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 […]
History by Robert Lowell
History by Robert Lowell History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had– it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his […]
Dolphin by Robert Lowell
Dolphin by Robert Lowell My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Ph?dre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing […]
Now That You’re Gone by Roberto Cocina
I found myself laying in our bed once again with tears streaming from my eyes. Since here I am crying over you because my heart can’t accept your death. I watched you died in my arms after receiving a gunshot wound to the chest. I watched you bleed in my arms, all life within you […]
My World Destroyed by Roberto Cocina
And I feel my world spiraling out of control once again like before. Mood keeps getting lower and my thoughts keep running into each other. Crashing and breaking into pieces that can’t be put back together. Nerves keep on pounding in my head while the shiny bottle cracked. Could feel all of my emotions slowly […]
My Heart Screams by Roberto Cocina
Here I am once again laying on my bed staring at the ceiling fan. Watching the blades rotate around and around, going faster and faster. Air blowing down on me, drying the tears that escaped my eyes once again. Holding my broken heart in my hands feeling the blood trickle from my palms. Mind running […]
My Beach by Robert Saltzman
Grains of sand on a pristine beach. I gaze in awe at the turquoise Gulf. Ospreys circle, seeking morning prey; Sandpipers scurry to shun the eddy. Sunlight rides the rainbows, edge. Across the horizon, waters remain steady. My day has started. Breaths of sea air To bask in this warmth be my only pledge. Lost […]
Mortal Words by Robert McNamara
A day so crisp it snaps underfoot – dropped wrappings, twigs and leaves – even the shadows of stripped trees on wet pavement, the wafer of sky broken over what shines and gleams – bicycle spokes, the green- grocer pedaling to market, boys clustered around a ball, houses where life goes on in its not […]
Memories of West Street and Lepke by Robert Lowell
Memories of West Street and Lepke by Robert Lowell Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is […]
Man And Wife by Robert Lowell
Man And Wife by Robert Lowell Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian. At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white. […]
Identification In Belfast by Robert Lowell
Identification In Belfast by Robert Lowell (I.R.A. Bombing) The British Army now carries two rifles, one with rubber rabbit-pellets for children, the other’s of course for the Provisionals…. ‘When they first showed me the boy, I thought oh good, it’s not him because he’s blonde— I imagine his hair was singed dark by the bomb. […]
Homecoming by Robert Lowell
Homecoming by Robert Lowell What was is . . . since 1930; the boys in my old gang are senior partners. They start up bald like baby birds to embrace retirement. At the altar of surrender, I met you in the hour of credulity. How your misfortune came out clearly to us at twenty. At […]
Home After Three Months Away by Robert Lowell
Home After Three Months Away by Robert Lowell Gone now the baby’s nurse, a lioness who ruled the roost and made the Mother cry. She used to tie gobbets of porkrind to bowknots of gauze— three months they hung like soggy toast on our eight foot magnolia tree, and helped the English sparrows weather a […]
High School Crush by Roberto Cocina
Sometimes I feel like I tricked myself into believing that I’m in love with you. Since you kept appearing in all of my dreams and you kept making my heart beat. You melted away all the sadness I kept hidden inside with your presence around me. And you brought a smile to my face that […]
Greengrocer by Robert McNamara
–at the Campo dei Fiori Six days a week she’s at her stall of prodigal greens, rust-flecked leaves falling around her, the little mouse tails of string beans clipped, the stem ends trimmed like nails. From her hands everything green and less than good spills at her feet. Even what she’ll keep falls first into […]
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.” The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand […]
Fake Identity by Roberto Cocina
For my heart to be sane, All I really need is you. Kill the depression please, Embrace me in your arms. I need you to be near me, Don’t be far from me. Even when I’m down, Never stop trying To cheer me up. In all the sadness that consumes me, Think about that one […]
Epilogue by Robert Lowell
Epilogue by Robert Lowell Those bless?d structures, plot and rhyme– why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare […]