New Poem: Märchenbilder

Es war einmal...No, it's too heavy
To be said. Besides, you aren't paying attention any more.
How shall I put it?
"The rain thundered on the uneven red flagstones.

The steadfast tin soldier gazed beyond the drops
Remembering the hat-shaped paper boat, that soon..."
That's not it either.
Think about the long summer evenings of the past, the queen anne's lace.

Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

Pomp of flowers, decorations
Junked next day. Now look out of the window.
The sky is clear and bland. The wrong kind of day
For business or games, or betting on a sure thing.

The trees weep drops
Into the water at night. Slowly couples gather.
She looks into his eyes. "It would not be good
To be left alone." He: I'll stay

As long as the night allows" This was one of those night
rainbows
In negative color. As we advance, it retreats; we see
We are now far into a cave, must be. Yet there seems to be
Trees all around, and a wind lifts their leaves, slightly.

I want to go back, out of the bad stories,
But there's always the possibility that the next one...
No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog
Yet they are beautiful as we people them

With ourselves. They are empty as cupboards.
To spend whole days drenched in them, waiting for the next whisper,
For the word in the next room. This is how the princes must have behaved,
Lying down in the frugality of sleep.

[end of poem]

new poem: City Afternoon

A veil of haze protects this
Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody
In this photograph, most of them now
Sucked screaming through old age and death.

If one could seize America
Or at least a fine forgetfulness
That seeps into our outline
Defining our volumes with a stain
That is fleeting too

But commemorates
Because it does define, after all:
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change,
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside down in the reflecting pool.

[end of poem]

New Poem : Robin Hood's Barn

This would be the day: a few small drops of rain,
A dab of this, a touch of eau-de-cologne air
As long as it's suggestive. And it
Mounts, a serenade, to the surrounding
Love. You bad birds,
But God shall not punish you, you
Shall be with us in heaven, though less
Conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.
Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,
But you are the fruit and jewels
Of my arrangements: O be with me!
Forget stand-offishness, exact
Bookkeeping of harsh terms! The banal
Sun is about to creep across heaven on its
Daily turn: don't let it find us arguing
Or worse, alone, each
Having turned his back to the other,
Alone in the wonderful solitude
Of the new day. To be there
Is not to know it, its outline
Creeps up on you, and then it has fallen over you
Like bedclothes of fog.
From some serene, high table
Set near the top of a flight of stairs
Come once and for all into our
Consideration though it be flat like lemonade.
The rest that is dreamed is as the husk
Of this feast on the damp ground.
As I was turning to say something to her she sped by me
Which meant all is over in a few years: twenty-six, twenty-seven,
Who were those people
Who came down to the boat and met us that time?
And your young years become a kind of clay
Out of which the older, more rounded and also brusquer
Retort is fashioned, the greeting
That takes you into night
Like a lantern up ahead:
The "Where were you"s; meanwhile
The dark is waiting like so many other things,
Dumbness and voluptuousness among them.
It is good to be part of it
In the dream that is the kernel
Deep in it, the unpretentious, unblushing,
But also the steep side stretching far away:
For this we pay, for this
Tonight and every night.
But for the time being we are free
And meanwhile the songs
Protect us, in a way, and the special climate.

[end of poem]

New Poem : All and Some

And for those who understand:
We shifted the day, until there was no more
Coming out of the situation we had so imitated.
And now we had talked of it
Not as a human being, deeply polite and intelligent
Coming forward to speak things of dark concern
But as a merely interesting description of itself.

Thus all good intentions remain puny
Consigned as they are to the cold dews
And nagging climates of a life's blood.
Does grave dawn drape in a pattern of convolvulus
The next noon alters, dim or baldly untragic
Until the pattern comes to seem no more than footsteps,
Dry and gay, doting on the old-fashioned, the mensual.

"Climate" isn't a sign, but it could be
A by-product, an anonymous blue-collar suburb
In the great mildness that has taken over the air
With snapping cogs, deft reversals.
The blinded sun's got to answer for this
But meanwhile the housing's been built
And actually moved into, some of it.

But what I mean is there's no excuse
For always deducing the general from particulars,
Like spots on that sun. How many
Helpless wails have slid out orchestras
Across skittery dance floors until even
The dancers were there, waltzing lamely at first
But now static and buzzing like plaid? No one

Cares or uses the little station any more.
They are too young to remember
How it was when the late trains came in.
Violet sky grazing the gray hill-crests.
What laziness of appetite
Kept the buzzards circling, and when the dawn came
Up it did so on four wheels, without excuses or fuss.

It is impossible to picture the firmness
Of relationships then. The slack
Was by definition taken up, and so
Everything was useful. People died
Delighted with the long wait,
Exhaled brief words into the afternoon, the hills:
Then sweetness was knocked down for the last time.

Do you remember how we used to gather
The woodruff, the woodruff? But all things
Cannot be emblazoned, but surely many
Can, and those few devoted
By a caprice beyond the majesty
Of time's maw live happy useful lives
Unaware that the universe is a vast incubator.

To sense this clearly is not to know it, alas -
Today the directions arrive from many separated realms
Conjoining at the place of a bare pedestal.
Too many armies, too many dreams, and that's
It. Goodbye, you say, until next time
And I build our climate until next time
But the sky frowns, and the work gets completed in a dream.

[end of poem]

New poem: Oleum Misericordiae

To rub it out, make it less virulent
And a stab too at rearranging
The whole thing from the ground up.
Yes we were waiting just now
Yes we are no longer waiting.