
Edna St. Vincent Millay (circa 1920) Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may…
In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. There are left books and bridges and painted canvases and machinery. Whose fate is to survive. But what has gone is also not nothing: by the rule of the game, something has gone. Not people die, but worlds die in them. Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures. Of whom, essentially, what did we know?…
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead, I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse; You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the…
The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were the irs. These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing Which a year ago, or less than twain, No finches were, nor nightingales, Nor thrushes, But only particles of grain, And earth, and air, and rain. In 1926…
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I. All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. All things were spotless and pure and glorious. The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The green trees, when I…
once the door is shut, even the dogs in their kennels are hushed. air traffic ceases, no mower, no ticking alarm clock, no intrusion. just the curtain seam that drags along the floor. a shaft of light that strikes my eye. a sense of fever. timber creaking softly. just a wasp that bounces off the window. the sway of firs outside, and in my room, where someone lurks with blunted blade, motes are…
Christ, let me die at night with a semblance of my senses, like the full moon that fails. I'll never forget watching a visibly shaken Joseph Brodsky, who was a good friend of Robert Lowell's, read these lines during the poet's funeral at the Church of the Advent in Boston in September 1977. This fragment was found among the papers Lowell left at his home in Britain when he departed from there…
A click of window glass had roused me Out of my sleep at early dawn. Beneath me Venice swam in water, A sodden pretzel made of stone. It was all quiet now; however, While still asleep, I heard a cry-- And, like a sign that had been silence, It still disturbed the morning sky. It hung--a trident of the Scorpion-- Above the sleeping mandolins And had been uttered by an angry, Insulted woman's voice,…
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? This is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. A.E. Housman (1859-1936) spent much of his life as a Latin professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, concentrating on arcane areas of Latin scholarship and…
