The Giant Book of Poetry (2006)

by William H. Roetzheim

  and free I fare, half-heedless of her fate:

  no faith, no flag I owe—then why not seek

  this last loop-hole of life? Why hesitate?

  I will deny … and yet I do not speak.

  “Deny your God!” their spears are poised on high,

  and tense and terrible they wait the word;

  and dark and darker glooms the dreary sky,

  and in that hush of horror no thing stirred.

  Then, through the ringing terror and sheer hate

  leaped there a vision to me—Oh, how far!

  A face, Her face … through all my stormy fate

  a joy, a strength, a glory and a star.

  Beneath the pines, where lonely camp-fires gleam,

  in seas forlorn, amid the deserts drear,

  how I had gladdened to that face of dream!

  And never, never had it seemed so dear.

  O silken hair that veils the sunny brow!

  O eyes of grey, so tender and so true!

  O lips of smiling sweetness! must I now

  for ever and for ever go from you?

  Ah, yes, I must … for if I do this thing,

  how can I look into your face again?

  Knowing you think me more than half a king,

  I with my craven heart, my honor slain.

  No! no! my mind’s made up. I gaze above,

  into that sky insensate as a stone;

  not for my creed, my country, but my Love

  will I stand up and meet my death alone.

  Then though it be to utter dark I sink,

  the God that dwells in me is not denied;

  “Best” triumphs over “Beast,”—and so I think

  humanity itself is glorified … .

  “And now, my butchers, I embrace my fate.

  Come! let my heart’s blood slake the thirsty sod.

  Curst be the life you offer! Glut your hate!

  Strike! Strike, you dogs! I’ll not deny my God.”

  I saw the spears that seemed a-leap to slay,

  all quiver earthward at the headman’s nod;

  and in a daze of dream I heard him say:

  “Go, set him free who serves so well his God!”

  The Wee Shop1

  She risked her all, they told me, bravely sinking

  the pinched economies of thirty years;

  and there the little shop was, meek and shrinking,

  the sum of all her dreams and hopes and fears.

  Ere it was opened I would see them in it,

  the gray-haired dame, the daughter with her crutch;

  so fond, so happy, hoarding every minute,

  like artists, for the final tender touch.

  The opening day! I’m sure that to their seeming

  was never shop so wonderful as theirs;

  with pyramids of jam-jars rubbed to gleaming;

  such vivid cans of peaches, prunes and pears;

  and chocolate, and biscuits in glass cases,

  and bon-bon bottles, many-hued and bright;

  yet nothing half so radiant as their faces,

  their eyes of hope, excitement and delight.

  I entered: how they waited all a-flutter!

  How awkwardly they weighed my acid-drops!

  And then with all the thanks a tongue could utter

  they bowed me from the kindliest of shops.

  I’m sure that night their customers they numbered;

  discussed them all in happy, breathless speech;

  and though quite worn and weary, ere they slumbered,

  sent heavenward a little prayer for each.

  And so I watched with interest redoubled

  that little shop, spent in it all I had;

  and when I saw it empty I was troubled,

  and when I saw them busy I was glad.

  And when I dared to ask how things were going,

  they told me, with a fine and gallant smile:

  “Not badly … slow at first … There’s never knowing …

  ‘Twill surely pick up in a little while.”

  I’d often see them through the winter weather,

  behind the shutters by a light’s faint speck,

  poring o’er books, their faces close together,

  the lame girl’s arm around her mother’s neck.

  They dressed their windows not one time but twenty,

  each change more pinched, more desperately neat;

  alas! I wondered if behind that plenty

  the two who owned it had enough to eat.

  Ah, who would dare to sing of tea and coffee?

  The sadness of a stock unsold and dead;

  the petty tragedy of melting toffee,

  the sordid pathos of stale gingerbread.

  Ignoble themes! And yet—those haggard faces!

  Within that little shop … . Oh, here I say

  one does not need to look in lofty places

  for tragic themes, they’re round us every day.

  And so I saw their agony, their fighting,

  their eyes of fear, their heartbreak, their despair;

  and there the little shop is, black and blighting,

  and all the world goes by and does not care.

  They say she sought her old employer’s pity,

  content to take the pittance he would give.

  The lame girl? yes, she’s working in the city;

  she coughs a lot—she hasn’t long to live.

  Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)

  from Idem the Same, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,

  A Very Valentine1

  Very fine is my valentine.

  Very fine and very mine.

  Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.

  Very fine is my valentine and mine,

  very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.

  Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

  Last Answers1

  I wrote a poem on the mist

  and a woman asked me what I meant by it.

  I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,

  how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,

  and change the drab shanties

  with lighted lamps at evening

  into points of mystery quivering with color.

  I answered:

  the whole world was mist once long ago and some day

  it will all go back to mist,

  our skulls and lungs

  are more water than bone and tissue

  and all poets love dust and mist because

  all the last answers

  go running back to dust and mist.

  The Junk Man2

  I am glad God saw Death

  and gave Death a job

  taking care of all who are tired of living:

  when all the wheels in a clock are worn and slow

  and the connections loose

  and the clock goes on ticking

  and telling the wrong time from hour to hour

  and people around the house joke

  about what a bum clock it is,

  how glad the clock is when

  the big Junk Man drives his wagon

  up to the house

  and puts his arms around the clock and says:

  “You don’t belong here,

  you gotta come

  along with me,”

  how glad the clock is then,

  when it feels the arms of the Junk Man

  close around it and carry it away.

  To Know Silence Perfectly1

  There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always.

  If the music dies down there is a silence

  almost the same as the movement of music.

  To know silence perfectly is to know music.

  Vachel Lindsay (1879 – 1931)

  The Horrid Voice of Science2

  “There’s machinery in the butterfly;

  there’s a mainspring to the bee;

  there’s hydraulics
to a daisy,

  and contraptions to a tree.

  If we could see the birdie

  that makes the chirping sound

  with x-ray, scientific eyes,

  we could see the wheels go round.”

  And I hope all men

  who think like this

  will soon lie

  underground.

  Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)

  The Snow Man1

  One must have a mind of winter

  to regard the frost and the boughs

  of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

  and have been cold a long time

  to behold the junipers shagged with ice,

  the spruces rough in the distant glitter

  of the January sun; and not to think

  of any misery in the sound of the wind,

  in the sound of a few leaves,

  which is the sound of the land

  full of the same wind

  that is blowing in the same bare place

  for the listener, who listens in the snow,

  and, nothing himself, beholds

  nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird2

  I

  Among twenty snowy mountains,

  the only moving thing

  was the eye of the blackbird.

  II

  I was of three minds,

  like a tree

  in which there are three blackbirds.

  III

  The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

  It was a small part of the pantomime.

  IV

  A man and a woman

  are one.

  A man and a woman and a blackbird

  are one.

  V

  I do not know which to prefer,

  the beauty of inflections

  or the beauty of innuendoes,

  the blackbird whistling

  or just after.

  VI

  Icicles filled the long window

  with barbaric glass.

  The shadow of the blackbird

  crossed it, to and fro.

  The mood

  traced in the shadow

  an indecipherable cause.

  VII

  O thin men of Haddam,

  why do you imagine golden birds?

  Do you not see how the blackbird

  walks around the feet

  of the women about you?

  VIII

  I know noble accents

  and lucid, inescapable rhythms;

  but I know, too,

  that the blackbird is involved

  in what I know.

  IX

  When the blackbird flew out of sight,

  it marked the edge

  of one of many circles.

  X

  At the sight of blackbirds

  flying in a green light,

  even the bawds of euphony

  would cry out sharply.

  XI

  He rode over Connecticut

  in a glass coach.

  Once, a fear pierced him,

  in that he mistook

  the shadow of his equipage

  for blackbirds.

  XII

  The river is moving.

  The blackbird must be flying.

  XIII

  It was evening all afternoon.

  It was snowing

  and it was going to snow.

  The blackbird sat

  in the cedar-limbs.

  Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1881 – 1968)

  Cubist Portrait1

  She is purposeless as a cyclone; she must move

  either by chance or in a predestined groove,

  following a whim not her own, unable to shape

  her course. From chance or God even she cannot escape!

  Think of a cyclone sitting far-off with its head in its hands, motionless,

  drearily longing for distant lands

  where every lonely hurricane may at last discover

  its own transcendent, implacable, indestructible lover!

  What is a cyclone? Only thin air moving fast

  from here to yonder, to become silent emptiness at last.

  William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)

  Danse Russe2

  If when my wife is sleeping

  and the baby and Kathleen

  are sleeping

  and the sun is a flame-white disc

  in silken mists

  above shining trees,—

  if I in my north room

  dance naked, grotesquely

  before my mirror

  waving my shirt round my head

  and singing softly to myself:

  “I am lonely, lonely,

  I was born to be lonely,

  I am best so!”

  If I admire my arms, my face,

  my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

  against the yellow drawn shades,—

  Who shall say I am not

  the happy genius of my household?

  The Act1

  There were the roses, in the rain.

  Don’t cut them, I pleaded.

  They won’t last, she said.

  But they’re so beautiful

  where they are.

  Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said.

  And cut them and gave them to me

  in my hand.

  The Last Words of My English Grandmother1

  There were some dirty plates

  and a glass of milk

  beside her on a small table

  near the rank, disheveled bed—

  Wrinkled and nearly blind

  she lay and snored

  rousing with anger in her tones

  to cry for food,

  Gimme something to eat—

  they’re starving me—

  I’m all right I won’t go

  to the hospital. No, no, no

  Give me something to eat

  Let me take you

  to the hospital, I said

  and after you are well

  you can do as you please.

  She smiled, Yes

  you do what you please first

  then I can do what I please—

  Oh, oh, oh! she cried

  as the ambulance men lifted

  her to the stretcher—

  Is this what you call

  making me comfortable?

  By now her mind was clear—

  Oh you think you’re smart

  you young people,

  she said, but I’ll tell you

  you don’t know anything.

  Then we started.

  On the way

  we passed a long row

  of elms. She looked at them

  awhile out of

  the ambulance window and said,

  What are all those

  fuzzy-looking things out there?

  Trees? Well, I’m tired

  of them and rolled her head away.

  The Red Wheelbarrow1

  so much depends

  upon

  a red wheel

  barrow

  glazed with rain

  water

  beside the white

  chickens.

  The Three Graces2

  We have the picture of you in mind,

  when you were young, posturing

  (for a photographer) in scarves

  (if you could have done it) but now,

  for none of you is immortal, ninety-three,

  the three, ninety and three,

  Mary, Ellen and Emily, what

  beauty is it clings still about you?

  Undying? Magical? For there is still

  no answer, why we live or why

  you will not live longer than I

  or that there should be an answer why

  any should live and whatever other

  should die. Yet you live. You l
ive

  and all that can be said is that

  you live, time cannot alter it—

  and as I write this Mary has died.

  To Mark Anthony in Heaven1

  This Quiet morning light

  reflected, how many times

  from grass and trees and clouds

  enters my north room

  touching the walls with

  grass and clouds and trees.

  Anthony,

  trees and grass and clouds.

  Why did you follow

  that beloved body

  with your ships at Actium?

  I hope it was because

  you knew her inch by inch

  from slanting feet upward

  to the roots of her hair

  and down again and that

  you saw her

  above the battle’s fury—

  clouds and trees and grass—

  For then you are

  listening in heaven.

  This is Just to Say1

  I have eaten

  the plums

  that were in

  the icebox

  and which

  you were probably

  saving

  for breakfast

  Forgive me

  they were delicious

  so sweet

  and so cold

  Tract2

  I will teach you my townspeople

  how to perform a funeral—

  for you have it over a troop

  of artists—

  unless one should scour the world—

  you have the ground sense necessary.

  See! the hearse leads.

  I begin with a design for a hearse.

  For Christ’s sake not black—

  nor white either—and not polished!

  Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—

  with gilt wheels (this could be

  applied fresh at small expense)

  or no wheels at all:

  a rough dray to drag over the ground.

  Knock the glass out!

  My God—glass, my townspeople!

  For what purpose? Is it for the dead

  to look out or for us to see

  how well he is housed or to see

  the flowers or the lack of them—

  or what?

  To keep the rain and snow from him?

  He will have a heavier rain soon:

  pebbles and dirt and what not.

  Let there be no glass—

  and no upholstery, phew!

  and no little brass rollers