....................Abso-frackin'-lutely [!!]

And thinking on earlier contemplaters of the black holes of existence, I've committed this translation by Maz to memory — of an anonymous poem she recalled from childhood and posted in a thread once when discussing those Big, Cosmic Question Marks:


When I think on thinges three

When I think on matters three,
I may never happy be.
The first is that I must away,
the second: I know not the day.
The third thing gives me my most woe:
I know not whither I shall go.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(older version found in a search):
Wanne Ich thenche thinges thre
Ne mai neure blithe be.
That oon is Ich sal awe.
That other is Ich ne wot wilk day.
That thridde is mi meste kare:
I ne woth nevre wuder I sal fare.
.

A few more.
 

A few more:

The Garden
By Ezra Pound

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anamia.

And round about there is a rabble
of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some on to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

The Artist's Model
By Joe Bolton

The light the morning of Soyer's death was clear.
It sifted through the three tall dirty windows
Of his studio. But he wasn't there-
Wasn't there among the deep blue shadows

Representing desire on the canvas,
Nor in the wood-framed mirror in which he
Painted himself, in shadow, painting me.
Outside, the city oddly without menace,

Traffic gliding down Seventy-fourth Street.
I remembered taking my cloths off those chill
Mornings when I'd come dressed like a Russian doll.
And still on the easel, all of me but my feet:

All Body, all flesh, all paint, all surface,
the withe shirt draped over my right shoulder,
A face both mine and not mine-distant, older,
As if he had painted his soul in my face.

The Snowfall
By Donald Justice

The classic landscapes of dreams are not
More pathless, though footprints leading nowhere
would seem to prove that a people once
Survived for a little even here.

Fragments of a pathetic culture
Remain, the lost mittens of children,
And a singe, bright detassled snow cap,
Evidence of some frantic migration.

The landmarks are all gone. Nevertheless
There is something familiar about this country.
Slowly now we begin to recall

The terrible whispers of our elders
Falling softly about our ears
In childhood, never believed till now.

Robert Frost's "The Pasture"
 

I know a couple of his other poems are better known, but recently this one by Robert Frost has opened up for me:

THE PASTURE

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long. You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long. You come too.

That would easily be Alexander Pushkin's "I loved you"

Childe Harold, Canto iv, Verse 178

THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Lament for Séan

O strong was the wood in the ashen oar,
And strong was the heart of Séan its rower,
And strong was the boat as she skimmed the tide,
And strong were the thowl-pins fixed in her side;
Strong, strong, strong!

But strong was the wave that broke the oar,
That stopped the heart of Séan its rower,
That sunk the boat as she skimmed the tide,
That smashed the thowl-pins fixed in her side;
Strong, strong, strong!

- D.J. O’Sullivan

Television

Hug me, mother of noise,
Find me a hiding place.
I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.

- Anne Stevenson