Collected Poems

SMALL FROGS KILLED ON THE HIGHWAY

Into our century and rot. But someone whose triumphant name Is Lyndon Fink Jane Adam Smith Will pounce on your forgotten name To write a dissertationwith. God help me too, defeated poet. You walked with me one afternoon Of blind stone and Ohio soot, To visit a great lonely man. Never you mind. Today I bought Collected poems of Ralph Hodgson. Now you are dead. I am not yet. Hodgson is now. I will be soon. Still, in Minerva, he had still A white tree, a white miracle Beyond a little mound of coal (Listen, what rhymes with miracle?) We sang all afternoon, we tossed A willing honey under the tongue. I must have seemed a silly ghost. Pity me now. I was just young. SMALL FROGS KILLED ON THE HIGHWAY Still, I would leap too Into the light, If I had the chance. It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field On the other side of the road. They crouch there, too, faltering in terror And take strange wing. Many Of the dead never moved, but many Of the dead are alive forever in the split second Auto headlights more sudden Than their drivers know. The drivers burrow backward into dank pools 190 Where nothing begets Nothing. Across the road, tadpoles are dancing On the quarterthumbnail Of the moon. They can't see, Not yet. A WAY TO MAKE A LIVING (from an epigram by Plato) When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetery. Think of all I could Have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much. I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living. NEW POEMS ipl ...