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Their Lonely Betters. Shorts. Uncle Henry. Adolescence. Are You There?
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Their Lonely Betters
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.
Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
Shorts
Pick a quarrel, go to war,
Leave the hero in the bar;
Hunt the lion, climb the peak:
No one guesses you are weak.
The friends of the born nurse
Are always getting worse.
I'm beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations:
They are not deep,
And they are not cheap.
I'm for freedom because I mistrust the Censor in office,
But if I held the job, my! how severe I should be!
When he is well
She gives him hell;
But she's a brick
When he is sick.
Those who will not reason
Perish in the act;
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.
Let us honor if we can
The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
Private faces
In public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces
In private places.
The conversation of birds
Say very little,
But mean a great deal.
Among the mammals
Only Man has ears
That can display no emotion.
In moments of joy
All of us wish we possessed
A tail we could wag.
The shame in ageing
is not that Desire should fail
(Who mourns for something
he no longer needs? ): it is
That someone else must be told.
The tyrant's device:
Whatever is Posiible
Is Necessary.
Passing Beauty
still delights him,
but he no longer
has to turn round.
Does God ever judge us
by appearances?
I suspect that He does.
Today two poems begged to be written: I had to refuse them.
Sorry, no longer, my dear! Sorry, my precious, not yet!
Only look in the mirror to detect a removable blamish,
As of the permanent ones already you know quite enough.
God never makes knots,
But is expert, if asked to,
At untying them.
A poet's hope: to be,
Like some valley cheese,
Local, but prized elsewhere.
WORDS
A sentence uttered makes a world appear
Where all things happen as it says they do;
We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:
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Words have no word for words that are not true.
Syntactically, though, it must be clear;
One cannot change the subject half-way through,
Nor alter tenses to appease the ear:
Arcadian tales are hard-luck stories too.
But should we want to gossip all the time,
Were fact not fiction for us at its best,
Or find a charm in syllables that rhyme,
Were not our fate by verbal chance expressed,
As rustics in a ring-dance pantomime
The Knight at some lone cross-roads of his quest?
Uncle Henry
When the Flyin’ Scot [260]
fills for shootin’, I go southward,
wisin’ after coffee, leavin’
Lady Starkie.
Weady for some fun,
visit yearly Wome, Damascus,
in Mowocco look for fwesh a —
— musin’ places.
Where I’ll find a fwend,
don’t you know, a charmin’ creature,
like a Gweek God and devoted:
how delicious!
All they have they bwing,
Abdul, Nino, Manfwed, Kosta:
here’s to women for they bear such
lovely kiddies!
Adolescence
" He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. "
(King James Bible, Psalms 23: 2) [261]
By landscape reminded once of his mother's figure
The mountain heights he remembers get bigger and bigger
With the finest of mapping pens he fondly traces
All the family names on the familiar places.
In a green pasture straying, he walks by still waters;
Surely a swan he seems to earth's unwise daughters,
Bending a beautiful head, worshipping not lying,
'Dear' the dear beak in the dear concha crying.
Under the trees the summer bands were playing;
'Dear boy, be brave as these roots', he heard them saying:
Carries the good news gladly to a world in danger,
Is ready to argue, he smiles, with any stranger.
And yet this prophet, homing the day is ended,
Receives odd welcome from the country he so defended:
The band roars 'Coward, Coward', in his human fever,
The giantess shuffles near, cries 'Deceiver'.
Are You There?
Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:
Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.
Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.
The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.
The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.
Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
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