Oh, and don't forget this one, called "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell"---
At midnight tears
Run into your ears
Worthy of Hank Williams, no? Or this one, "Cartography"--
As you lay in sleep
I saw the chart
Of artery and vein
Running from your heart,
Plain as the strenth
Marked upon the leaf
Along the length,
Mortal and brief,
Of your gaunt hand.
I saw it clear:
The wiry brand
Of the life we bear
Mapped like the great
Rivers that rise
Beyond our fate
And distant from our eyes.
And "Evening in the Sanatarium" and "Come, Sleep" and "Spirit's Song" and "Tears in Sleep" and "Second Song" and
"Question in a Field" and "The Crows" and and and and....
and I can't resist typing out one more, "Kept"---
Time for the wood, the clay,
The trumpery dolls, the toys
Now to be put away:
We are not girls and boys.
What are those rags we twist
Our hearts upon, or clutch
Hard in the sweating fist?
They are not worth so much.
But we must keep such things
Till we at length begin
To feel our nerves their strings,
Their dust, our blood within.
The dreadful painted bisque
Becomes our very cheek.
A doll's heart, faint at risk,
Within our breast grows weak.
Our hand the doll's, our tongue.
Time for the pretty clay,
Time for the straw, the wood.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.
And what the hell, here's that one about her brother, "To My Brother Killed: Haumont Wood: October, 1918"--
O you so long dead,
You masked and obscure,
I can tell you, all things endure:
The wine and the bread;
The marble quarried for the arch;
The iron become steel;
The spoke broken from the wheel;
The sweat of the long march;
The hay-stacks cut through like loaves
And the hundred flowers from the seed;
All things indeed
Though struck by the hooves
Of disaster, of time due,
Of fell loss and gain,
All things remain,
I can tell you, this is true.
Though burned down to stone
Though lost from the eye,
I can tell you, and not lie,--
Save of peace alone.
[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 02, 2004).]
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