A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books by Robert Frost
Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain In Dalton that would someday make his fortune. There’d been some Boston people out to see it: And experts said that deep down in the mountain The mica sheets were big as plate-glass windows. He’d like to take me there and show it to me. “I’ll tell you […]
A Dream Pang by Robert Frost
I had withdrawn in forest, and my song Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway; And to the forest edge you came one day (This was my dream) and looked and pondered long, But did not enter, though the wish was strong: you shook your pensive head as who should say, ‘I dare not–to […]
A Cliff Dwelling by Robert Frost
There sandy seems the golden sky And golden seems the sandy plain. No habitation meets the eye Unless in the horizon rim, Some halfway up the limestone wall, That spot of black is not a stain Or shadow, but a cavern hole, Where someone used to climb and crawl To rest from his besetting fears. […]
A Brook in the City by Robert Frost
The firm house lingers, though averse to square With the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook? I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength And impulse, having dipped a finger length And made it leap my […]
A Boundless Moment by Robert Frost
He halted in the wind, and–what was that Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost? He stood there bringing March against his thought, And yet too ready to believe the most. ‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,’ I said; And truly it was fair enough for flowers had we but in us to assume in […]
Zero by Robert Creeley
Zero by Robert Creeley for Mark Peters Not just nothing, Not there’s no answer, Not it’s nowhere or Nothing to show for it – It’s like There’s no past like the present. It’s all over with us. There are no doors… Oh my god! Like I wish I had a dog. Oh my god! I […]
Water Music by Robert Creeley
Water Music by Robert Creeley The words are a beautiful music. The words bounce like in water. Water music, loud in the clearing off the boats, birds, leaves. They look for a place to sit and eat– no meaning, no point. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems […]
The Way by Robert Creeley
The Way by Robert Creeley My love’s manners in bed are not to be discussed by me, as mine by her I would not credit comment upon gracefully. Yet I ride by the margin of that lake in the wood, the castle, and the excitement of strongholds; and have a small boy’s notion of doing […]
The Warning by Robert Creeley
The Warning by Robert Creeley For love-I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry […]
The Rain by Robert Creeley
The Rain by Robert Creeley All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quite, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not […]
The Mirror by Robert Creeley
The Mirror by Robert Creeley Seeing is believing. Whatever was thought or said, these persistent, inexorable deaths make faith as such absent, our humanness a question, a disgust for what we are. Whatever the hope, here it is lost. Because we coveted our difference, here is the cost. ————— The End And that’s the End […]
The Innocence by Robert Creeley
The Innocence by Robert Creeley Looking to the sea, it is a line of unbroken mountains. It is the sky. It is the ground. There we live it, on it. It is a mist now tangent to another quiet. Here the leaves come, there is the rock in evidence or evidence. What I come to […]
The Conspiracy by Robert Creeley
The Conspiracy by Robert Creeley You send me your poems, I’ll send you mine. Things tend to awaken even through random communication Let us suddenly proclaim spring. And jeer at the others, all the others. I will send a picture too if you will send me one of you. ————— The End And that’s the […]
The Carnival by Robert Creeley
The Carnival by Robert Creeley Whereas the man who hits the gong dis- proves it, in all its simplicity — Even so the attempt makes for triumph, in another man. Likewise in love I am not foolish or in- competent. My method is not a tenderness, but hope defined. ————— The End And that’s the […]
Song by Robert Creeley
Song by Robert Creeley What I took in my hand grew in weight. You must understand it was not obscene. Night comes. We sleep. Then if you know what say it. Don’t pretend. Guises are what enemies wear. You and I live in a prayer. Helpless. Helpless, should I speak. Would you. What do you […]
Something by Robert Creeley
Something by Robert Creeley I approach with such a careful tremor, always I feel the finally foolish question of how it is, then, supposed to be felt, and by whom. I remember once in a rented room on 27th street, the woman I loved then, literally, after we had made love on the large bed […]
Other by Robert Creeley
Other by Robert Creeley Having begun in thought there in that factual embodied wonder what was lost in the emptied lovers patience and mind I first felt there wondered again and again what for myself so meager and finally singular despite all issued therefrom whether sister or mother or brother and father come to love’s […]
Myself by Robert Creeley
Myself by Robert Creeley What, younger, felt was possible, now knows is not; but still not chanted enough – Walked by the sea, unchanged in memory – evening, as clouds on the far-off rim of water float, pictures of time, smoke, faintness – still the dream. I want, if older, still to know why, human, […]
Love by Robert Creeley
Love by Robert Creeley The thing comes of itself (Look up to see the cat & the squirrel, the one torn, a red thing, & the other somehow immaculate ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world […]
Kore by Robert Creeley
Kore by Robert Creeley As I was walking I came upon chance walking the same road upon. As I sat down by chance to move later if and as I might, light the wood was, light and green, and what I saw before I had not seen. It was a lady accompanied by goat men […]
I Know A Man by Robert Creeley
I Know A Man by Robert Creeley As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,–John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look […]
Goodbye by Robert Creeley
Goodbye by Robert Creeley She stood at the window. There was a sound, a light. She stood at the window. A face. Was it that she was looking for, he thought. Was it that she was looking for. He said, turn from it, turn from it. The pain is not unpainful. Turn from it. The […]
Four Days In Vermont by Robert Creeley
Four Days In Vermont by Robert Creeley Window’s tree trunk’s predominant face a single eye-leveled hole where limb’s torn off another larger contorts to swell growing in around imploding wound beside a clutch of thin twigs hold to one two three four five six dry twisted yellowish brown leaves flat against the other gray trees […]
Clemente’s Images by Robert Creeley
Clemente’s Images by Robert Creeley 1) Sleeping birds, lead me, soft birds, be me inside this black room, back of the white moon. In the dark night sight frightens me. 2) Who is it nuzzles there with furred, round headed stare? Who, perched on the skin, body’s float, is holding on? What other one stares […]
Ballad Of The Despairing Husband by Robert Creeley
Ballad Of The Despairing Husband by Robert Creeley My wife and I lived all alone, contention was our only bone. I fought with her, she fought with me, and things went on right merrily. But now I live here by myself with hardly a damn thing on the shelf, and pass my days with little […]
America by Robert Creeley
America by Robert Creeley America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here, you said and […]
Age by Robert Creeley
Age by Robert Creeley Most explicit– the sense of trap as a narrowing cone one’s got stuck into and any movement forward simply wedges once more– but where or quite when, even with whom, since now there is no one quite with you–Quite? Quiet? English expression: Quait? Language of singular impedance? A dance? An involuntary […]
A Wicker Basket by Robert Creeley
A Wicker Basket by Robert Creeley Comes the time when it’s later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill, and very soon after rings out the sound of lively laughter– Picking up change, hands like a walrus, and a face like a barndoor’s, and a head without any apparent size, nothing but two […]
A Token by Robert Creeley
A Token by Robert Creeley My lady fair with soft arms, what can I say to you-words, words as if all worlds were there. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry. Poetry Monster — the […]
A Song by Robert Creeley
A Song by Robert Creeley I had wanted a quiet testament and I had wanted, among other things, a song. That was to be of a like monotony. (A grace Simply. Very very quiet. A murmur of some lost thrush, though I have never seen one. Which was you then. Sitting and so, at peace, […]
The Unborn by Sharon Olds
The Unborn by Sharon Olds Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads, Like gnats around a streetlight in summer, The children we could have, The glimmer of them. Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing In some antechamber; servants, half- Listening for the bell. Sometimes I see them lying like love letters In the Dead […]
The Space Heater by Sharon Olds
The Space Heater by Sharon Olds On the then-below-zero day, it was on, near the patients’ chair, the old heater kept by the analyst’s couch, at the end, like the infant’s headstone that was added near the foot of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the almost laughing satire of a fire’s heat, […]
The Sash by Sharon Olds
The Sash by Sharon Olds The first ones were attached to my dress at the waist, one on either side, right at the point where hands could clasp you and pick you up, as if you were a hot squeeze bottle of tree syrup, and the sashes that emerged like axil buds from the angles […]
The Pact by Sharon Olds
The Pact by Sharon Olds We played dolls in that house where Father staggered with the Thanksgiving knife, where Mother wept at noon into her one ounce of cottage cheese, praying for the strength not to kill herself. We kneeled over the rubber bodies, gave them baths carefully, scrubbed their little orange hands, wrapped them […]
The Mortal One by Sharon Olds
The Mortal One by Sharon Olds Three months after he lies dead, that long yellow narrow body, not like Christ but like one of his saints, the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs, the ones who died of nettles, bile, the one who died roasted […]
The End by Sharon Olds
The End by Sharon Olds We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and […]
The Daughter Goes To Camp by Sharon Olds
The Daughter Goes To Camp by Sharon Olds In the taxi alone, home from the airport, I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept creeping over the smooth plastic to find your strong meaty little hand and squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the noble ribbing of the corduroy, straight and regular […]
The Clasp by Sharon Olds
The Clasp by Sharon Olds She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds, we had been in the apartment two weeks straight, I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his face, again, and when I had her wrist in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a […]
The Borders by Sharon Olds
The Borders by Sharon Olds To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay […]
The Arrivals by Sharon Olds
The Arrivals by Sharon Olds I pull the bed slowly open, I open the lips of the bed, get the stack of fresh underpants out of the suitcase—peach, white, cherry, quince, pussy willow, I choose a color and put them on, I travel with the stack for the stack’s caress, dry and soft. I enter […]