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though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
There’s not one leaf left to bear witness, with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp, against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind. Only my nose running and my face frozen into a kind of a grin which has nothing to do with the ice and the wind or death and December, but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy, for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.
a hand’s width and two generations away,
When I am sixty-three, when you are ten, and you are neither closer nor as far, your arms will fill with what you know by then, the arithmetic and love we do and are.
The battery cranks, the engine gives 2 or 3 low groans and starts. My God it starts. And unlike my family in the house, the job I’m headed towards, the poems in my briefcase, the dreams I had last night, there is no question about what makes sense.
and when you consider the altitude, the secret parts of the engines, and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . . well, I just think it would be good if one of us maybe stood up and said a few words, or, so as not to involve the police, at least quietly wrote something down.
i know all about what is happening in this city at just this moment, every last grain of dark, i conceive. but what i see now is the 2 little girls flung up flung up, the sun snatch ing them, their mouths rounded in gasps. they are there, they fly up.
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be Good for you, and you will have to learn them In order to become one of the grown-ups
This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play At Jackson Park Middle School 8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947. Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio With scenery from Miss Ferguson’s art class.
You want to think of water A surface with no scars
But about all the unremarkable years that Hallmark doesn’t even make a card for.
Love, whoever you are, your courage was my companion for many cold towns after the betrayal of Ithaca, and when I order coffee in a strange place, still I say, lifting, this is for you.
Sonnet No. 6: Dearest, I never knew such loving
The undertaker Pins a small note on the coffin saying “Wait till I return, I’ve got a date with Love.”
Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre, If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame, If we skip the Champs Elysées And remain here in this sleazy Old hotel room Doing this and that To what and whom Learning who you are, Learning what I am. Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris, The little bit of Paris in our view. There’s that crack across the ceiling And the hotel walls are peeling And I’m in Paris with you.
To A Frustrated Poet R. J. Ellmann