Status Updates From Selected Poems

Allt för mycket av detta känns som tredje klassens evolakopia.

the horses are haunted by white night gowns

le monocle, vers 5. In the high west there burns a furious star.

The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.

But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is—

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.

The essential poem at the center of things

Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling in the colors at a festival.

And the secondary sense of the ear
Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs,
Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds
With nothing else compounded, carried full,
Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt
And this must comfort the heart's core against
Its false disasters- these fathers standing round,
These mothers touching, speaking, being near,
These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered
And spring’s infuriations over and a long way
To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods
Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight
Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.
...
This is the last day of a certain year
Beyond which there is nothing left of time.
It comes to this and the imagination’s life.

Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics

A too, too human god, self-pity's kin
And uncourageous genesis... It seems
As if the health of the world might be enough.

It seems as if the honey of common summer
Might be enough, as if the golden combs
Were part of a sustenance itself enough,

As if hell, so modified, had disappeared,
As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,
Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.