Category Archives: Woolgathering

Bells over Trieste

Under the simmering beat of sun
And confused drone of crickets
One bends his back to the sound,
Discordant and clanging
Like a god wearying of his hammer.
This back will not straighten till the song ends,The eye has wept as though stung by a bumblebee.
The weak flame is reached and touched
By a hand which burns, and sears,
And finally shivers [...]

It startles the heart

It startles the heart the toll sunlight
Takes on man’s devisings,
Unchecked and unobserved,
One realizes that to be
Resigned, fully resigned
Takes more than patience,
But also exhaustion of the wellspring,
The self and further options.
Today it snowed for the first time.
The grasses in the fields are trodden down
By winter’s old miserly settling,
Creaky, indifferent-
The milkweed pods tattered, their downy comas drifting, [...]

A street not far from here

A street not far from here
Has been inhabited by vagrants
For some time,
Will continue to be so I feel.
A shuttling red ensanguines
In steady flashes
Its rain-sheered surface;
History, here, remains only in drear fetters
Clinging to the walls—
Achievement in gutter spume.
Sonorous still, the knell of an invisible
Instrument, ubiquitous whine cants
Of the separation of races, of poverty,
The mechanization of birth, [...]

Walking Along A Forgotten Strip of Beach

Walking along a forgotten strip of beach
On Nantucket Isle,
I am thinking: When civilization ends,
It will look like this.
My bare feet pad over
Rocks smoothed by the surging tide, and
Old empty horseshoe-crab shells, wide brown-rimmed
Carapaces lie in sand-flanked
Clusters where the gulls dropped them.
Knotty driftwood and streamers of
Dry seaweed line the banks, blown by a salty wind,
And the [...]

Feb. 17, 2006

Such a small inn room and so much money for so little;
how warm you are tonight but cold, your fingers
in the bathtub’s clear stinging water, runneled with red of a sudden, and you
asleep on the sheets, so different
from me.
I cannot find you tonight because I am too lost in myself, have beenfor far too long–
two [...]

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