Days Volume Two

* * FRAGMENT OF A LOST POEM O the clear moment, when from the mouth A word flies, current immediately Among friends; or when a loving gift astounds As the identical wish nearest the heart; Or when a stone, volleyed in sudden danger, Strikes the rabid beast full on the snout! Moments in never.... Robert Graves A Question a poem by Robert Frost A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth. Robert Frost If in the silent echo, he stood out, interlocking streets, shadows of the trees everywhere, he dreaded the silence but he dreaded his own dysfunction even more. Come on, buck up, the voice said, but the rhythms were the same, lost, lost, things undone, parties unattended, all kept in silence, fragments of lyricism, a quiet time. He could hear the sound of his unfortunate rooster, the crows drifting across the Paddington terraces, the handsome beast calling for his mate. But there were none. He thought ...

* * It's a Queer Time Robert Graves It's hard to know if you're alive or dead When steel and fire go roaring through your head. One moment you'll be crouching at your gun Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun : The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast No time to think leave all and off you go . . . To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow, To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Rest West! It's a queer time. You're charging madly at them yeling 'Fag!' When somehow something gives and your feet drag. You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain And find . . . You're digging tunnels through the hay In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day. O springy hay, and lovely beams to climb! You're back in the old sailor suit again. It's a queer time. Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out A great roar the trench shakes and falls about You're struggling, gasping, struggling, ...

* The Drunken Fisherman Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation...

* Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town.... My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless...

* My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself-- to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did. Dolphin Robert Lowell Caught in the shadows, in the tiny spaces, there on the streets of past lives, there before the Christmas that never came. It was a terrible time of year. Everyone had gone away on holidays. Everyone that is who had any money to escape the city. Everyone who hadn't pissed everything up against a wall, who weren't walking around the st...

* Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I'm no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind's hand. All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear. One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons. Morning Song by Sylvia Plath One Christmas too early, one street too late, he never knew, as it approached the festive season, exactly what to do. They had been the only kids on their street who didn't celebrate Christmas. It w...

* A dense mass of azure towers thrust from the sloped foundations of the Benevolence relics, fluted and spiralled like the shells of fabulous sea creatures, agleam with gold and silver gilding. A haze of delicate latticed walkways and bridges wrapped itself around the towers of Ymir, with the longer spans reaching from finger to finger. The air spangled with the bright moving motes of vehicles and airborne people, buzzing from tower to tower. Alastair Reynolds. House of Suns. If there were memories, if we were chaos driven and not coming from some comfortable suburban alcove, then the sight of the two of them in the street might have touched us. Margie was a well known character in the area. She had a strange chomping motion about her mouth, a pudgy, battered in face, wore second hand clothes and presumably lived somewhere in the midst of the mound of pubic housing nearby. He was not satisfied. Her colour and movement, her story, was just another blimp on the landscape. They struggled ...