Collected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

bells get music of metal in the rain.
    The prey I am willingly prospers.
    The exile that comes on comes too late.
    I go to it as Adam, singing across paradise.
A KIND OF WORLD
    Things that are themselves. Waves water, the rocks
    stone. The smell of her arms. Stillness. Windstorms.
    The long silence again. The well. The rabbit. Heat.
    Nipples and long thighs. Her heavy bright mane.
    Plunging water flashing as she washes her body in the sun.
    “Perfect in whiteness.” Light going away every evening
    like some great importance. Grapes outside the windows.
    Linda talking less and less. Going down to the sea
    while she sleeps. Standing in the cold water to my mouth
    just before morning. Linda saying late in the day
    we should eat now or it would be too dark to wash the dishes.
    She going out quietly afterward to scream into the wind
    from the ocean. Coming in. Lighting the lamps.
LEAVING MONOLITHOS
    They were cutting the spring barley by fistfuls
    when we came. Boys drove horses and mules over it
    all day in threshing pits under the powerful sky.
    They came from their white village on the horizon
    for tomatoes in June. And later for grapes.
    Now they are plowing in the cold wind. Yesterday
    I burned my papers by the wall. This morning I look
    back at the lone, shuttered farmhouse. Sun rising
    over the volcano. At the full moon above the sea.
DIVORCE
    Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
    Rushed through the dark house.
    Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
    out at the bright moonlight on concrete.
REMEMBERING MY WIFE
    I see them in black and white as they wait,
    severely happy, in the sunlight of Thermopylae.
    As Iseult and Beatrice are always black and white.
    I imagine Helen in light, not hue. In my dreams,
    Nausicaä is blanched colorless by noon.
    And Botticelli’s Simonetta comes as faint tints of air.
    Cleopatra is in color almost to the end.
    Like Linda’s blondeness dyed by flowers and the sea.
    I loved that wash of color, but remember her
    mostly black and white. Mark Antony listening
    to Hercules abandoning him listened in the dark.
    In that finer time of day. In the essence, not the mode.
PEWTER
    Thrushes flying under the lake. Nightingales singing underground.
    Yes, my King. Paris hungry and leisurely just after the war. Yes.
    America falling into history. Yes. Those silent winter afternoons
    along the Seine when I was always alone. Yes, my King. Rain
    everywhere in the forests of Pennsylvania as the king’s coach
    lumbered and was caught and all stood gathered close
    while the black trees went on and on. Ah, my King,
    it was the sweet time of our lives: the rain shining on their faces,
    the loud sound of rain around. Like the nights we waited,
    knowing she was probably warm and moaning under someone else.
    That cold mansard looked out over the huge hospital of the poor
    and far down on Paris, gray and beautiful under the February rain.
    Between that and this. That yes and this yes. Between, my King,
    that forgotten girl, forgotten pain, and the consequence.
    Those lovely, long-ago night bells that I did not notice grow
    more and more apparent in me. Like pewter expanding as it cools.
    Yes, like a king halted in the great forest of Pennsylvania.
    Like me singing these prison songs to praise the gray,
    to praise her, to tell of me, yes, and of you, my King.
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT
    He struggles to get the marble terrace clear
    in his dreams. Broad steps going down.
    A balustrade cut into the bright moonlight.
    Love is pouring out and he is crying.
    All the romantic equipment. But it is not that.
    He looks down on the gray night in the black pool.
    Sculpture glimmers in the weeds around it.
    Why is the small-headed Artemis so moving,
    and the Virtues with their pretty breasts?
    He is not foolish. He knows better.
    The scuffing of his shoes on the stairs is loud.
    What is he searching for among the banal statues?
    When he touches the chapped plinths, his spirit twangs.
    Derision protects him less and less. He