Houseboat Days: Poems Read Online Free PDF

the figures
    Of this evening seeping from a far and fatal corridor
    Of relaxed vigilance: these colors and this speech only.

Two Deaths
    The lace
    Of spoken breathing fades quite quickly, becomes
    Something it has no part in, the chairs and
    The mugs used by the new young tenants, whose glance
    Is elsewhere. The body rounds out the muted
    Magic, and sighs.
    Unkind to want
    To be here, but the way back is cut off:
    You can only stand and nod, exchange stares, but
    The time of manners is going, the woodpile in the corner
    Of the lot exudes the peace of the forest. Perennially,
    We die and are taken up again. How is it
    With us, we are asked, and the voice
    On the old Edison cylinder tells it: obliquity,
    The condition of straightness of these tutorials,
    Firm when it is held in the hand.
    He goes out.
    The empty parlor is as big as a hill.

Houseboat Days
    “The skin is broken. The hotel breakfast china
    Poking ahead to the last week in August, not really
    Very much at all, found the land where you began …”
    The hills smouldered up blue that day, again
    You walk five feet along the shore, and you duck
    As a common heresy sweeps over. We can botanize
    About this for centuries, and the little dazey
    Blooms again in the cities. The mind
    Is so hospitable, taking in everything
    Like boarders, and you don’t see until
    It’s all over how little there was to learn
    Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated, and the trouvailles
    Of every one of the senses fallen back. Really, he
    Said, that insincerity of reasoning on behalf of one’s
    Sincere convictions, true or false in themselves
    As the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough
    To argue at all with each other, we must be tempted
    At times—do you see where it leads? To pain,
    And the triumph over pain, still hidden
    In these low-lying hills which rob us
    Of all privacy, as though one were always about to meet
    One’s double through the chain of cigar smoke
    And then it … happens, like an explosion in the brain,
    Only it’s a catastrophe on another planet to which
    One has been invited, and as surely cannot refuse:
    Pain in the cistern, in the gutters, and if we merely
    Wait awhile, that denial, as though a universe of pain
    Had been created just so as to deny its own existence.
    But I don’t set much stock in things
    Beyond the weather and the certainties of living and dying:
    The rest is optional. To praise this, blame that,
    Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where
    We must stay, in motion. To flash light
    Into the house within, its many chambers,
    Its memories and associations, upon its inscribed
    And pictured walls, argues enough that life is various.
    Life is beautiful. He who reads that
    As in the window of some distant, speeding train
    Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
    Pinpricks of rain fall again.
    And from across the quite wide median with its
    Little white flowers, a reply is broadcast:
    “Dissolve parliament. Hold new elections.”
    It would be deplorable if the rain also washed away
    This profile at the window that moves, and moves on,
    Knowing that it moves, and knows nothing else. It is the light
    At the end of the tunnel as it might be seen
    By him looking out somberly at the shower,
    The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from,
    Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete
    You can’t have. So, winding past certain pillars
    Until you get to evening’s malachite one, it becomes a vast dream
    Of having that can topple governments, level towns and cities
    With the pressure of sleep building up behind it.
    The surge creates its own edge
    And you must proceed this way: mornings of assent,
    Indifferent noons leading to the ripple of the question
    Of late afternoon projected into evening.
    Arabesques and runnels are the result
    Over the public address system, on the seismograph at Berkeley.
    A little simple arithmetic tells you that to be with you
    In this passage, this movement, is what the instance