The cormorant and the mayflower

I was walking across the Point Street Bridge recently, here in Providence. There’s an ancient wooden piling / dock beneath the bridge, which is now terribly rickety and unsafe.

But the birds love it. There are always gulls and ducks there, and sometimes egrets and swans. And almost always there are cormorants: lithe delicate birds with slender curving necks and broad wings, which fly low over the water’s surface and dive quickly to snap up fish with their sharp little beaks.

The cormorants were resting that day. It was warm and humid, but there was a pleasant quiet breeze blowing off the land toward the ocean; I could feel it up on the bridge, and the birds on the piling could feel it too.

One cormorant was facing into the breeze, its winds outstretched as if it were flying. It stood and rocked gently in the cool breeze.  I took some pictures, but I’m not very good with my phone’s camera, so you can barely see it:

“He was pretending to fly in the breeze,” I said to my friend Cathleen later, showing her the photo. “He looked so serene and happy.”

“He was drying his wings,” she said soberly. “It’s just instinct.”

Maybe Cathleen is right. But I prefer to think that the cormorant was dreaming about flying.

It does my heart good to see things like this. Not very many things make me truly happy, now that I’m a sour old codger. Partner makes me happy, and once in a while Apollonia or Cathleen says something that makes me laugh.

But seeing that bird in imaginary flight made me happy. Sometimes small things – a flower, a tree, a bird – take us out of ourselves; they make us realize that life isn’t as difficult as it might be, and that sometimes there are moments of pure unconsidered joy.

Which brings me to Elinor Wylie.

Elinor’s poetry is mostly forgotten nowadays. She was active in the 1910s and 1920s, and died in 1929. She’s a minor poet, but (I think) an important one. I have bits and pieces of her verse rattling around in my head all the time.

This is the last stanza of her poem “As I Went Down by Havre de Grace”:

As I went out by Prettymarsh

I saw the mayflower under the leaves:

Life (I said) is rough and harsh

And fretted by a hundred griefs:

Yet were it more than I could face,

Who have faced out a hundred dooms,

Had I been born in any place

Where this small flower never blooms.

---

For National Poetry Month: "Some Trees," by John Ashbery

---

April is National Poetry Month. And today – April 18 – is “Poem In Your Pocket” day. Today’s the day to carry your favorite poem with you, and give it to people, and let people know.

 

 

I don’t have a single favorite poem. It depends on my mood, which is sometimes a little somber. But it’s April, so let’s have a brighter one today – a very early one by John Ashbery:

 

 

 

Some Trees

 

These are amazing: each 
Joining a neighbor, as though speech 
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

 

To meet as far this morning 
From the world as agreeing 
With it, you and I 
Are suddenly what the trees try

 

To tell us we are: 
That their merely being there 
Means something; that soon 
We may touch, love, explain.

 

And glad not to have invented 
Such comeliness, we are surrounded: 
A silence already filled with noises, 
A canvas on which emerges

 

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, 
Our days put on such reticence 
These accents seem their own defense.

---

 

Unenchanted April

---

Poets used to love springtime. Remember Chaucer?:

 

 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye . . .       Or how about some Shakespeare?     It was a lover and his lass,   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,   That o'er the green corn-field did pass,   In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,   When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring.       Eh.       I myself do not much like the spring. It can be very pretty, granted, and I do think crocuses and daffodils are very nice. But there’s something a little – I don’t know – relentless about it. And I notice that, over the past hundred years, a few poets seem to be agreeing with me.       How about that ol’ T. S. Eliot?:       April is the cruellest month, breeding   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing   Memory and desire, stirring   Dull roots with spring rain.         But my personal favorite is New England’s own Edna St. Vincent Millay:       To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.       I love those last few lines.       Happy springtime, everyone!

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having; or, Rhapsody on a theme by John Ashbery

---

So (I says casually), did you see the photo on the front page of the New York Times on Friday? Snow in Jerusalem. Crazy, right?

 

 

And how about that heatwave in Australia? Pretty awful.

 

 

Not to mention the soaking rains they’ve been having in the UK.

 

 

And did I mention that it’s gonna be close to sixty degrees here in Providence over the next few days? In mid-January. Seriously, it feels like late March / early April outside.

 

 

You know where I’m going with this.

 

 

We’ve done it to ourselves. We didn’t mean to do it, but we did it. We have steadily warmed our climate, and now abnormal weather is the new normal: storms, droughts, temperature extremes. 2012 was the warmest year on record in the United States, by the way.

 

 

So what can we do about it?

 

 

Little enough. The damage is already done. The carbon dioxide is already out there, and the ozone is already torn up.

 

 

Good night and good luck, human race.

 

 

(But let’s end with something nice. I started with a John Ashbery quote, so let’s have the whole poem, and think – or hope – that humanity might not die out completely, or might at least leave behind something beautiful.)

 

 

(Something like this:)

 

 

 

 

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know. 

---

Asteroids

---

Partner and I saw something interesting the other night. A near-earth asteroid, Apophis, was making a near approach to Earth, and we watched it in real time, on a British website called Slooh.com, which operates a powerful telescope in the Canary Islands off Africa.

 

 

The images were peaceful enough: a tiny bright spot moving slowly against a background of stars.

 

 

Apophis will not trouble us this time; it’s too far away.

 

 

But Apophis is coming back. It will make another near-Earth approach in 2029, and again in 2036. There is a vanishingly small chance that, in 2036, Apophis will actually hit the Earth.

 

 

If it does, it would not be quite as bad as the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit Earth sixty million years ago. It would be very bad, however.

 

 

But, as I said, the chances are very small.

 

 

Makes you feel uncertain, doesn’t it?

 

 

I don’t much care. In 2036, I’ll be 79 years old, if I’m not already dead.

 

 

But it makes me think of all the odd things that can happen, and the random horrible accidents that can really ruin your day.

 

 

And I used to like the asteroids.  I thought of them as a remote peaceful place, a planetary archipelago, kind of like the British West Indies.

 

 

I prefer them that way.

 

 

Here’s Diane Ackerman’s poem from the 1970s:

 

 

We imagine them

flitting

cheek to jowl,

these driftrocks

of cosmic ash

thousandfold afloat

between Jupiter and Mars.

Frigga,

Fanny,

Adelheid,

Lacrimosa.

Names to conjure with,

Dakotan black hills,

A light-opera

Staged on a barrier reef.

And swarm they may have,

Crumbly as blue-cheese,

That ur-moment

when the solar system

broke wind.

But now

they lumber

so wide apart

from each

to its neighbor’s

pinprick-glow

slant millions

and millions

of watertight miles.

Only in the longest view

do they graze

like one herd

on a breathless tundra. 

 

---

 

 

For New Year's Day: I'm going to reform!

---

You know I try to provide something different for holidays.

 

 

Well, here it is, New Year’s Day 2013, and I have nothing.

 

 

No songs, no pertinent video clip, no nothing. This is my fifty-sixth New Year’s Day on earth, and I find that I have nothing inspirational to share.

 

 

Well, maybe one thing: a quatrain from Don Marquis, written by the cockroach Archy. Archy kept slipping, and repenting, and rebelling, and falling into line again. This is from one of his more repentant periods:

 

 

 

i sing the glad noo year

that s tending toward the norm

my song is one of cheer

i m going to reform

 

 

 

That’s a nice all-purpose resolution.

 

 

Happy New Year, kids.

---

 

 

For Sunday: "archy at the tomb of napoleon," by Don Marquis

---

The first time I went to Paris was in March 1984. I was hopping from the USA to Morocco and had only about six hours to waste, so I raced into the city from the airport, had a cup of coffee and a brioche, and visited the Hotel des Invalides, which houses the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte.

 

 

 

Why? Because Archy the Cockroach went there back in the 1920s and wrote a whopping good poem about it.

 

 

 

Partner and I visited the Invalides again in October. Napoleon is still there, in his gigantic stone tomb that looks like a cross between an overstuffed sofa and an enormous old-fashioned radio. And, like Archy, we left feeling “solemn but likewise uplifted.”

 

 

 

Herewith: “archy at the tomb of napoleon,” by Don Marquis.

 

 

 

paris france

i went over to

the hotel des invalides

today and gazed on

the sarcophagus of the

great napoleon

and the thought came

to me as i looked

down indeed it

is true napoleon

that the best goods

come in the smallest

packages here are

you napoleon with

your glorious course

run and here is

archy just in the

prime of his career

with his greatest

triumphs still before

him neither one of us

had a happy youth

neither one of us

was welcomed socially at

the beginning of his

career neither one of

us was considered much

to look at

and in ten thousand years from

now perhaps what you said and did

napoleon will be

confused with what

archy said and did

and perhaps the burial

place of neither will be

known napoleon looking

down upon you

I wish to ask you now

frankly as one famous

person to another

has it been worth

all the energy

that we expended all the

toil and trouble and

turmoil that it cost us

if you had your life

to live over

again bonaparte would

you pursue the star

of ambition

i tell you frankly

bonaparte that i myself

would choose the

humbler part

i would put the temptation

of greatness aside

and remain an ordinary

cockroach simple

and obscure but alas

there is a destiny that

pushes one forward

no matter how hard

one may try to resist it

i do not need to

tell you about that

bonaparte you know as

much about it as i do

yes looking at it in

the broader way neither

one of us has been to blame

for what he has done

neither for his great

successes nor his great mistakes

both of us napoleon

were impelled by some

mighty force external to

ourselves we are both to

be judged as great forces of

nature as tools in the

hand of fate rather than as

individuals who willed to

do what we have done

we must be forgiven

napoleon

you and i

when we have been

different from the common

run of creatures

i forgive you as i know

that you would forgive

me could you speak to me

and if you and i

napoleon forgive and

understand each other

what matters it if all

the world else find

things in both of us that

they find it hard

to forgive and understand

we have been

what we have been

napoleon and let them laugh that off

well after an hour or so of

meditation there i left

actually feeling that i

had been in communion

with that great spirit and

that for once in my

life i had understood and been

understood

and i went away feeling

solemn but likewise

uplifted mehitabel the

cat is missing

archy

 

For Groundhog Day: Richard Eberhart's "The Groundhog," performed by college students

---

What to give you for Groundhog Day?  I wanted very much to share a clip of Rudy Vallee and Robert Morse singing the “Groundhog Song” from the movie version of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” but all I could find on YouTube were audio recordings of Rudy and Robert, and tons of really awful college / neighborhood productions of the same. 

 

 

So nerts to that.

 

 

Then, by chance, up floated another idea.

 

 

I met Richard Eberhart at a poetry reading in the 1980s, and shook his hand, and told him how much I loved this poem, and he smiled and thanked me. 

 

 

I still love it. 

 

 

Below is a link to a video of a group of (I assume) college kids, somewhere, reading the poem (badly) and acting it out and generally murdering it.  Imagine!  The best poem ever written about a dead groundhog!

 

 

I like to think that Eberhart (who died in 2005) would have enjoyed it.

 

 

Happy Groundhog Day.

 

 

(Postscript: if you want to read the poem as it was actually written, try this link.)

 

 

 

---

 

Halloween offering: "Colloque sentimental," by Paul Verlaine

---

Today, a poem.  Those of you who are purely Anglophone can skip to the translation below, by A. S. Kline.  It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than anything I could manage on the spur of the moment, and it rhymes, and it will give you an idea of the very lovely and sad and Halloweeny original. 

 

 

(One thing in the last couplet: “avoines folles” are “wild oats,” which I am sure you know by sight at least, and which I have given you in the above image.  They are a far more atmospheric background for our two ghosts than “wild herbs,” but Kline used “herbs” to rhyme with “words,” and I understand and sympathize and am glad I can read French, and that’s why translation is a crazy bitch.)

 

*

 

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.

Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles,
Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

--Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne ?
--Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne ?

--Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom ?
Toujours vois tu mon âme en rêve? --Non.

--Ah! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible
Où nous joignions nos bouches! --C'est possible.

Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l'espoir !
--L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.

Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.

*

 

In the lonely old park’s frozen glass

Two dark shadows lately passed.

 

Their lips were slack, eyes were blurred,

The words they spoke scarcely heard.

 

In the lonely old park’s frozen glass

Two spectral forms invoked the past.

 

‘Do you recall our former ecstasies?’

‘Why would you have me rake up memories?’

 

‘Does your heart still beat at my name alone?’

‘Is it always my soul you see in dream?’ – ‘Ah, no’.

 

‘Oh the lovely days of unspeakable mystery,

When our mouths met!’ – ‘Ah yes, maybe.’

 

‘How blue it was, the sky, how high our hopes!’

‘Hope fled, conquered, along the dark slopes.’

 

So they walked there, among the wild herbs,

And the night alone listened to their words.

 

---

 

My career as a poet

---

I was a poet, for a while.

 

 

I wrote poetry like a demon. I had notebooks full of lines, and words, and full poems, and sequences of poems, and sequences of sequences. I had a whole book planned out at one point, in five sections.

 

 

I won the Poetry Award at my college in my senior year, and I was sure it was a sign of future greatness.  You know how successful and wealthy and famous poets are! (Yes, I'm being sarcastic, just so you know. But when you're twenty, it's a heady feeling. It's important to feel that way at twenty, I think.)

 

 

During the decade that followed, I wrote poetry constantly, and submitted it to the ten thousand little magazines that accept contributions. They changed all the time. A few are fixtures: Poetry, naturally, and the Kenyon Review. I never dared to approach them; I decided (sensibly) to build a reputation first. I got published! Always in little magazines. “Bardic Echoes,” I remember. I'd have to dig out the box of publications to remember the others. I'm sure they're all long dead.

 

 

I had a last burst of poetic inspiration while I was in the Peace Corps, in my late twenties. I wrote pages and pages of doggerelish rhyming verse. Some of it was actually clever, I think.

 

 

Since then: nothing.

 

 

My friend Joanne recently sent me a copy of the college publication in which my prize-winning poem appeared in 1978. Ah Jesus!

 

 

I so badly wanted to be a real poet. More than that: I was sure that I was a poet, and would somehow suddenly erupt into notoriety as a famous poet . . .

 

 

It didn't happen.

 

 

Ah well.

 

 

Maybe I'll have a burst of creativity sometime between now and 2040 . . .

 

---

 

 

Getting old with Sara Teasdale

---

Partner and I have lots of interesting retirement schemes. Most of them rely on non-traditional methods, like keno and Powerball.

 

 

One plan is that I win big on "Jeopardy!," the TV game show. I've auditioned four times. I have high hopes.

 

 

But I didn't get called for an audition this year.

 

 

I know I did poorly on the online test. I used my laptop, which was a mistake; I skipped over a couple of questions just because the keyboard was balky.

 

 

But I can't blame it entirely on my laptop. The truth is that my memory is deteriorating very rapidly.

 

 

Once, not long ago, I was encyclopedic. I knew who was in what movie, and who wrote what, and what characters were in what books, and what year who did what. I was unstoppable. The other night, however, I was watching "Jeopardy!" while on the treadmill in the health club, and presumably my blood was pumping to all relevant sections of my brain, but my recall was patchy at best.

 

 

It happens, they say, with age.

 

 

You know the Sara Teasdale poem about climbing the hill?

 

 

I must have passed the crest a while ago,

And now I am going down -

Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,

But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.

 

 

All the morning I thought how proud I should be

To stand there straight as a queen,

Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me -

But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.

 

 

It was nearly level along the beaten track,

And the brambles caught in my gown;

But it's no use now to think of turning back,

The rest of the way will be only going down.

 

 

Sigh.

 

---

 

Robert Bly

---

I have met a few poets.

 

 

Richard Eberhart I met in the late 1980s, a frail old man. I shook his hand after one of his readings and told him how much I loved “The Groundhog.” He smiled and nodded politely, but he seemed pleased.

 

John Ashbery was (and still is) very cute, and giggled when I told him how much I admired him.

 

 

Marge Piercy, back in the 1970s, was a cloud of black hair, lost in a dream. I was introduced to her, but I doubt that she noticed.

 

 

Seamus Heaney, like Marge, was drifting in limbo when I met him.

 

 

Poets are crazy, right? The muse drives them over the wall and up the mountain and back again. Some of them (like Ashbery and Eberhart) are the Apollonian type, writing Poetic Poetry, full of rhyme and meter and control; but the madness and the beauty crept into their poetry too. “There was no sign of the groundhog,” wrote a young Eberhart, and that line broke my heart. “A chorus of smiles, a winter's morning,” wrote a young Ashbery, and it was a vision of beauty and perfection.

 

 

Then there was Robert Bly.

 

 

He did a reading in early 1978 at Gonzaga. He was huge and tall and loud and mostly drunk. He “tuned up” by reading/reciting other poetry, which is an idea I like very much; I remember he did a few Emily Dickinson lyrics. Why not? Then he started putting on masks and stalking around the hall making menacing gestures at people. I suppose this was part of the whole “Iron John” thing, and coming to terms with one's manhood, and voodoo priesthood, and the sunset of the Beat Poets. It was creepy and compelling, though.

 

After the reading I was introduced to Bly. I'd won the University's poetry award that year, for a forgettable little lyric that was a mishmash of Ashbery and Eliot and who knows who else.  He belted down another drink and loomed down at me and ate a fistful of peanuts. “Were you born at the winter solstice?” he bellowed down at me.

 

“No,” I whispered. “July.”

 

He snorted and looked away.

 

I don't think he was very impressed with me.

 

 

Herewith his best lines:

 

“The world will soon break up

into small colonies of the saved . . . “

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: "1967," by Thomas Hardy

---

This is Thomas Hardy, in 1867, expressing a truth of which Partner and I remind each other daily.

 

 

And I hope that the last stanza is true for Partner and me.

 

 

*

 

Thomas Hardy: “1967”

In five-score summers! All new eyes,
New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise;
New woes to weep, new joys to prize;

 

With nothing left of me and you
In that live century’s vivid view
Beyond a pinch of dust or two;

A century which, if not sublime,
Will show, I doubt not, at its prime,
A scope above this blinkered time.

—Yet what to me how far above?
For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love!

—16 Westbourne Park Villas, 1867

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: Who is Sylvia?

---

Today, May 8, is the birthday of my friend Sylvia. I have always loved her name. Shakespeare got a pretty good song out of it:

 

 

Who is Sylvia? What is she

that all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair, and wise is she;

the heaven such grace did lend her,

that she might admired be.

 

 

Is she wise as she is fair?

For beauty lives with kindness.

Love doth to her eyes repair,

to help him of his blindness,

and, being helped, inhabits there.

 

 

Then to Sylvia let us sing,

that Sylvia is excelling;

she excels each mortal thing

upon the dull earth dwelling:

to her garlands let us bring.

 

 

And now listen to what Schubert (and the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) did with it!

 

14_Gesang_(An_Silvia),_D891.wma Listen on Posterous

 

 

---

 

 

Good Friday blog: The Crucifixion

---

For Good Friday: a very old Irish poem by an unknown author, as set to music by Samuel Barber in his “Hermit Songs.”

 

 

The remarkable thing here is that Christ suffers more in thinking about his mother’s grief than over his own crucifixion!

 

*

 

At the cry of the first bird

They began to crucify Thee, o Swan.

Never shall lament cease because of that!

It was like the parting of day from night.

O sore was the suffering borne by the body of Mary's Son.

But sorer still to Him was the grief

That for His sake

Came upon His mother.

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: John Ashbery’s “More Pleasant Adventures”

---

I met John Ashbery at a reading once. He was small and frail and very cute with his big owlish glasses on, and I told him how much I enjoyed his poetry, and he sort of giggled.

 

I love his earlier poetry especially, and some of his more recent stuff.

 

This poem, written in 1983 and featured in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, I love entirely.

 

*

 

More Pleasant Adventures

The first year was like icing.
Then the cake started to show through.
Which was fine, too, except you forget the direction you’re taking.
Suddenly you are interested in some new thing
And can’t tell how you got here. Then there is confusion
Even out of happiness, like a smoke—
The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others.
And outlines disappear once again.

Heck, it’s anybody’s story,
A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,”
And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream:
You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you.
We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.
We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
We can always be found with our associates.
Haven’t you always wanted to curl up like a dog and go to sleep like a dog?

In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist),
There’s also room for breaking out of living.
Whatever happens will be quite ingenious.
No acre but will resume being disputed now,
And paintings are one thing we never seem to run out of.

---

 

 

 

New Year's Day blog: 'Tis well that the old year is out

---

I've always found the poetry of John Dryden congenial.  Here's something from “The Secular Masque”:

All, all, of a piece throughout,

Thy chase had no beast in view;

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

'Tis well that the old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

Good riddance to a mostly crappy year.

Welcome, 2011.

---

Sunday blog: Mind and heart

---

 

For the third Sunday of Advent: one of my favorite bits of Wallace Stevens. To be read aloud.

 

 

*

 

 

Day is the children's friend.

It is Marianna's Swedish cart.

It is that and a very big hat.

 

 

Confined by what they see,

Aquiline pedants treat the cart

As one of the relics of the heart,

 

 

They treat the philosopher's hat,

Left thoughtlessly behind,

As one of the relics of the mind . . .

 

 

Of day, then, children make

What aquiline pedants take

For souvenirs of time, lost time,

 

 

Adieux, shapes, images -

No, not of day, but of themselves,

Not of perpetual time.

 

 

And, therefore, aquiline pedants find

The philosopher's hat to be part of the mind,

The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.

 

 

---

 

Thanksgiving blog: Thank you

---

In the spirit of Thanksgiving: the last few stanzas of Kenneth Koch's wonderful early poem “Thank You.”

***

. . . Thank you for the chance to run a small hotel

In an elephant stopover in Zambezi,

But I do not know how to take care of guests, certainly they would all leave soon,

After seeing blue lights out the windows and rust on their iron beds –

I'd rather run a bird-house in Jamaica:

Those people come in, the birds, they do not care how things are kept up . . .

It's true that Zambezi proprietorship would be exciting,

with people getting off elephants and coming into my hotel,

But as tempting as it is I cannot agree.

And thank you for this offer of the post of referee

For the Danish wrestling championship – I simply do not feel qualified . . .

But the fresh spring air has been swabbing my mental decks

Until, although prepared for fight, still I sleep on land.

Thank you for the ostriches. I have not yet had time to pluck them,

But I am sure they will be delicious, adorning my plate at sunset,

My tremendous plate, and the plate

Of the offers to all my days. But I cannot fasten my exhilaration to the sun.

And thank you for the evening of the night on which

I fell off my horse in the shadows. That was really useful.

---