Wisteria
by Philip Levine
The first purple wisteria
I recall from boyhood hung
on a wire outside the windows
of the breakfast room next door
at the home of Steve Pisaris.
I loved his tall, skinny daughter,
or so I thought, and I would wait
beside the back door, prostrate,
begging to be taken in. Perhaps
it was only the flowers of spring
with their sickening perfumes
that had infected me. When Steve
and Sophie and the three children
packed up and made the move west,
I went on spring after spring,
leaden with desire, half-asleep,
praying to die. Now I know
those prayers were answered.
That boy died, the brick houses
deepened and darkened with rain,
age, use, and finally closed
their eyes and dreamed the sleep
of California. I learned this
only today. Wakened early
in an empty house not lately
battered by storms, I looked
for nothing. On the surface
of the rain barrel, the paled,
shredded blossoms floated.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- The Ballad of the King’s Mercy by Rudyard Kipling
- Blow, Bugle, Blow poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Angels By The Door by William Barnes
- The Flash Reverses Time poem – A. Van Jordan poems
- Sonnet To Mrs. Reynolds’s Cat poem – John Keats poems
- 3 Fun Ways to Stimulate Creative Thinking
- Спиридон Дрожжин – Я для песни задушевной
- Erasing Amyloo by Russell Edson
- To a Locomotive in Winter. by Walt Whitman
- Ocean of Forms by Rabindranath Tagore
- O What Is That Sound by W H Auden
- Calm is all Nature as a Resting Wheel. by William Wordsworth
- The Immortal Part poem – A. E. Housman
- Poems On Man by Rabindranath Tagore
- cascades of emptiness by Steve Troyanovich
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).
Philip Levine ( 1928 – 2015) was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012