All Poems

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Her News

© Hugo Williams

You paused for a moment and I heard you smoking
on the other end of the line.
I pictured your expression,
one eye screwed shut against the smoke

Overnight At The Riverside Tower

© Du Fu

Evening colors linger on mountain paths.
Out beyond this study perched over River Gate,
At the cliff's edge, frail clouds stay
All night. Among waves, a lone, shuddering

Saturday Morning

© Hugo Williams

Everyone who made love the night before
was walking around with flashing red lights
on top of their heads-a white-haired old gentlemen,
a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman

Domestic Happiness

© Fitz-Greene Halleck

I.
"BESIDE the nuptial curtain bright"
The Bard of Eden sings,
"Young Love his constant lamp will light,

Bar Italia

© Hugo Williams

How beautiful it would be to wait for you again
in the usual place,
not looking at the door,
keeping a lookout in the long mirror,

Lines On Reading Too Many Poets

© Dorothy Parker

Roses, rooted warm in earth,
Bud in rhyme, another age;
Lilies know a ghostly birth
Strewn along a patterned page;
Golden lad and chimbley sweep
Die; and so their song shall keep.

The smell of ammonia in the entrance hall.
The racing bike. The junk mail.
The timer switch whose single naked bulb
allowed us as far as the first floor.
The backs of your legs
as you went ahead of me up the stairs.

Unobtainable

© Hugo Williams

Whether it was putting in an extra beat,
or leaving one out, I couldn't tell.
My heart seemed to have forgotten
everything it ever knew

To Pan doth white-limbed Daphnis offer here

© Theocritus

To Pan doth white-limbed Daphnis offer here
(He once piped sweetly on his herdsman's flute)
His reeds of many a stop, his barbed spear,
And scrip, wherein he held his hoards of fruit.

Siren Song

© Hugo Williams

I phone from time to time, to see if she's
changed the music on her answerphone.
'Tell me in two words', goes the recording,
'what you were going to tell in a thousand'.

The Young Housewife

© William Carlos Williams

At ten a.m. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husbands house.
I pass solitary in my car.

Billy's Rain

© Hugo Williams

How do you think I feel
when you make me talk to you
and won't let me stop
till the words turn into a moan?

The Surges Gushed And Sounded

© William Ernest Henley

The surges gushed and sounded,
The blue was the blue of June,
And low above the brightening east
Floated a shred of moon.

Heart of Copper

© Edward Dorn

The Candidate, answering a question
about El Salvador, generalized
by saying he thought
we should support human rights

Osama Thou Art Inert

When the pies are no longer trembling

Shall you be

In My Youth I Was a Tireless Dancer

© Edward Dorn

But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,

On A Pen Of Thomas Starr King

This is the reed the dead musician dropped,
With tuneful magic in its sheath still hidden;
The prompt allegro of its music stopped,
Its melodies unbidden.

A Youth Mowing

There are four men mowing down by the Isar;
I can hear the swish of the scythe-strokes, four
Sharp breaths taken: yea, and I
Am sorry for what's in store.