You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
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Poems
A boat, beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
my friends, my sweet barbarians,
there is that hunger which is not for food—
but an eye at the navel turns the appetite
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant, and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve is like the melody
His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall?
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,
Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,
Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored my earth to joy
Have you departed, every one,
“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”
“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
The air smells of rhubarb, occasional
Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,
Undulant hurt, so body snaps and curls
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
’Tis true, ’tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ’tis light?
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
