wrung my hair, stamped them feet

I painted a portrait, and named it Dejection;
My aims were to mirror on canvas the river
That drained assorted tales from a section
Of forest. On broad boats of leaves
Fallen in its current it speeded down
The whispers of trees once green, sent them down
To dusky, dying, soundless seas.

It fell that in the middle of the river I composed this picture.

Things weren't as I imagined them.
Yea, the woods were not gorgeous,
And the stream's bends were imperfect,
And the trailing leaves uncrisp, and rotted, and stale.
I wandered more, and noted that scores on scores
Of brown skulls of spring clogged the scene,
Where aged ribs of flowers stuck fast, collected,
Then slowly congealed the ebb and swirl,
Coercing the current into pools, where, coagulate,
Sorrowful made the fair waters stagnate,
Froze their motion, decayed the river's resolve,
Its impeccable keening for grander shores forgot,
Destroyed in slow measure the life, the hope,
The pure liquid pulsate of its soul.

More evil the wood, then, that imprisoned the river there,
and in chains of Autumn fallen forbid it drain!
How earth sullied that clear crystalline stream,
Until languorous and weepy, overgrown with algae
So sickly green the stopped-up river seemed
That I, absorbed in morose rapture,
thinking this spot a grazen pasture,
Stepped; I sunk, and in the mud was bound.

And I had my brush, but had no pigment;
So drawing from the wounds of the river
In muddy pustule I painted my picture.

we painted, or took pictures,

When once that Fall, which was a while ago, it rained,

All the airs whispering and cool on our faces,

And the colors falling hotly, and our sky drowning;

And the empty climate of the wood around our house

Would remind you and I we had only cornbread to eat, and each other;

Where we lived I would go, and

Pluck flowers out of coffins,

And bring them back to you. They sat,

And drank up their black spines from pewter vases

the water drawn from pools

on the train tracks behind our house where our children trod, safe and secure

that never a train would run, that these places always freightless were.

There was a time which, if you measured it on a wristwatch,
was the emptiness of a yawning mouth.

You see, seized up in cotton is a tough place to be,
or whatever paper is made of nowadays,
Materials of all varieties: mostly wood pulp,
sometimes fishing lines, or even more rarely
big gray bridges, open bays, hay lofts,
autumntime bales and wide indistinct fields.

My father has been irresolvable,
very had to figure. I used to think he did not emit,
but he emits well, only in a curious fashion, like to
a nitpicking butterfly, or a giraffe.
I did not think my father emits, until in an old cardboard box
he showed me his emissions, like confessions, under
a professor who could only have been incredibly fat;
I shrank in the chair and beheld lists of things.

Fallow acres
upon acres
upon acres fallow.

Fern Hill

Maintenant comme j'etais jeune et libre sous les branches des pommes
pres de la maison penchee et content comme les herbes etaient verts,
et le soir au-dessus le grenier etait etoile,
les Temps m'ont permis...

fuck.

The muse, the tongue, the pen,
love diffused, sullen and silent, stiff
is the glance, the jazz-band, the marching, the hands
that play and graft ribbon, skin, dreams on the bent wood,
sleep the contortion forests yellow and red as a circus tent.

dissolved.

blasphemous or empty

Ring out the bells, make the air heavy with them!
Send out fog of myrrh, heady spice! Earthly delight!
Choke on that, the fervor, you may sing your battle cry;
you may,
you may,
you may lift it to the raven wind,
you may,
or tune your voice to smaller hymns you may,
to thank the hearth, next the bread, last the LORD;
that is your song.

You may sing the trees, make them greener in note and phrase
than ever they were in golden summer light;
sing that light,
sing the Song! Use your voice,
warble like a thrush,
a hen at creaking day, a creek--
sing the creek! Sing it colder and faster,
sing it down to sea-green shores, misted wharves,
sing it past the lonesome tottering hermit--
sing the sands, sing their distraction.

Sing the large hymns, not the small.
Sing first the LORD;
that is to sing the world.

can't wrinkle a webpage

so much fuck the world; so much.

rocks and literal rocks,
What is it that is not children playing?
When the radio-dial in grimmest tones informs me of the funeral I have missed,
because of oversleeping again? Second time this week.
Loaded barges gray with age who lug impossible cargo
'gainst the current sage and surge--time surges too, with haphazard sickle and scythe--
while the unthinking green children make sweet indentation in the hilly grass,
watch them barges wheels about in the sky and seem OH GREAT TUNEFUL WORK,
Huck and berrybush all fused in such delight in swarming Mississippi jungle.

Where is the creeks that go? Where is the creeks that run to, parched, phantom?
My address to you is simile; is like them pyramid cloister, cloister dry rot,
cloistered sandstorm brown, like them sandstone slavehands, penhand rather.
Writ, tossed with the afterbirth in the bin; binned, rubbish, that's writ a shade,
a stream a shade to a-c-compose.
Rotted faithless and a hull pitiless for none, to who none spread when eyed.
Whores eyed. great great humdrum, great turning unending space association
too cold for wolves , dipping , boughs drip , or smell of olive , baking ,
too cold and deep for mothers and any love at all.

The night is the worst sort of neighbor, forever perturbed
and ill at ease with his own sightless company,
insists on pressing between my curtains until slipped inside
I have to share with him his nighttime woes.