The Buried Train by Robert Bly
The Buried Train by Robert Bly Tell me about the train that people say got buried By the avalanche–was it snow?–It was In Colorado, and no one saw it happen. There was smoke from the engine curling up Lightly through fir tops, and the engine sounds. There were all those people reading–some From Thoreau, some […]
The Defunct Drugstore by Robert Lloyd Jaffe
The Defunct Drugstore by Robert Lloyd Jaffe The electric meters have been pulled off the walls and ivy is blocking the door with the goodbye note and thanks for letting us serve you. Don’t the townspeople still have birthdays, and weddings, funerals and get well soon? And what about the drugs? Where do the people […]
The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass
They are walking in the woods along the coast and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest […]
Snowbanks North of the House by Robert Bly
Snowbanks North of the House by Robert Bly Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house … Thoughts that go so far. The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books; the son stops calling home. The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more […]
Sleep Spaces by Robert Desnos
Sleep Spaces by Robert Desnos In the night there are of course the seven wonders of the world and the greatness tragedy and enchantment. Forests collide with legendary creatures hiding in thickets. There is you. In the night there are the walker’s footsteps the murderer’s the town policeman’s light from the street lamp and the […]
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow by Robert Duncan
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow by Robert Duncan as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein […]
No, Love Is Not Dead by Robert Desnos
No, Love Is Not Dead by Robert Desnos No, love is not dead in this heart these eyes and this mouth that announced the start of its own funeral. Listen, I’ve had enough of the picturesque, the colorful and the charming. I love love, its tenderness and cruelty. My love has only one name, one […]
Need by Robert Lloyd Jaffe
Need by Robert Lloyd Jaffe I love them, one and three and often, in happy moments wish time would let us be Have walked through an ancient cemetery them clinging to my legs and arm leaning on me, heavily And handed over my umbrella standing there, wet and hungry with a smile wondering where I […]
My Mother Would Be a Falconress by Robert Duncan
My Mother Would Be a Falconress by Robert Duncan My mother would be a falconress, And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize, where I dream in my little hood with many bells jangling when I’d turn myMy mother […]
Misery And Splendor by Robert Hass
Summoned by conscious recollection, she would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking, before or after dinner. But they are in this other room, The window has many small panes, and they are on a couch embracing. He holds her as tightly as he can, she buries herself in his body. Morning, maybe […]
Lying Down by Robert Desnos
Lying Down by Robert Desnos To the right, the sky, to the left, the sea. And before your eyes, the grass and its flowers. A cloud, the road, follows its vertical way Parallel to the plumb line of the horizon, Parallel to the rider. The horse races towards its imminent fall And the other climbs […]
Long Long Ago by Robert Desnos
Long Long Ago by Robert Desnos Long long ago I went through the castle of leaves Yellowing slowly in the moss And far away barnacles clung desperately to rocks in the sea Your memory better still your tender presence was there too Transparent and mine Nothing had changed but everything had aged at the same […]
Iowa City: Early April by Robert Hass
This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves. And last night the sapphire of the raccoon’s eyes in the beam of the flashlight. He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal Simmered in […]
Interrupted Meditation by Robert Hass
Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside. And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold, thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber like—ah, now we come to it. We were not put on earth, the old man said, he was hacking into the crust […]
If You Only Knew by Robert Desnos
If You Only Knew by Robert Desnos Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth, Far from me but here all the same without your knowing, Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly. Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, […]
Identity of Images by Robert Desnos
Identity of Images by Robert Desnos I am fighting furiously with animals and bottles In a short time perhaps ten hours have passed one after another The beautiful swimmer who was afraid of coral wakes this morning Coral crowned with holly knocks on her door Ah! coal again always coal I conjure you coal tutelary […]
I Have Dreamed of You so Much by Robert Desnos
I Have Dreamed of You so Much by Robert Desnos I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real. Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again? I have dreamed of you so much that my […]
Heroic Simile by Robert Hass
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with […]
Fairy Tale by Robert Desnos
Fairy Tale by Robert Desnos Many times upon a time There was a man who loved a woman. Many times upon a time There was a woman who loved a man. Many times upon a time There was a man and there was a woman Who did not love the ones who loved them. Once […]
Dove in the Arch by Robert Desnos
Dove in the Arch by Robert Desnos Cursed! be the father of the bride of the blacksmith who forged the iron for the axe with which the woodsman hacked down the oak from which the bed was carved in which was conceived the great-grandfather of the man who was driving the carriage in which your […]
Dancing by Robert Hass
The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America, Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not A man who kills fifty people in five minutes With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists Are mentally ill. […]
Children Are Like Water by Robert Lloyd Jaffe
Children Are Like Water by Robert Lloyd Jaffe Children are like water water that fights the drain but won’t be contained. Children fight sleep and fight the wake-up and, like water, fight the drain and won’t be contained. Like a rambunctious Moon who fights its wax, and fights its wane. ————— The End And that’s […]
Cascade by Robert Desnos
Cascade by Robert Desnos What sort of arrow split the sky and this rock? It’s quivering, spreading like a peacock’s fan Like the mist around the shaft and knot less feathers Of a comet come to nest at midnight. How blood surges from the gaping wound, Lips already silencing murmur and cry. One solemn finger […]
Between The Wars by Robert Hass
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. […]
What We Leave Behind by Robert Saltzman
STELLA!! He screamed this Brando guy…. in a Street Car Named Desire, Mr. Dean he died in a crash… of twisted metal and fire. We had John Wayne…Superman they were our heroes of the day, when we were 18 we knew it all…. we were going to do it our way. We grew, we learned, […]
Water by Robert Lowell
Water by Robert Lowell It was a Maine lobster town— each morning boatloads of hands pushed off for granite quarries on the islands, and left dozens of bleak white frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock, and below us, the sea lapped the raw little match-stick mazes of a weir, where […]
Waking in the Blue by Robert Lowell
Waking in the Blue by Robert Lowell The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My hearts grows tense as though a harpoon […]
The Wound by Robert McNamara
In this blue prolific light you squint to see a child sitting by the stream, his shirt splayed beside him in the grass. A bamboo pole catches the brown curve of his shoulder and the green-laden tree. This isolation pains you: it is a pleasant afternoon. And this dove, like the soul sprung from the […]
The Withdrawal by Robert Lowell
The Withdrawal by Robert Lowell 1 Only today and just for this minute, when the sunslant finds its true angle, you can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle our gentle, fluffy tree— suddenly the green summer is momentary… Autumn is my favorite season— why does it change clothes and withdraw? This week the house went […]
The Ruins Of Time by Robert Lowell
The Ruins Of Time by Robert Lowell (Quevedo, Mire los muros de la partia mia and Buscas en Roma a Roma, (!)O peregrino!) I I saw the musty shingles of my house, raw wood and fixed once, now a wash of moss eroded by the ruin of age furning all fair and green things into […]
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket by Robert Lowell
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket by Robert Lowell (For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea) Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket– The […]
The Drunken Fisherman by Robert Lowell
The Drunken Fisherman by Robert Lowell Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar […]
Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell For Elizabeth Bishop Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up […]
Promise Me Rain Retold by Roberto Cocina
As you walked me back to my truck, I kept glancing at your face with my eyes. Saw a smile spread across those lips, the same ones that I had the pleasure to kiss. In the movie theater on our first date, the perfect one I’ve had in quite a long while. You grabbed my […]
San Francisco Night Windows by Robert Penn Warren
San Francisco Night Windows by Robert Penn Warren So hangs the hour like fruit fullblown and sweet, Our strict and desperate avatar, Despite that antique westward gulls lament Over enormous waters which retreat Weary unto the white and sensual star. Accept these images for what they are– Out of the past a fragile element Of […]
True Love by Robert Penn Warren
True Love by Robert Penn Warren In silence the heart raves.It utters words Meaningless, that never had A meaning.I was ten, skinny, red-headed, Freckled.In a big black Buick, Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat In front of the drugstore, sipping something Through a straw. There is nothing like Beauty. It […]
Tell Me a Story by Robert Penn Warren
Tell Me a Story by Robert Penn Warren Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard The great geese hoot northward. I could not see them, there being no moon And the stars sparse.I heard them. I did not know what was happening in my heart. […]
Mortal Limit by Robert Penn Warren
Mortal Limit by Robert Penn Warren I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming. It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming Of dream-spectral light above the lazy purity of snow-snags. There–west–were the Tetons.Snow-peaks would soon be In dark profile to break constellations.Beyond what height […]
Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren
Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak’s black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes. His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is […]
A Way to Love God by Robert Penn Warren
A Way to Love God by Robert Penn Warren Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true. And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know About submarine geography, and your father’s death rattle Provides all […]