It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,

Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.

The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,

Repeating his name with its patient syllables,

Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

An Old Man Asleep

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.

A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,

Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,

The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

Lebensweisheitspielerei

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls

In the afternoon. The proud and the strong

Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,

The finally human,

Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence

That is an indigence of the light,

A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty

Of autumnal space becomes

A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us

With what he is and as he is,

In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

The Hermitage at the Centre

The leaves on the macadam make a noise—

How soft the grass on which the desired

Reclines in the temperature of heaven—

Like tales that were told the day before yesterday—

Sleek in a natural nakedness,

She attends the tintinnabula—

And the wind sways like a great thing tottering—

Of birds called up by more than the sun,

Birds of more wit, that substitute—

Which suddenly is all dissolved and gone—

Their intelligible twittering

For unintelligible thought.

And yet this end and this beginning are one,

And one last look at the ducks is a look

At lucent children round her in a ring.

The Dove in Spring

Brooder, brooder, deep beneath its walls—

A small howling of the dove

Makes something of the little there,

The little and the dark, and that

In which it is and that in which