Houseboat Days: Poems Read Online Free PDF Page B

costs:
    A sail out of some afternoon, beyond amazement, astonished,
    Apparently not tampered with. As the rain gathers and protects
    Its own darkness, the place in the slipcover is noticed
    For the first and last time, fading like the spine
    Of an adventure novel behind glass, behind the teacups.

Whether It Exists
    All through the fifties and sixties the land tilted
    Toward the bowl of life. Now life
    Has moved in that direction. We taste the conviction
    Minus the rind, the pulp and the seeds. It
    Goes down smoothly.
    At a later date I added color
    And the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember.
    Familiarly, but without tenderness, the sunset pours its
    Dance music on the (again) slanting barrens.
    The problems we were speaking of move up toward them.

The Lament upon the Waters
    For the disciple nothing had changed. The mood was still
    Gray tolerance, as the road marched along
    Singing its little song of despair. Once, a cry
    Started up out of the hills. That old, puzzling persuasion
    Again. Sex was part of this,
    And the shock of day turning into night.
    Though we always found something delicate (too delicate
    For some tastes, perhaps) to touch, to desire.
    And we made much of this sort of materiality
    That clogged the weight of starlight, made it seem
    Fibrous, yet there was a chance in this
    To see the present as it never had existed,
    Clear and shapeless, in an atmosphere like cut glass.
    At Latour-Maubourg you said this was a good thing, and on the steps
    Of Métro Jasmin the couriers nodded to us correctly, and the
    Pact was sealed in the sky. But now moments surround us
    Like a crowd, some inquisitive faces, some hostile ones,
    Some enigmatic or turned away to an anterior form of time
    Given once and for all. The jetstream inscribes a final flourish
    That melts as it stays. The problem isn’t how to proceed
    But is one of being: whether this ever was, and whose
    It shall be. To be starting out, just one step
    Off the sidewalk, and as such pulled back into the glittering
    Snowstorm of stinging tentacles of how that would be worked out
    If we ever work it out. And the voice came back at him
    Across the water, rubbing it the wrong way: “Thou
    Canst but undo the wrong thou hast done.” The sackbuts
    Embellish it, and we are never any closer to the collision
    Of the waters, the peace of light drowning light,
    Grabbing it, holding it up streaming. It is all one. It lies
    All around, its new message, guilt, the admission
    Of guilt, your new act. Time buys
    The receiver, the onlooker of the earlier system, but cannot
    Buy back the rest. It is night that fell
    At the edge of your footsteps as the music stopped.
    And we heard the bells for the first time. It is your chapter, I said.

Drame Bourgeois
    A sudden, acrid smell of roses, and the urchin
    Turns away, tears level in the eyes. Waffled feeling:
    “You’d scarce credit it, mum,” as the starched
    Moment of outline recedes down a corridor, some parts
    Lighter, but the ensemble always darker as the vanishing point
    Is reached and turns itself
    Into an old army blanket, or something flat and material
    As this idea of an old stump in a woods somewhere.
    Then it is true…. It is you, who, that
    Wet evening in March … Madam, say no more,
    Your very lack of information is special to me,
    Your emptying glance, prisms which I treasure up.
    Only let your voice not become this clarion,
    Alarum in the wilderness, calling me back to piety, to sense,
    Else I am undone, for late haze drapes the golf links
    And the gilded spines of these tomes blaze too bright.

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
    You can’t say it that way any more.
    Bothered about beauty you have to
    Come out into the open, into a clearing,
    And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
    Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
    Of you, you who have so many lovers,
    People who look up to you and are willing
    To do things for you, but you think
    It’s not right, that if they really knew