I bought Barnes's book the night I attended Bob Mezey's read at the Huntington. They are both wonderful poets who should be known to all of us, The first below is Barnes, who wrote mostly free verse but with knockout control, and the second is one of Mezey's that he read that night. Let it also be noted that Professor Mezey has championed the work of Henri Coulette, another unjustly neglected poet.
-- Frank
Alluvium: A Reply
Somewhere two rivers rush together at the foot of a scarp,
meander over a coastal plateau, then down a barranca
the rio caudal plunges into its deep estuary
and huge canyons under the sea. But here
on this nearly level delta wide as the eye can see
streams mingle and separate, some sweet, some brack
some sink under their own silt, are lost in the arrowweed
where a curve of current earlier carved the bank
some dwindle down sloughs under poplar or willow,
the heron’s home, some into quicksand, and
nothing is turning out the way you thought it would be,
nothing.
Hardy
Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,
Plucked from the swaddling shroud, and chafed and slapped,
The crone implacable. At last he shivered,
Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped
In a world from which there is but one escape
And that forestalled now almost ninety years.
In such a scene as he himself might shape,
The maker of a thousand songs appears.
From this it follows, all the ironies
Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow
The way of things, the suffering one sees,
The many cups of bitterness he must swallow
Before he is permitted to be gone
Where he was headed in that early dawn.
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