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Old summer days now gone to flies
Bestir themselves alert in vixen eyes;
Some primal cause
Twitches the old man’s human-seeming paws.
An ancient sharp surmise is melded here
And shapes all Dooms
Which look on Death and know it.
Darwin all this knows.
The fox knows he knows.
But knowing is wise not to show it.
They stand a moment more upon the uncut lawn.
Then as if by sign, quit watchfulness;
Each imitates the other’s careless yawn.
And with no wave save pluming tail of fox and kin
Away the creatures go to sleep the day,
Leaving old Charlie there in curious disarray,
His hair combed this, his wits the other way.
So off he ambles, walks, and wanders on,
Leaving an empty meadow,
A place
Where strange lives passed …
And dawn.
Evidence (#ulink_96f22f71-54d7-539d-a263-deaa7a3b7563)
Basking in sun,
Age 37, mid-Atlantic, on a ship,
And the ship sailing west,
Quite suddenly I saw it there
Upon my chest, the single one,
The lonely hair.
The ship was sailing into night.
The hair was white …
The sun had set beyond the sky;
The ship was sailing west,
And suddenly, O God, why, yes,
I felt, I knew …
So was I.
Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are (#ulink_f36187ad-7bfe-58e6-a132-2ced52826430)
Even before you opened your eyes
You knew it would be one of those days.
Tell the sky what color it must be,
And it was indeed.
Tell the sun how to crochet its way,
Pick and choose among leaves
To lay out carpetings of bright and dark
On the fresh lawn,
And pick and choose it did.
The bees have been up earliest of all;
They have already come and gone
and come and gone again
to the meadow fields
and returned
all golden fuzz upon the air
all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full,
nectar-dripping.
Don’t you hear them pass?
hover?
dance their language?
telling where the sweet gums are,
The syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies,
That make boys squirm with unpronounced juices,
That make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes
Their dolphin selves naked
aflash
on the warm air
Poised forever in one
Eternal
Glass
Wave.
Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep! (#ulink_b1348553-7b46-5db6-a77b-5b5129c7fb11)
What did he call, and what was said?
From the sleep of the dead, from the lone white
Arctic midnight of his soul
What shy albino mole peered forth and gave a cry?
Or was it just the wind asifting through the winter screens
Upon the attic windows
Where the dust looks out at dew on empty lawns?
Or did the dawn mist find a tongue
And issue like his mystic seaport tides
From out his mouth while, all-unknowing, drowned, he slept
And dreamed on … Emily?
O what a shame, that these two wanderers
Of three A.M. did not somehow contrive
To knock each other’s elbows drifting late
On sidewalks-vast inhabited by only leaves
And mice and tracks of silver from lost hieroglyphic snails.
How sad that from a long way off these two
Did not surprise each other’s ghosts,
One sailing lawns, the other ocean storms,
Strike up a conversation out of single simple words,
Alarms repeated and re-echoed, and so make up a life
From halves which separated long before the oceans rolled
Still sought each other, but in different towns.
Un-met and doomed they went their ways
To never greet or make mere summer comment
On her attic mothball or his sea-dog days.
Death would not stop for her,
Yet White graves yawned for him,
Each loved one half of that which, grim, enticed and beckoned,
Yet neither reckoned it as half a life for each;
With sudden reach they might have found
