All Poems
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The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80
© Howard Nemerov
“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.”
—The Insight Lady
“Yet to die. Unalone still.”
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
Yet to die. Unalone still.
For now your pauper-friend is with you.
Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains,
And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 121
© Alfred Tennyson
Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done:
Romans in Dorset: A.D. MDCCCXCV
© Louise Imogen Guiney
A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath
A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.
Mingus in Diaspora
© William Matthews
You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out,
like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon,
or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost,
who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus.
What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person
© Denise Levertov
This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
"Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind"
© William Shakespeare
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
A Prayer for My Daughter
© William Butler Yeats
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
Helen: A Revision
© Jack Spicer
And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost
And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost
Hope the cost.
Obsessive
© Marvin Bell
It could be a clip, it could be a comb;
it could be your mother, coming home.
It could be a rooster; perhaps it’s a comb;
it could be your father, coming home.
It could be a paper; it could be a pin.
It could be your childhood, sinking in.
The Rescue
© Robert Creeley
The man sits in a timelessness
with the horse under him in time
to a movement of legs and hooves
upon a timeless sand.
Veterans of the Seventies
© Marvin Bell
His army jacket bore the white rectangle
of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute
Psalm 55
© Mary Sidney Herbert
My God, most glad to look, most prone to hear,
An open ear, oh, let my prayer find,
Captain, Captive
© Samuel Menashe
Of your fate
Fast asleep
On the bed you made
Dream away
Wake up late
The War in the Air
© Howard Nemerov
For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.
Music when Soft Voices Die (To --)
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
The Artist
© Amy Lowell
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?
Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?
The Chaste Stranger
© James Tate
All the sexually active people in Westport
look so clean and certain, I wonder
Ælla, a Tragical Interlude
© Thomas Chatterton
The boddynge flourettes bloshes atte the lyghte;
The mees be sprenged wyth the yellowe hue;
Ynn daiseyd mantels ys the mountayne dyghte;
The nesh yonge coweslepe bendethe wyth the dewe;
The trees enlefed, yntoe Heavenne straughte,
Whenn gentle wyndes doe blowe to whestlyng dynne ys broughte.
