verdancy and its contingent benefits

                 GREEN                                  

               

Some days I walk down the street
where we lived and the fat man
who stole  tomatoes
sits under the same old sycamore
tapping out his angry rhythms
on the knotted roots.  And though
the children are no longer ours,
the oaks are no less generous
to the sidewalks with their shade.
Overhead, sweet air still arrives
through many simple branches—
some reaching skyward for joy,
others downcast for a reason.
We were like good trees
the years we lived on this street.
We were so green.  Fresh as leaves.
And the days whispered through us.

                            Charles Douthat...

i realized that the poem The Hold had been published a few years ago

as i re read it i realized i'd known that poem....

so this is a replacement Charles Douthat poem

.....

o of love let me beg

If You Would Hold Me

It is so very strange that, loving me,

You should ensnare the freedom I find sweet,

Catch in your cunning will my flying feet.

I will not barter love for liberty;

You cannot break and tame me utterly.

For when your careful conquest is complete

Shall victory be swallowed in defeat.

You hold me only when you set me free.

Because my straight, wild ways are in your power

Do not believe that I surrender them.

Untrammeled love is all I have to give.

If you would keep it, do not pluck the flower;

Leave it, I beg, unbroken on its stem,

Wild with the wind and weather! Let it live

Sr Mary Madaleva Wolff  CSC

....

cool nonetheless

Di Brandt

writes

  EARLY SPRING THAW                                           

Today I am made of water, touch my shoulder and I leak,

my belly a lake, my bones an open river flowing toward

sea, all this salt in me, who would have thought,

dissolving into flesh, tears, an open wound, rubbed raw.

The wind of February sweeps the air clean, the sky with

its fugitive clouds, its murky definitions, vaguely white,

soon the clear pale lemon yellow fading into dark rose

and then blue black, the night, with its cold sparkle, its

spectacular consolation.

And me in early spring thaw, gasping for new air,

imagine, in all this snow, melting.

................a mennonite canadian voice

....

domestic decadence

            The House on the Hill

         Edwin Arlington Robinson

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

The winds blow bleak and shrill;

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one today

To speak them good or ill:

There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray

Around that sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

.....

a being self attuned to personal wonder

ABOUT A LITTLE GIRL                            Knowledge defeats its own end approaching the state of heaven when it envisions through the glass delicately adjusted in the sliding tubes         —to prove death inevitable— the red and blue dots of anilene stained blood which shout derisively at our despair But the child walks laughing from room to room of her gentle home She is eleven and her parents love her very much Over her the trees hold their leaves dripping with the rain shining green This afternoon she will ride in the bus to the railroad station There will be a locomotive and cars and people running around— bags to carry—The lake beckons in the distance—                         But she is an angel, already in heaven, the earth is a toy balloon under her feet— with her girlish shoes she pushes it back— it falls away into banality— her wrinkling brown eyes have robbed it of its meaning—                 It is she The Promenader— whom men see and do not discover— Princess Marion eaten by curious wrongs                Dr. William Carlos Williams ////////////////

to ponder sadness deep

                            LAMENTATIONS                

Grief, have I denied thee?
Grief, I have denied thee.

That robe or tunic, black gauze
over black and silver my sister wore
to dance Sorrow, hung so long
in my closet. I never tried it on.
                               And my dance
was Summer—they rouged my cheeks
and twisted roses with wire stems into my hair.
I was complaint, Juno de sept ans,
betraying my autumn birthright pour faire plaisir.
Always denial. Grief in the morning, washed away
in coffee, crumbled to a dozen errands between
busy fingers.
                      Or across cloistral shadow, insistent
intrusion of pink sun stripes from open
archways, falling recurrent.

Corrosion denied, the figures the acid designs
filled in. Grief dismissed,
and Eros along with grief.
Phantasmagoria swept across the sky
by shaky winds endlessly,
the spaces of blue timidly steady—
blue curtains at trailer windows framing
the cinder walks.
There are hidden corners of sky
choked with the swept shreds, with pain and ashes.
                                                            Grief,
have I denied thee? Denied thee. 
The emblems torn from the walls,
and the black plumes.

                       Denise  Levertov

....