Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

A wink from Hesper, falling
Fast in the wintry sky,
Comes through the even blue,
Dear, like a word from you…
Is it good-bye?

Across the miles between us
I send you sigh for sigh.
Good-Night, sweet friend, good-night:
Till life and all take flight,
Never good-bye.
...

When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone's bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
and started to wash a corner of his stone.
Then a black and amber ant
ran out onto the granite, and off it,
and another ant hauled a dead
ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.
Ants ran down into the grooves of his name

...

The kettle hums before the light arrives,
and someone in the next apartment
turns a dial through static and weather.
Morning enters in a small key —
a half cup of coffee gone cold,
a sparrow arguing with the gutter.

I have started keeping notes
on the smallest hours:
how the stairwell smells of rain at six,

...

As bronze may be much beautified
By lying in the dark damp soil,
So men who fade in dust of warfare fade
Fairer, and sorrow blooms their soul.

Like pearls which noble women wear
And, tarnishing, awhile confide
Unto the old salt sea to feed,
Many return more lustrous than they were.

But what of them buried profound,
Buried where we can no more find.
Who ( )
Lie dark for ever under abysmal war?
...

What simple profundities
What profound simplicities
To sit down among the trees
and breathe with them
in murmur brool and breeze —

And how can I trust them
who pollute the sky
with heavens
the below with hells

...

He was never part of our picture,
just a stranger crossing sunlight,
caught forever mid-stride,
one foot in our family's summer.

Years later we still zoom in,
laughing at the borrowed face,
how randomly memory keeps
what the camera never chose.


...

Squire Adam had two wives, they say,
   Two wives had he, for his delight,
He kissed and clypt them all the day
   And clypt and kissed them all the night.
   Now Eve like ocean foam was white
And Lilith roses dipped in wine,
   But though they were a goodly sight
No lady is so fair as mine.

To Venus some folk tribute pay
   And Queen of Beauty she is hight,
And Sainte Marie the world doth sway
   In cerule napery bedight.
   My wonderment these twain invite,
Their comeliness it is divine,
   And yet I say in their despite,
No lady is so fair as mine.

Dame Helen caused a grievous fray,
   For love of her brave men did fight,
The eyes of her made sages fey
   And put their hearts in woeful plight.
   To her no rhymes will I indite,
For her no garlands will I twine,
   Though she be made of flowers and light
No lady is so fair as mine.

L'Envoi

Prince Eros, Lord of lovely might,

...

Porter Wagoner in a nudie suit
flashes the crowd an embroidered Hi!
He kids around trading jokes with the hee-haw,
then the lights go down and the teardrops start.
The Queens of the Nashville Sound gear up,
nobody’s laughing or chewing now.
Skeeter, frail in a sky blue sheath,
is out of rehab and born again.
Her voice has gone the way of her orchestra.
It’s almost fifty years since the crash

...

Your Journey Into Endless Night

Everything is incomplete
Yet it's not all that you perceive
Everyone is changing daily
There is nothing you can leave
Others look as if they've stopped
Into a place of of rest and peace
You don't know what's in their minds
When they are lying in their beds

...