Randall Jarrell Poems

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by Jarrell, Randall

 A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where (just as though they'd let
It live for looks) a locust billows
In leaf-green and shade-violet,
A standing mercy.
The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."
If...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 The postman comes when I am still in bed.
"Postman, what do you have for me today?"
I say to him. (But really I'm in bed.)
Then he says - what shall I have him say?

"This letter says that you are president
Of - this word here; it's a republic."
Tell them I can't answer right away.
"It's your duty." No, I'd rather just be...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 Her imaginary playmate was a grown-up 
In sea-coal satin. The flame-blue glances, 
The wings gauzy as the membrane that the ashes 
Draw over an old ember --as the mother 
In a jug of cider-- were a comfort to her. 
They sat by the fire and told each other stories. 

"What men want..." said the godmother softly-- 
How she went...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 If, in an odd angle of the hutment,
A puppy laps the water from a can
Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving
Whistles O Paradiso!--shall I say that man
Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

The other murderers troop in yawning;
Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one
Lies counting missions, lies there sweating
Till even his heart beats: One;...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 Did they send me away from my cat and my wife
To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,
To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?
Did I nod in the flies of the schools?
And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,
The blood froze over my splints like a scab --
Did I snore, all...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.
The week is dealt out like a hand
That children pick up card by card.
One keeps getting the same hand.
One keeps getting the same card.
But twice a day -- except on Saturday --
The wheel stops, there is a crack in Time:
With a hiss of soles, a rattle of tin,
My own gray Daemon pauses...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon.
Der heilige Hieronymus--his lion is at the zoo--
Listens, listens. All the long, soft, summer day
Dreams affright his couch, the deep boils like a pot.
As the sun sets, the last patient rises,
Says to him, Father, trembles, turns away.

Often, to the lion, the saint said, Son.
To the man the saint says--but the man...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 It was not dying: everybody died. 
It was not dying: we had died before 
In the routine crashes-- and our fields 
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, 
And the rates rose, all because of us. 
We died on the wrong page of the almanac, 
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; 
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 The letters always just evade the hand
One skates like a stone into a beam, falls like a bird.
Surely the past from which the letters rise
Is waiting in the future, past the graves?
The soldiers are all haunted by their lives.
Their claims upon their kind are paid in paper
That established a presence, like a smell.
In letters and in dreams they see...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 When the swans turned my sister into a swan
 I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
 A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.

Out on the lake, a girl would laugh.
 "Sister, here is your porridge,...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose....Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 Looking back in my mind I can see 
The white sun like a tin plate 
Over the wooden turning of the weeds; 
The street jerking --a wet swing-- 
To end by the wall the children sang. 

The thin grass by the girls' door, 
Trodden on, straggling, yellow and rotten, 
And the gaunt field with its one tied cow-- 
The...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 At the back of the houses there is the wood.
While there is a leaf of summer left, the wood

Makes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
Has paths I can walk, when I wake, to good

Or evil: to the cage, to the oven, to the House
In the Wood. It is a part of life, or of the story

We make...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 About suffering, about adoration, the old masters 
Disagree. When someone suffers, no one else eats 
Or walks or opens the window--no one breathes 
As the sufferers watch the sufferer. 
In St. Sebastian Mourned by St. Irene
The flame of one torch is the only light. 
All the eyes except the maidservant's (she weeps 
And covers them with a cloth) are...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House
Run by a lady my age. She was gay.
When I told her that I came from Pasadena
She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena
When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus."

I felt that I had met someone from home.
No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbuckle.
Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common
Like...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 In the shabby train no seat is vacant.
The child in the ripped mask
Sprawls undisturbed in the waste
Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant?
They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed
That they were willing to trade for this?
The dried blood sparkles along the mask
Of the child who yesterday possessed
A country welcomer than this.
Did he? All...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. 
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
 this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my...Read More

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by Jarrell, Randall

 What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel...Read More

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