an abandoned chest of roistering literature for the drunk and rampant reader.
You say Hello and part of what you spend to say it goes to God.
There is a tax on all our simplest thoughts and common acts.
It will come to pass that a friend greets friend and there is not a sound.
Thus God subtracts bit by little bit till in the end there is nothing at all. Intend. Intend.
Detach from Learning and You Have No Worries
Detach from learning and you have no worries.
How far apart are yes and yeah?
How far apart are good and bad?
The things people fear cannot but be feared.
Wild indeed the uncentered!
Most people celebrate
as if they were barbecueing a slaughtered cow,
or taking in the springtime vistas;
I alone am aloof,
showing no sign,
like an infant that doesn’t yet smile,
riding buoyantly
as if with nowhere to go.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
I’ll tell you how the sun rose, —
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must have been the sun!”
* * *
But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while
Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.
There are so many pianos still left
In the fields of the village
Where you insist that we continue
To live, so many pianos
Though only a few have remained faithful
To the serious chords of the wind.
For example, the camel-colored Steinway
Beneath the arbor of lavender wisteria
& drooping bougainvillea has barely
A dozen keys left working, their thin felt
Hammers long grown soggy as dawn mist,
Soft as the pillowing fog.
Still, you say, who cares? as you turn from me,
Stepping calmly onto the narrow stone terrace
Overlooking these perpetual fields—
Just as every young woman in this
Village stands each morning, every one of them,
& exactly at this moment of the day, satisfied by
The first ripple of light as it sketches
The body’s languid harmony. If I am lucky, I know
I will live forever in this ancient, lost village
Of pianos & a late pagan petulance.
– from The Red Leaves of Night
The mountain sat upon the plain
In his eternal chair,
His observation omnifold,
His inquest everywhere.
The seasons prayed around his knees,
Like children ’round a Sire:
Grandfather of the days is he,
Of dawn the ancestor.
Let’s imagine I’m translating something to you–
you, asleep, or sleepless and naming
that third place–between–
with the tips of your tapering fingers–
I don’t know the language.
It bends.
In the mind–in that strangely shared chamber–
that is, I mean, in your hands,
where you show me those scenes of confusion and flight
with such intimacy, and don’t know it–
even sans color, sans liquor, sans shape,
we are twins. Fraternal. Unknown.
The moon, invasive, huge,
lunging in through the windows,
makes no exceptions–
It’s true: it will never happen / you’d be surprised.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing father, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing ins’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master;
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
“Poets don’t finish poems, they abandon them.”
drunken library 