Best Famous Pouring Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Pouring poems. This is a select list of the best famous Pouring poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Pouring poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of pouring poems.

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• All Famous Pouring Poems

Written by John Keats | Ode to a Nightingale MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5 But being too happy in thine happiness, That thou, light-wing¨¨d Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10 O for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delv¨¨d earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Proven?al song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stain¨¨d mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20 Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30 Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, 35 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40 I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalm¨¨d darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50 Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mus¨¨d rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55 To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain¡ª To thy high requiem become a sod. 60 Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70 Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75 Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:¡ªdo I wake or sleep? 80

Written by Adrienne Rich | Cartographies of Silence 1. A conversation begins with a lie. and each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart as if powerless, as if up against a force of nature A poem can being with a lie. And be torn up. A conversation has other laws recharges itself with its own false energy, Cannot be torn up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself. Inscribes with its unreturning stylus the isolation it denies. 2. The classical music station playing hour upon hour in the apartment the picking up and picking up and again picking up the telephone The syllables uttering the old script over and over The loneliness of the liar living in the formal network of the lie twisting the dials to drown the terror beneath the unsaid word 3. The technology of silence The rituals, etiquette the blurring of terms silence not absence of words or music or even raw sounds Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint of a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence 4. How calm, how inoffensive these words begin to seem to me though begun in grief and anger Can I break through this film of the abstract without wounding myself or you there is enough pain here This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain? 5. The silence strips bare: In Dreyer's Passion of Joan Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography mutely surveyed by the camera If there were a poetry where this could happen not as blank space or as words stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people have talked till dawn. 6. The scream of an illegitimate voice It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself How do I exist? This was the silence I wanted to break in you I had questions but you would not answer I had answers but you could not use them The is useless to you and perhaps to others 7. It was an old theme even for me: Language cannot do everything- chalk it on the walls where the dead poets lie in their mausoleums If at the will of the poet the poem could turn into a thing a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head alight with dew If it could simply look you in the face with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn till you, and I who long to make this thing, were finally clarified together in its stare 8. No. Let me have this dust, these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words moving with ferocious accuracy like the blind child's fingers or the newborn infant's mouth violent with hunger No one can give me, I have long ago taken this method whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue If from time to time I envy the pure annunciation to the eye the visio beatifica if from time to time I long to turn like the Eleusinian hierophant holding up a single ear of grain for the return to the concrete and everlasting world what in fact I keep choosing are these words, these whispers, conversations from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

Written by Anne Sexton | Cinderella You always read about it: the plumber with the twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That story. Or the nursemaid, some luscious sweet from Denmark who captures the oldest son's heart. from diapers to Dior. That story. Or a milkman who serves the wealthy, eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk, the white truck like an ambulance who goes into real estate and makes a pile. From homogenized to martinis at lunch. Or the charwoman who is on the bus when it cracks up and collects enough from the insurance. From mops to Bonwit Teller. That story. Once the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed and she said to her daughter Cinderella: Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile down from heaven in the seam of a cloud. The man took another wife who had two daughters, pretty enough but with hearts like blackjacks. Cinderella was their maid. She slept on the sooty hearth each night and walked around looking like Al Jolson. Her father brought presents home from town, jewels and gowns for the other women but the twig of a tree for Cinderella. She planted that twig on her mother's grave and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat. Whenever she wished for anything the dove would drop it like an egg upon the ground. The bird is important, my dears, so heed him. Next came the ball, as you all know. It was a marriage market. The prince was looking for a wife. All but Cinderella were preparing and gussying up for the event. Cinderella begged to go too. Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils into the cinders and said: Pick them up in an hour and you shall go. The white dove brought all his friends; all the warm wings of the fatherland came, and picked up the lentils in a jiffy. No, Cinderella, said the stepmother, you have no clothes and cannot dance. That's the way with stepmothers. Cinderella went to the tree at the grave and cried forth like a gospel singer: Mama! Mama! My turtledove, send me to the prince's ball! The bird dropped down a golden dress and delicate little slippers. Rather a large package for a simple bird. So she went. Which is no surprise. Her stepmother and sisters didn't recognize her without her cinder face and the prince took her hand on the spot and danced with no other the whole day. As nightfall came she thought she'd better get home. The prince walked her home and she disappeared into the pigeon house and although the prince took an axe and broke it open she was gone. Back to her cinders. These events repeated themselves for three days. However on the third day the prince covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it. Now he would find whom the shoe fit and find his strange dancing girl for keeps. He went to their house and the two sisters were delighted because they had lovely feet. The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on but her big toe got in the way so she simply sliced it off and put on the slipper. The prince rode away with her until the white dove told him to look at the blood pouring forth. That is the way with amputations. They just don't heal up like a wish. The other sister cut off her heel but the blood told as blood will. The prince was getting tired. He began to feel like a shoe salesman. But he gave it one last try. This time Cinderella fit into the shoe like a love letter into its envelope. At the wedding ceremony the two sisters came to curry favor and the white dove pecked their eyes out. Two hollow spots were left like soup spoons. Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity. Regular Bobbsey Twins. That story.

Written by Sappho | To Atthis My Atthis, although our dear Anaktoria lives in distant Sardis, she thinks of us constantly, and of the life we shared in days when for her you were a splendid goddess, and your singing gave her deep joy. Now she shines among Lydian women as when the red-fingered moon rises after sunset, erasing stars around her, and pouring light equally across the salt sea and over densely flowered fields; and lucent dew spreads on the earth to quicken roses and fragile thyme and the sweet-blooming honey-lotus. Now while our darling wanders she thinks of lovely Atthis's love, and longing sinks deep in her breast. She cries loudly for us to come! We hear, for the night's many tongues carry her cry across the sea.

Written by John Keats | A Thing of Beauty (Endymion) A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its lovliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; An endless fountain of immortal drink, Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

Written by Walt Whitman | Proud Music of The Storm 1 PROUD music of the storm! Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains! Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras! You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert, Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations; You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses! You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient! You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts; You sounds from distant guns, with galloping cavalry! Echoes of camps, with all the different bugle-calls! Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless, Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber—Why have you seiz’d me? 2 Come forward, O my Soul, and let the rest retire; Listen—lose not—it is toward thee they tend; Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber, For thee they sing and dance, O Soul. A festival song! The duet of the bridegroom and the bride—a marriage-march, With lips of love, and hearts of lovers, fill’d to the brim with love; The red-flush’d cheeks, and perfumes—the cortege swarming, full of friendly faces, young and old, To flutes’ clear notes, and sounding harps’ cantabile. 3 Now loud approaching drums! Victoria! see’st thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying? the rout of the baffled? Hearest those shouts of a conquering army? (Ah, Soul, the sobs of women—the wounded groaning in agony, The hiss and crackle of flames—the blacken’d ruins—the embers of cities, The dirge and desolation of mankind.) 4 Now airs antique and medieval fill me! I see and hear old harpers with their harps, at Welsh festivals: I hear the minnesingers, singing their lays of love, I hear the minstrels, gleemen, troubadours, of the feudal ages. 5 Now the great organ sounds, Tremulous—while underneath, (as the hid footholds of the earth, On which arising, rest, and leaping forth, depend, All shapes of beauty, grace and strength—all hues we know, Green blades of grass, and warbling birds—children that gambol and play—the clouds of heaven above,) The strong base stands, and its pulsations intermits not, Bathing, supporting, merging all the rest—maternity of all the rest; And with it every instrument in multitudes, The players playing—all the world’s musicians, The solemn hymns and masses, rousing adoration, All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals, The measureless sweet vocalists of ages, And for their solvent setting, Earth’s own diapason, Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves; A new composite orchestra—binder of years and climes—ten-fold renewer, As of the far-back days the poets tell—the Paradiso, The straying thence, the separation long, but now the wandering done, The journey done, the Journeyman come home, And Man and Art, with Nature fused again. 6 Tutti! for Earth and Heaven! The Almighty Leader now for me, for once has signal’d with his wand. The manly strophe of the husbands of the world, And all the wives responding. The tongues of violins! (I think, O tongues, ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself; This brooding, yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.) 7 Ah, from a little child, Thou knowest, Soul, how to me all sounds became music; My mother’s voice, in lullaby or hymn; (The voice—O tender voices—memory’s loving voices! Last miracle of all—O dearest mother’s, sister’s, voices;) The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav’d corn, The measur’d sea-surf, beating on the sand, The twittering bird, the hawk’s sharp scream, The wild-fowl’s notes at night, as flying low, migrating north or south, The psalm in the country church, or mid the clustering trees, the open air camp-meeting, The fiddler in the tavern—the glee, the long-strung sailor-song, The lowing cattle, bleating sheep—the crowing cock at dawn. 8 All songs of current lands come sounding ’round me, The German airs of friendship, wine and love, Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances—English warbles, Chansons of France, Scotch tunes—and o’er the rest, Italia’s peerless compositions. Across the stage, with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion, Stalks Norma, brandishing the dagger in her hand. I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’ unnatural gleam; Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevell’d. I see where Ernani, walking the bridal garden, Amid the scent of night-roses, radiant, holding his bride by the hand, Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn. To crossing swords, and grey hairs bared to heaven, The clear, electric base and baritone of the world, The trombone duo—Libertad forever! From Spanish chestnut trees’ dense shade, By old and heavy convent walls, a wailing song, Song of lost love—the torch of youth and life quench’d in despair, Song of the dying swan—Fernando’s heart is breaking. Awaking from her woes at last, retriev’d Amina sings; Copious as stars, and glad as morning light, the torrents of her joy. (The teeming lady comes! The lustrious orb—Venus contralto—the blooming mother, Sister of loftiest gods—Alboni’s self I hear.) 9 I hear those odes, symphonies, operas; I hear in the William Tell, the music of an arous’d and angry people; I hear Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, the Prophet, or Robert; Gounod’s Faust, or Mozart’s Don Juan. 10 I hear the dance-music of all nations, The waltz, (some delicious measure, lapsing, bathing me in bliss;) The bolero, to tinkling guitars and clattering castanets. I see religious dances old and new, I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre, I see the Crusaders marching, bearing the cross on high, to the martial clang of cymbals; I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers’d with frantic shouts, as they spin around, turning always towards Mecca; I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs; Again, at Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing, I hear them clapping their hands, as they bend their bodies, I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet. I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding each other; I see the Roman youth, to the shrill sound of flageolets, throwing and catching their weapons, As they fall on their knees, and rise again. I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling; I see the worshippers within, (nor form, nor sermon, argument, nor word, But silent, strange, devout—rais’d, glowing heads—extatic faces.) 11 I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings, The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen; The sacred imperial hymns of China, To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone;) Or to Hindu flutes, and the fretting twang of the vina, A band of bayaderes. 12 Now Asia, Africa leave me—Europe, seizing, inflates me; To organs huge, and bands, I hear as from vast concourses of voices, Luther’s strong hymn, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott; Rossini’s Stabat Mater dolorosa; Or, floating in some high cathedral dim, with gorgeous color’d windows, The passionate Agnus Dei, or Gloria in Excelsis. 13 Composers! mighty maestros! And you, sweet singers of old lands—Soprani! Tenori! Bassi! To you a new bard, carolling free in the west, Obeisant, sends his love. (Such led to thee, O Soul! All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee, But now, it seems to me, sound leads o’er all the rest.) 14 I hear the annual singing of the children in St. Paul’s Cathedral; Or, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the symphonies, oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn; The Creation, in billows of godhood laves me. Give me to hold all sounds, (I, madly struggling, cry,) Fill me with all the voices of the universe, Endow me with their throbbings—Nature’s also, The tempests, waters, winds—operas and chants—marches and dances, Utter—pour in—for I would take them all. 15 Then I woke softly, And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream, And questioning all those reminiscences—the tempest in its fury, And all the songs of sopranos and tenors, And those rapt oriental dances, of religious fervor, And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs, And all the artless plaints of love, and grief and death, I said to my silent, curious Soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber, Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long, Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day, Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real, Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream. And I said, moreover, Haply, what thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds, Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh scream, Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy, Nor German organ majestic—nor vast concourse of voices—nor layers of harmonies; Nor strophes of husbands and wives—nor sound of marching soldiers, Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-calls of camps; But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee, Poems, bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten, Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write.

Written by Dylan Thomas | I In My Intricate Image I I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels, Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator Laying my ghost in metal, The scales of this twin world tread on the double, My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor, To my man-iron sidle. Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels, Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season Worked on a world of petals; She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain Out of the naked entrail. Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels, Image of images, my metal phantom Forcing forth through the harebell, My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal, I, in my fusion of rose and male motion, Create this twin miracle. This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril, A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless, No death more natural; Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil, In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance. The natural parallel. My images stalk the trees and the slant sap's tunnel, No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire Mount on man's footfall, I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles, In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower, Hearing the weather fall. Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals, Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour, Finding the water final, On the consumptives' terrace taking their two farewells, Sail on the level, the departing adventure, To the sea-blown arrival. II They climb the country pinnacle, Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture, Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral; They see the squirrel stumble, The haring snail go giddily round the flower, A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral. As they dive, the dust settles, The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily, The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel Turn the long sea arterial Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall. (Death instrumental, Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey, Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple, The neck of the nostril, Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral; Bring out the black patrol, Your monstrous officers and the decaying army, The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles, A cock-on-a-dunghill Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity, Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.) As they drown, the chime travels, Sweetly the diver's bell in the steeple of spindrift Rings out the Dead Sea scale; And, clapped in water till the triton dangles, Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman's raft, Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial. (Turn the sea-spindle lateral, The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table, Let the wax disk babble Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping. These are your years' recorders. The circular world stands still.) III They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles, Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling, The flight of the carnal skull And the cell-stepped thimble; Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran. Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule, Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly Star-set at Jacob's angle, Smoke hill and hophead's valley, And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father's coral Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile. Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble, Be by the ships' sea broken at the manstring anchored The stoved bones' voyage downward In the shipwreck of muscle; Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle, Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels. And in the pincers of the boiling circle, The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time, My great blood's iron single In the pouring town, I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam's cradle, No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile. Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel, Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes, Time in the hourless houses Shaking the sea-hatched skull, And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail, All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel. Man was Cadaver's masker, the harnessing mantle, Windily master of man was the rotten fathom, My ghost in his metal neptune Forged in man's mineral. This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl, And my images roared and rose on heaven's hill.

Written by Billy Collins | Directions You know the brick path in the back of the house, the one you see from the kitchen window, the one that bends around the far end of the garden where all the yellow primroses are? And you know how if you leave the path and walk into the woods you come to a heap of rocks, probably pushed down during the horrors of the Ice Age, and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now against the light-brown fallen leaves? And farther on, you know the small footbridge with the broken railing and if you go beyond the you arrive at the bottom of sheep's head hill? Well, if you start climbing, and you might have to grab on to a sapling when the going gets steep, you will eventually come to a long stone ridge with a border of pine trees which is a high as you can go and a good enough place to stop. The best time for this is late afternoon en the sun strobes through the columns of trees as you are hiking up, and when you find an agreeable rock to sit on, you will be able to see the light pouring down into the woods and breaking into the shapes and tones of things and you will hear nothing but a sprig of a birdsong or leafy falling of a cone or t through the trees, and if this is your day you might even spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese driving overhead toward some destination. But it is hard to speak of these things how the voices of light enter the body and begin to recite their stories how the earth holds us painfully against ts breast made of humus and brambles how we will soon be gone regard the entities that continue to return greener than ever, spring water flowing through a meadow and the shadows of clouds passing over the hills and the ground where we stand in the tremble of thought taking the vast outside into ourselves. Still, let me know before you set out. Come knock on my door and I will walk with you as far as the garden with one hand on your shoulder. I will even watch after you and not turn back to the house until you disappear into the crowd of maple and ash, heading up toward the hill, percing the ground with your stick.

Written by Sylvia Plath | Berck-Plage (1) This is the sea, then, this great abeyance. How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation. Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands. Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding? I have two legs, and I move smilingly.. A sandy damper kills the vibrations; It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices Waving and crutchless, half their old size. The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces, Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner. Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses? Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock? Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers Who wall up their backs against him. They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body. The sea, that crystallized these, Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress. (2) This black boot has no mercy for anybody. Why should it, it is the hearse of a dad foot, The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest Who plumbs the well of his book, The bent print bulging before him like scenery. Obscene bikinis hid in the dunes, Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar Of little crystals, titillating the light, While a green pool opens its eye, Sick with what it has swallowed---- Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers Two lovers unstick themselves. O white sea-crockery, What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat.... And the onlooker, trembling, Drawn like a long material Through a still virulence, And a weed, hairy as privates. (3) On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering. Things, things---- Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches. Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles? I am not a nurse, white and attendant, I am not a smile. These children are after something, with hooks and cries, And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults. This is the side of a man: his red ribs, The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon: One mirrory eye---- A facet of knowledge. On a striped mattress in one room An old man is vanishing. There is no help in his weeping wife. Where are the eye-stones, yellow and vvaluable, And the tongue, sapphire of ash. (4) A wedding-cake face in a paper frill. How superior he is now. It is like possessing a saint. The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful; They are browning, like touched gardenias. The bed is rolled from the wall. This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible. Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak Rises so whitely unbuffeted? They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye. Now the washed sheets fly in the sun, The pillow cases are sweetening. It is a blessing, it is a blessing: The long coffin of soap-colored oak, The curious bearers and the raw date Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm. (5) The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green sea Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows, The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife---- Blunt, practical boats Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters. In the parlor of the stone house One curtain is flickering from the open window, Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle. This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember. How far he is now, his actions Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor. As the pallors gather---- The pallors of hands and neighborly faces, The elate pallors of flying iris. They are flying off into nothing: remember us. The empty benches of memory look over stones, Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils. It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place. (6) The natural fatness of these lime leaves!---- Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church. The voice of the priest, in thin air, Meets the corpse at the gate, Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell; A glittler of wheat and crude earth. What is the name of that color?---- Old blood of caked walls the sun heals, Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts. The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters, Necessary among the flowers, Enfolds her lace like fine linen, Not to be spread again. While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles, Passes cloud after cloud. And the bride flowers expend a fershness, And the soul is a bride In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless. (7) Behind the glass of this car The world purrs, shut-off and gentle. And I am dark-suited and stil, a member of the party, Gliding up in low gear behind the cart. And the priest is a vessel, A tarred fabric,sorry and dull, Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman, A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips Storming the hilltop. Then, from the barred yard, the children Smell the melt of shoe-blacking, Their faces turning, wordless and slow, Their eyes opening On a wonderful thing---- Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, And a naked mouth, red and awkward. For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma. There is no hope, it is given up.

Written by Weldon Kees | A Distance From The Sea To Ernest Brace "And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not." --REVELATIONS, x, 4. That raft we rigged up, under the water, Was just the item: when he walked, With his robes blowing, dark against the sky, It was as though the unsubstantial waves held up His slender and inviolate feet. The gulls flew over, Dropping, crying alone; thin ragged lengths of cloud Drifted in bars across the sun. There on the shore The crowd's response was instantaneous. He Handled it well, I thought--the gait, the tilt of the head, just right. Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves. And then we knew our work well worth the time: The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails, The tiresome rehearsals, considerations of execution. But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it, Lay your plans carefully and keep one jump Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle Is a pleasure unalloyed; but staging one requires Tact, imagination, a special knack for the job Not everyone possesses. A miracle, in fact, means work. --And now there are those who have come saying That miracles were not what we were after. But what else Is there? What other hope does life hold out But the miraculous, the skilled and patient Execution, the teamwork, all the pain and worry every miracle involves? Visionaries tossing in their beds, haunted and racked By questions of Messiahship and eschatology, Are like the mist rising at nightfall, and come, Perhaps to even less. Grave supernaturalists, devoted worshippers Experience the ecstasy (such as it is), but not Our ecstasy. It was our making. Yet sometimes When the torrent of that time Comes pouring back, I wonder at our courage And our enterprise. It was as though the world Had been one darkening, abandoned hall Where rows of unlit candles stood; and we Not out of love, so much, or hope, or even worship, but Out of the fear of death, came with our lights And watched the candles, one by one, take fire, flames Against the long night of our fear. We thought That we could never die. Now I am less convinced. --The traveller on the plain makes out the mountains At a distance; then he loses sight. His way Winds through the valleys; then, at a sudden turning of a path, The peaks stand nakedly before him: they are something else Than what he saw below. I think now of the raft (For me, somehow, the summit of the whole experience) And all the expectations of that day, but also of the cave We stocked with bread, the secret meetings In the hills, the fake assassins hired for the last pursuit, The careful staging of the cures, the bribed officials, The angels' garments, tailored faultlessly, The medicines administered behind the stone, That ultimate cloud, so perfect, and so opportune. Who managed all that blood I never knew. The days get longer. It was a long time ago. And I have come to that point in the turning of the path Where peaks are infinite--horn-shaped and scaly, choked with thorns. But even here, I know our work was worth the cost. What we have brought to pass, no one can take away. Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance. Nothing will be the same as once it was, I tell myself.--It's dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting darker. It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy. Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down. And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.