A flower watered
in the falling falling rain
and unspeakingly
the moon in her watchtower
looks on while I do not sleep
————
The lamp on the street
though midnight stars are rising
pales beside your light
————
The man in the moon
rattles his tin can aloft
dropping stars to earth
but for all his estrangement
he is not as far as you
Our own private worries loom large, but getting lost in them is a dangerous thing. We suffer, then know pain; but oughtn’t we to keep this knowledge and use it for compassion’s sake?
I salute the farsighted folks!
————
hello little sunshine
dab in mirror take a bow
what are the birdies doing today?
a fine little ditty
curled-up hair smile now
ask all the lovelies what do you wear
on a day like today?
lightning bulbs flashing how
they’re making stars in the room tonight
so bright they burst
so bright they boom
they’re making tea-shapes in your gloom
I see the light
I see the light
is blinding you!
————
In the hall of the mountain king
A lad walks dazed and idling
Woebegone, he twists his ring
He’s lost his true-love girl
Without the rain is pouring down
The streets are flooded straight to town
The jester’s shoes are turning brown
He’s lost his true-love girl
The lad can wander scarcely more
The winds are rapping at the door
A heart is broken evermore
He’s lost his true-love girl
A beggar-woman steps inside
She shakes the rain from hair and hide
Asks a penny, canst thou bide?
He’s lost his true-love girl
The lad, distrait, spares not a cent
His mind upon his sorrows bent
His heart by self-despairing rent
He’s lost his true-love girl
The beggar-woman pleads again
Divert the lad from selfish pain!
But still she supplicates in vain
He’s lost his true-love girl
At this she sheds her beggar’s cloak
Beyond the door an ancient oak
Bends from wind and look! the bloke
He’s found his true-love girl
But, soft, the maid is looking low
“I rather thought that thou wouldst know
To aid a girl in sorry show”
Thus speaks his true-love girl
“Thou lost thyself in inward life
Cared not a whit for others’ strife
The selfish pangs are like a knife”
Plunged in his true-love girl
His true-love girl turns on the spot
Fast as a finger pokes a pot
That’s spilling liquid, boiling hot
The lad, I think he knows his lot
He’s lost his true-love girl
There is a small back-pocket field in the south of France where people come each fortnight. The people are of every cut of cloth, girls in petticoats, men in blue jackets, young and middling and ancient ones, the last as blind as bats. They are jaunty and humble and demure and wide-eyed, and if you emptied their pockets, you would collect on the whole one hundred francs, twenty-four centimes, a broken hair pin, two cat-eye marbles, a piece of thread, and very much lint. They are not more than fifteen in number, though occasionally they are less, for presently a bad cough is going around and the elder ones aren’t much for getting out, sturdy beds and hot air too strong of a temptation for their brittle bones.
I walked into the restaurant at a quarter-past eleven and found the dining room scarcely halfway full. There was a little placard stuck up on the wall, oily-looking, that told me, please seat yourself, and I did as it told. I quickly espied my dining companion one booth from the corner – the corner nearest the front window, hung with an oversized mirror, silver-plated and undoubtedly a garage sale centerpiece in its time – and she, my companion, was looking quite unruffled in a black bucket hat and black wooly scarf.
I tipped my head in greeting and gave a small smile, very naturally, before sliding opposite her into the booth. She was smiling pleasantly, though I’d have bet she was wearing precisely the same expression a minute, or sixteen minutes, prior, alone with her newspaper in the little booth; and now she was giving me a look through a pair of huge black owl eyes rimmed in wire-frame glasses, and the look was so purely luminous that it took a sudden coughing fit on my part to pull my gaze away.
The goodness of ole Mr. Wordsmith,
He fashioned a star in the evening –
I smiled like a loon by the window
And read as the ghosters went leaving;
How lovely the star gone a-blinking!
My life when no sleep came abed:
I’d elsewise leave off in a-dreaming
To marry the prince in my head.
Seymour goes out walking
The yawnder time of day
To peer at boats a-docking
Inside the Starboard Bay;
Clicks the little bottoms
Of his shiny sailing shoes,
All waxed with Mrs. Tottem’s
Super Waxing Booze
(He spares a nickel everytime
He passes by the store –
The men in faded trousers
Love him all the more);
When in the buoyish blueish sky
A robin meets a lark
And Seymour spies them in their flight,
Commencing to remark:
A lovely sort of sight (says he),
Those birds who strain together –
One the alto, one the treble,
Two born of single feather!
Then bursting from the distance,
A ship horn sounds its blow:
All hands on deck – Metonymy!
(Old Seymour lets them know);
The men pull out, the sails float on,
The salt is in the air;
Please, Seymour, dear! don’t stray too far –
The fish aren’t even there.
Words for a winter’s day.
————
A lonely heart
an empty room
a slumbrous day:
is all too much
for birdlike souls
to hold aloft
and stop the fall,
the breaking in
a hundred parts
is all, is all
I dream of
all the noon.
————
Once upon a time there was a little boy who wore yellow galoshes and a blue rain slicker everyplace he went, in the summer and fall and winter and spring. He was maybe six years old now, but you couldn’t be sure, looking at him, because nowadays all the boys were overgrown or undersized, depending on the lunches their mothers packed and the books their fathers read at night. His hair was the color of straw and a little shaggy all around, and his bangs fell in front of his eyebrows like little dusty blinds.
————
I profess, I am a lousy soul
My mind is short on wit
I had a charge to study hard
But made short work of it.
————
The people in the world are walking in pairs down the street, cooing like doves as they pass the pretty blossoming trees. I am a lonely wretch who sits on the bench by the side of the path and watches them all walk on, singing a set of lonely-heart songs as the minutes and hours pass on.