Written by
James Schuyler |
beside me in this garden
are huge and daisy-like
(why not? are not
oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?),
shrubby and thick-stalked,
the leaves pointing up
the stems from which
the flowers burst in
sunbursts.
I love
this garden in all its moods,
even under its winter coat
of salt hay, or now,
in October, more than
half gone over: here
a rose, there a clump
of aconite.
This morning
one of the dogs killed
a barn owl.
Bob saw
it happen, tried to
intervene.
The airedale
snapped its neck and left
it lying.
Now the bird
lies buried by an apple
tree.
Last evening
from the table we saw
the owl, huge in the dusk,
circling the field
on owl-silent wings.
The first one ever seen
here: now it's gone,
a dream you just remember.
The dogs are barking.
In
the studio music plays
and Bob and Darragh paint.
I sit scribbling in a little
notebook at a garden table,
too hot in a heavy shirt
in the mid-October sun
into which the Korean mums
all face.
There is a
dull book with me,
an apple core, cigarettes,
an ashtray.
Behind me
the rue I gave Bob
flourishes.
Light on leaves,
so much to see, and
all I really see is that
owl, its bulk troubling
the twilight.
I'll
soon forget it: what
is there I have not forgot?
Or one day will forget:
this garden, the breeze
in stillness, even
the words, Korean mums.
|
Written by
James Wright |
It can't be the passing of time that casts
That white shadow across the waters
Just offshore.
I shiver a little, with the evening.
I turn down the steep path to find
What's left of the river gold.
I whistle a dog lazily, and lazily
A bird whistles me.
Close by a big river, I am alive in my own country,
I am home again.
Yes: I lived here, and here, and my name,
That I carved young, with a girl's, is healed over, now,
And lies sleeping beneath the inward sky
Of a tree's skin, close to the quick.
It's best to keep still.
But:
There goes that bird that whistled me down here
To the river a moment ago.
Who is he? A little white barn owl from Hudson's Bay,
Flown out of his range here, and, if he wants to,
He can be the body that casts
That white shadow across the waters
Just offshore.
|
Written by
Peter Huchel |
For Michael Hamburger
Barn owl
daughter of snow,
subject to the night wind,
yet taking root
with her talons
in the rotten scab of walls,
beak face
with round eyes,
heart-rigid mask
of feathers a white fire
that touches neither time nor space.
Coldly the wind blows
against the old homestead,
in the yard pale folk,
sledges, baggage, lamps covered with snow,
in the pots death,
in the pitchers poison,
the last will nailed to a post.
The hidden thing
under the rocks' claws,
the opening into night,
the terror of death
thrust into flesh like stinging salt.
Let us go down
in the language of angels
to the broken bricks of Babel.
|