Wednesday
by Marvin Bell
Gray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon.
The carp lay on the bottom, resting, while dusk took shape
in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger,
and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upward.
Into this sodden, nourishing afternoon I emerged,
partway toward a paycheck, halfway toward the weekend,
carrying the last mail and holding above still puddles
the books of noble ideas. Through the fervent branches,
carried by momentary breezes of local origin,
the palpable Sublime flickered as motes on broad leaves,
while the Higher Good and the Greater Good contended
as sap on the bark of the maples, and even I
was enabled to witness the truly Existential where it loitered
famously in the shadows as if waiting for the moon.
All this I saw in the late afternoon in the company of no one.
And of course I went back to work the next morning. Like you,
like anyone, like the rumored angels of high office,
like the demon foremen, the bedeviled janitors, like you,
I returned to my job–but now there was a match-head in
my thoughts.
In its light, the morning increasingly flamed through the window
and, lit by nothing but mind-light, I saw that the horizon
was an idea of the eye, gilded from within, and the sun
the fiery consolation of our nighttimes, coming far.
Within this expectant air, which had waited the night indoors,
carried by–who knows?–the rhythmic jarring of brain tissue
by footsteps, by colors visible to closed eyes, by a music
in my head, knowledge gathered that could not last the day,
love and error were shaken as if by the eye of a storm,
and it would not be until quitting that such a man
might drop his arms, that he had held up all day since the dew.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Where My Sight Goes by Yvor Winters
- My Mother by Claude McKay
- Holiday Letter For A Poet Gone To War
- A Big Idea? by Satish Verma
- The Lion by Vachel Lindsay
- Владимир Маяковский – Рабкор (Лбом пробив безграмотья горы)
- Sonnet 72: O, lest the world should task you to recite by William Shakespeare
- My Invisible Valentine by Nin Andrews
- Black Cat by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Rip van Winkle’s dream by Raj Arumugam
- A Little Memory
- Making It Work by Philip Levine
- Parnell by William Butler Yeats
- Ольга Седакова – Кот, бабочка, свеча
- Armless Enemies by Satish Verma
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).