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Poetry
LARKINESQUE
The trees have shed their leaves at last,
Like something over — done and said.
How shall their settled piles be read
Now that fall is dead and past?
Perhaps like sibyl’s words that ...
Poetry
IMAGE
Between the sunset and the window shade,
The maple leaves were quaking in the wind.
I saw the shaken shadows that they made
As if in fear — as if they were afraid
That ...
Poetry
36 WEST PITMAN
What witches, what magicians, but . . . they needed
Sixty years — the slowest sleight of hand
On record. Did they fail to understand
We were sufficiently distracted on
Our own ...
Poetry
LEAVES: THREE TANKAS
Fall comes. He watches
Their dying flames fill the eaves
And ground their splotches
In slow-browning, flattened sheaves:
Loss over which no one grieves.
*
Their coming down makes
The ground a cereal bowl
Of brown. ...
Poetry
CRITIC
The black-capped skull obliviously alert
(My stare had not yet caught its yellow eye),
His head jerked left then right.
Between each stab: the hooked neb, pricking at
An upturned breast, its puff of ...
Poetry
CRITIC
The black-capped skull obliviously alert
(My stare had not yet caught its yellow eye),
His head jerked left then right.
Between each stab: the hooked neb, pricking at
An upturned breast, its puff of ...
Poetry
SNOW DROPS
First
useless spears against
the humus’s black backdrop,
then collapse
to heads hung down
in puny lampshade petals:
collapse without bud-burst.
Autochthonous, unsown,
their whited time
condensed,
they bell in clusters.
No tongue claps
and will not stop.
The freak wind blusters.
Down ...
Snow Drops
First
useless spears against
the humus’s black backdrop,
then collapse
to heads hung down
in puny lampshade petals:
collapse without bud-burst.
Autochthonous, unsown,
their whited time
condensed,
they bell in clusters.
No tongue claps
and will not stop.
The freak wind blusters.
Down on ...
Picturesque
Rising ambitiously, they set a goal
Of smoking out the red, reluctant sun,
Which smolders like some just-embarrassed coal.
Whatever looks to start has not begun,
But still the clouds’ bombastic undersides —
All glowing pearl ...