Clarinet
BY TERRANCE HAYES
I am sometimes the clarinet
your parents bought
your first year in band,
my whole body alive
in your fingers, my one ear
warmed by the music
you breathe into it.
I hear your shy laugh
among the girls at practice.
I am not your small wrist
rising & falling as you turn
the sheet music,
but I want to be.
Or pinky bone, clavicle.
When you walk home
from school, birds call
to you in a language
only clarinets decipher.
The leaves whistle
and gawk as you pass.
Locked in my skinny box,
I want to be at least
one of the branches
leaning above you.
Terrance Hayes, “Clarinet” from Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (2004). Used
with the permission of Verse Press.
Harlem
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Psalm
BY GEORGE OPPEN
Veritas sequitur ...
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.
An old story
BY BOB HICOK
It’s hard being in love
with fireflies. I have to do
all the pots and pans.
When asked to parties
they always wear the same
color dress. I work days,
they punch in at dusk.
With the radio and a beer
I sit up doing bills,
jealous of men who’ve fallen
for the homebody stars.
When things are bad
they shake their asses
all over town, when good
my lips glow.
"An Old Story" from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok, ©2004. All rights are controlled by the University of
Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Tonight
BY AGHA SHAHID ALI
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
—Laurence Hope
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?
Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”
“Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar—
All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.
Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.
Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities
multiply me at once under your spell tonight.
He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.
In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.
God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.
Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.
The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.
My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.
And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
“Tonight" from Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright 2003 by Agha
Shahid Ali Literary Trust. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The Deathwatch Beetle
BY LINDA PASTAN
1.
A cardinal hurls itself
at my window all morning long,
trying so hard to penetrate
its own reflection
I almost let it in myself,
though once I saw
another red bird, crazed
by the walls of a room,
spatter its feathers
all over the house.
2.
My whole childhood is coming apart,
the last stitches
about to be ripped out
with your death,
and I will be left—ridiculous,
to write
condolence letters
to myself.
3.
The deathwatch beetle
earned its name
not from its ugliness
or our terror
of insects
but simply because of the sound
it makes, ticking.
4.
When your spirit
perfects itself,
will it escape
out of a nostril,
or through the spiral
passage of an ear?
Or is it even now battering
against your thin skull, wild
to get through, blood brother
to this crimson bird?
kitchenette building
BY GW ENDOLYN BROOKS
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “kitchenette building” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks.
The Red W heelbarrow
BY W ILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
William Carlos Williams, “So much depends” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I,
1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
“What Do Women Want?”
BY KIM ADDONIZIO
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
The Afterbirth, 1931
BY NIKKY FINNEY
We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk
Who threw soil
not salt
Over our shoulders
Who tendered close the bible
Who grew and passed around the almanac at night
So we would know
What to plant at first light
Black soil and sweet brown sorghum
From the every morning biscuits
Mama Susan fixed
Dripping and mixing
Up under our fingernails
A secret salve
Just like any other
Living simple
And keeping to our proud selves
Quite aware of night riders
Quite aware of men with
Politicious smiles
Cologned with kerosene and match
Aware of just whose feet
Walked across our tin roofs at night
We were such light sleepers
Such long distance believers
We were a family pregnant
Whose water had broke
And for once there was ham money
’Bacca money
So we thought to do better by ourselves
To begin our next row
We would go and get him
Because he was medically degreed in baby bringing
Because he was young and white and handsome
And because of that
Had been neighbor to more knowledge
Than us way back behind
The country’s proud but inferior lines
And because he came with his papers in his pocket
So convincing
so soon
After his ivy graduation
Asking us hadn’t we heard
Telling us times had changed
And the midwife wasn’t safe anymore
Even though we had all been caught
By tried and true Black Grannies
Who lay ax blade sharp side up
And water pan underneath the bed
To cut the pain
To cool the fever
We were a Pregnant Clan of Kinfolk
Caught with water running down our legs
Old family say they remember
Going to fetch him
Telling him that it was time
That he should come now
But he didn’t show right away
Not right away
But came when he wanted
The next day
After his breakfast
But what more
Could we colored country folk ever want
Even if we had to watch the road all night for him
Even if we had to not let her push too hard
When he finally came
He had his papers on him
Something with one of those pretty shiny seals
Old family say they can remember
Somethin’ just wasn’t right
But we opened the screen for him anyway
Trusting
And tendering close what the Good Book
Had told us all our lives to do
Then we made him a path
Where he put his hand up
then inside
My grandmother’s womb
Her precious private pleasing place
Somewhere he probably didn’t want to touch
Then he pulled my daddy through
Somebody he probably didn’t care to reach for
And from the first he pulled him wrong
And wrong
Shattered his collarbone
And snapped his soft baby foot in half
And smashed the cartilage in his infant hand
Wringing
Their own sun baked arms
Old timey family
Remember him well
Say they knew somethin’ wasn’t right
As he came through the door
A day later
His breakfast digested now
Somethin’ just wasn’t right
How he had two waters on him
One sweet
one sour-mash
One trying to throw snow quilt over the other
As he un-carefully
As drunkenly
He with his papers on him still
Stood there turning a brown baby into blue
Un-magically
And right before our eyes
Hope and Pray
Hope and Pray
Then he packed his bag and
left
With all of his official training
And gathered up gold stars
left
The Virginia land of Cumberland County
He left and forgot
He left and didn’t remember
The afterbirth inside
Carlene Godwin Finney
To clabber
Gangrene
Close down
Her place
Her precious private pleasing place
To fill the house to the rafters
Up past the dimpled tin roof
With a rotting smell
That stayed for nine days
That mortgaged a room
In our memories
And did not die with her
We were a Brown and Pregnant Family
And he would’ve remembered his schoolin’
And left his bottle
Recollected his manners
And brought his right mind
Had another klan called him to their bedside
He would’ve come right away
He would’ve never had liquor on his breath
If the color of my daddy’s broken limbs
Had matched the color of his own but
We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk
We should’ve met him at the door
Should’ve told him lean first into the rusty screen
Made him open up his mouth and blow
Breathe out right there
Into all of our brown and lined up faces
In wait of his worthiness
Then just for good measure
Should’ve made him blow once again
Into Papa Josh’s truth telling jar
Just to be sure
Should’ve let Mama Sally
Then Aunt Nanny
Then lastly Aunt Mary
Give him the final once over
And hold his sterile hands
Down to the firelight to check
Just like she checked our own every night
Before supper
Before we were allowed to sit
At her very particular table
We could’ve let Aunt Ira clutch him by his chin
Enter and leave through her eyes
Just like how she came and went through us
Everyday at her leisure
She would’ve took care to notice
As she traveled all up and through him
Any shaking
any sweating
And caught his incapable belligerent incompetence
In time
Oh Jesus
We should’ve let Grandpop Robert
Have him from the first
Should’ve let him pick him up
By the back of his pants
And swirl him around
Just like he picked us up
And swirled us around
Anytime he caught us lying or lazy
Or being less than what we were
We should’ve let Grandpop
Loose on him from the start
And he would’ve held him up
High eye to the sun
And looked straight through him
Just like he held us up
And then we would have known first
Like he always knew first
And brought to us
The very map of his heart
Then we would have known
Just what his intentions were
With our Carlene
Before we knew his name
Or cared about his many degrees
Before he dared reach up
then inside
Our family’s brown globe
While we stood there
Some of us throwing good black soil
With one hand
Some of us tending close
The Good Book with the other
Believing and trusting
We were doing better
By this one
Standing there
Waterfalls running
Screaming whitewater rapids
Down our pants legs
Down our pantaloons
To our many selves
All the while
Praying hard
That maybe we were wrong
(please make us wrong)
One hundred proof
Smelled the same as
Isopropyl
Nikky Finney, "The AfterBirth, 1931" from Rice. Copyright © 1995 by Nikky Finney. Used by permission of
the author.
Not Waving but Drowning
BY STEVIE SMITH
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning” from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie
Smith. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Facing It
BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 2001 by Yusef
Komunyakaa. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
After working sixty hours again for what reason
BY BOB HICOK
The best job I had was moving a stone
from one side of the road to the other.
This required a permit which required
a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.
Yet because I hadn’t finished the job
I had no salary, and to pay the bribe
I took a job moving the stone
the other way. Because the official
wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit
for the second job. When I pointed out
that the work would be best completed
if I did nothing, he complimented
my brain and wrote a letter
to my employer suggesting promotion
on stationery bearing the wings
of a raptor spread in flight
over a mountain smaller than the bird.
My boss, fearing my intelligence,
paid me to sleep on the sofa
and take lunch with the official
who required a bribe to keep anything
from being done. When I told my parents,
they wrote my brother to come home
from university to be slapped
on the back of the head. Dutifully,
he arrived and bowed to receive
his instruction, at which point
sense entered his body and he asked
what I could do by way of a job.
I pointed out there were stones
everywhere trying not to move,
all it took was a little gumption
to be the man who didn’t move them.
It was harder to explain the intricacies
of not obtaining a permit to not
do this. Just yesterday he got up
at dawn and shaved, as if the lack
of hair on his face has anything
to do with the appearance of food
on an empty table.
"After working sixty hours again for what reason" from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok, ©2004. All rights are
controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University
of Pittsburgh Press.
Selene’s Horse
BY _____
–for my Grandfather James
I asked James, can you feel you’re dying?
Can you feel the water pouring from the hose turn to nothing in the grass?
James loved his big rigs.
I love the sweet metallic reek
filling my own gas tank.
All day the train
shuttles heaps of carpet scraps
through the wild blue phlox of Georgia
where James’ oil truck exploded.
When Aristotle said there must be something
immoveable in the animal
for the animal to move,
he must of meant James,
two years in a hospital bed.
Like the woman smoking on the billboard—
for one whole week only half her mouth
opened in the rain.
I think of Selene’s horse, its marble head
hacked from the Parthenon
and shipped to England in “manageable pieces.”
To see it, is to see pain
bulging in a single vein.
James can’t smile or blink.
Selene’s horse—
exiled, perched on a plinth in the cold light of a museum.
That’s one thing.
Then there’s James,
wide-eyed, nostrils flaring.
What the Living Do
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
From What the Living Do, copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton. All rights
reserved.
How to Uproot a Tree
By Jennifer Sweeney
Stupidity helps.
Naiveté that your hands will undo
what does perfectly without you.
My husband and I made the decision
not to stop until the task was done,
the small anemic tree made room
for something prettier.
We’d pulled before, pale hand over wide hand,
a marriage of pulling toward us what we wanted,
pushing away what we did not.
We had a shovel which was mostly for show.
It was mostly our fingers tunneling the dirt
toward a tangle of false beginnings.
The roots were branched and bearded,
some had spurs
and one of them was wholly reptilian.
They had been where we had not
and held a knit gravity
that was not in their will to let go.
We bent the trunk to the ground and sat on it,
twisted from all angles.
How like ropes it was,
the sickly thing asserting its will
only now at the end,
blind but beyond
the idea of leaving the earth.
2010, Perugia Press
BIRD IN SPACE
BY____
after Brancusi
Child, what efficient breath
you imitate
drawing a bird
without feet or wings,
your chalk breaking
the sidewalk. All morning,
trees in the city open to speed.
Winter has come in the hurry
birds live in. Your mother
sits in a metal bathtub inside Walter Reed’s
Warrior Transition Brigade.
Two blasts and just that like,
her legs burned off.
Child, you don’t understand
what should be visible. What science
drawing a bird the artist knows. The field marks,
the essential red drops on the wing
flashing from the dead stubs,
the burned-over cattails.
Warriors sleep on the street,
on the blue kickers of garbage trucks—
crack whores, skanks, cum-dumpsters.
Ignore their scarred hands,
their spans of liver spots, Child. Draw
with your chalk, carve the cold walk
into a highly-tuned nervous system,
the stick-bird, the abstract fledgling
round with hunger.
The simple glyph speaks
by shifting half her head in the sand
where the bent grass blows down
a song. Child, see how
the face surrenders
to hollow resolve
in the white trunk
of rain. Child, hurry,
gently scrub behind the wet ears
of your bird
in her stone tub. The wounds soften,
the hands, the feet dissolve.
The Nineteenth Century as a Song
BY ROBERT HASS B. 1941
“How like a well-kept garden is your soul.”
John Gray’s translation of Verlaine
& Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861
shorted him four centimes
on a pound of tripe.
He thought himself a clever man
and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,
gazed briefly at what Tennyson called
“the sweet blue sky.”
It was a warm day.
What clouds there were
were made of sugar tinged with blood.
They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages
new settings of the songs
Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.
The poet is a monarch of the clouds
& Swinburne on his northern coast
“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”
composed that lovely elegy
and then found out Baudelaire was still alive
whom he had lodged dreamily
in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”
Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century
while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs.
Robert Hass, “The Nineteenth Century as a Song” from Field Guide. Copyright © 1973
by Robert Hass. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press,
http://www.yale.edu/yup/.
Source: Field Guide (1973)
Song of Myself
(an excerpt from 35 pages)
BY WALT WHITMAN
1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
2
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air
through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and
of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the
sun.
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the
dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and
go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws
at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?
4
Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the
nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or
depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and
contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
5
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript
heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and
lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.