BUFFALO BILL’S
Buffalo Bill’s
Defunct
Who used to ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
He was a handsome man
And what i want to know is
How do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
HARLEM
GIRL HELP
What happens to a dream deferred?
Mild and slow and young,
She moves about the room,
And stirs the summer dust
With her wide broom
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?
In the warm, lofted air,
Soft lips together pressed,
Soft wispy hair,
She stops to rest.
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
And stops to breathe.
Amid the summer hum
The great white lilac bloom
Scented with days to come.
Or does it explode?
FIRE AND ICE
A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears—
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks and stones and trees.
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
1
MY PAPA’S WALTZ
WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
DISILLUSIONMENT OF
TEN O’CLOCK
The houses are haunted
By white night gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
RÉSUMÉ
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
DESERT PLACES
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it—it is theirs;
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
IN THE COUNSELOR’S WAITING ROOM
The terra cotta girl
with big flat farm feet
traces furrows in the rug
with her toes,
reads an existentialist paperback
from psychology class,
finds no ease there
from the guilt of loving
the quiet girl down the hall.
Their home soil has seen to this visit,
their Baptist mothers,
who weep for the waste of sturdy hips
ripe for grandchildren.
2
CASTOFF SKIN
METAPHORS
She lay in her girlish sleep at ninety-six,
small as a twig
Pretty good figure
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
for an old lady, she said to me once.
Then she crawled away, leaving
a tiny stretched transparence
behind her. When I kissed her paper cheek
I thought of the snake,
of his quick motion.
STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY
EVENING
SINDHI WOMAN
Barefoot through the bazaar,
and with the same undulant grace
as the cloth blown back from her face,
she glides with a stone jar
high on her head
and not a ripple in her tread.
Watching her cross erect
stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs
of glass in the Karachi slums,
I, with my stoop, reflect:
they stand most straight
who learn to walk beneath a weight.
HOME IS SO SAD
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped for the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as:
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and the frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
WE REAL COOL
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
3
AT THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT
A MONGOLOID CHILD HANDLING
SHELLS ON THE BEACH
To My Daughter, 1954
This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
The metal glitters deep and bright.
Great planes are waiting in the yard—
They are already in the night.
And you are here beside me, small,
Contained and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall—
Yet going whither you are bent.
I am the past, and that is all.
But you and I in part are one:
The frightened brain, the nervous will,
The knowledge of what must be done,
The passion to acquire the skill
To face that which you dare not shun.
The rain of matter upon sense
Destroys me momently. The score:
There comes what will come. The expense
Is what one thought, and something more—
One’s being and intelligence.
This is the terminal, the break.
Beyond this point, on lines of air,
You take the way that you must take;
And I remain in light and stare—
In light, and nothing else, awake.
LONDON
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In ev’ry cry of ev’ry man,
In ev’ry infant’s cry of fear,
In ev’ry voice, in ev’ry ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning church appalls,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh,
Runs in blood down palace walls.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the newborn infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
She turns them over in her slow hands,
as did the sea sending them to her;
broken bits from the mazarine maze,
they are the calmest things on the sand.
The unbroken children splash and shout,
rough as surf, gay as their nesting towels.
But she plays soberly with the sea’s
small change and hums back to it its slow vowels.
SEX WITHOUT LOVE
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
Skin? These are the true religious
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
Mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
They are like great runners: they know they are
alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their overall cardiovascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
___________________________________________
**My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes there is more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
4
The following poems are for you to choose from in order to write your Poetry Exam
and/or your Poetry Paper. Choose different poems for each.
DIVORCES
AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY OHIO
Do you remember the time
at one
of your quiet restaurant lunches
when you were SURE—
I mean when your ears were just
as sure as your silversweet tongue
was sure that the soup was oversalted
(because you always were
really sensitive really
tongue ears nose fingers almost
everything) and your father said
something that well wasn’t, it just
wasn’t well, you know— and
it was so funny you could have held
your breath for years waiting
to say something because you knew
like the soup WAS oversalted
you knew he lied.
And all of the people laughed
even the brotherly foreign
maitre d’…
and then suddenly
you got scared because his eyes
didn’t lie
and though you were
his beautiful well-behaved daughter
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
You were very, very far away and
could see.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
MEXICANS BEGIN JOGGING
At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence, Soto,” he shouted,
And I shouted that I was American.
“No time for lies,” he said, and pressed
A dollar in my palm, hurrying me
through the back door.
Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans—
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of the autumn sky.
What could I do but yell vivas
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.
5
A Work of Artifice
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
6