Thursday, January 29, 2015

New York, Night, 1928-29

The tower tilts, although the street is straight.
In Pisa? No, it has to be New York,
Even though it shares a certain trait-
A little rounding on the top, a cork
To keep what's in the tilt from tipping out-
The lights are wrong for Pisa. It's too bright,
Part of the city circling roundabout
Illuminated in the dead of night
By neon and by taxis and so on:
Life spilling out of doors. And yet the tilt:
The feeling it will fall when you are gone,
And crush the city so the light is spilt.
I dare not walk away, and yet I must
Leaving the city to its tilting trust.

PH-794, 1945

The plainsman draws the peaks he does not know,
Giving them halos, like the far off heads
Of ever distant angels, in whose glow
The sun that beats upon the old homesteads
Is candlelight. Up on the peaks they gleam
Refracting little fires, maybe but
A dim reflection of the reds that stream
Hidden behind, where nobody knows what
May live. The dark surrounding all is thick
Yet in that thickness lies a kind of light
Caught from the distance by a painter's trick
That bends beyond the likelihood of sight
And makes the sky, broken by peaks unknown
A part of him: the world he paints, his own.

Headlands, Monhegan, 1909

The grass that clings in patches to the rock
Creates the very cracks that threaten it
Not with a cataclysmic blasting shock
But year by year, iotic bit by bit.
The act of feeding splinters what it's fed
And growth is death. Below, the water waits
Watching the cliff decay and droop its head,
Whitening the brown and crumbling slates
With constant battering. Between the two
The ancient land cannot but fall someday,
Becoming one with all that distant blue.
But though it will, it has not yet, and may
For years remain so poised between these threats
Alive though bowed, still living in not-yets.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Voltaire

Can you imagine how it would have been
Had we known what we could have done before?
If somehow we beforehand knew the score
And acted with those thoughts already in
Our minds, and maybe hearts? We could begin
From wherever we chose, and, what is more,
Move onward as we wished, since an encore
Is always easier. What could we win
If our path were thus smoothed before our feet?
What joys could we enjoy, what woes forsake?
What pains could that foreknowledging delete
And what pure pleasures could we seize and take?
Nothing but what we have; for, candidly,
I cannot think a better joy could be.