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Sasha and the Poet
- Wesleyan University Press
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Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my soul. All Venice is sinking. Let us dance on the head of a pin And praise principalities! Life is a joke and all things show it! Let us praise the night sounds in Connecticut, The Czechoslovak’s parakeet, Whistling Idiot, Idiot! The moon’s disk singes a bucketing cloud Lit by the sun lit by a burning sword Pointing us out of the Garden. Turn your back on the dark reflecting glass Fogged up with the breath of old words: You will not be forgiven if you ignore The pillar of slow insistent snow Framing the angel at the door, Who will not speak and will not go, Numbering our hairs, our bright blue feathers. Sasha and the Poet Sasha: I dreamed you and he Sat under a tree being interviewed By some invisible personage. You were saying ‘They sound strange because they were lonely, The seventeenth century, That’s why the poets sound strange today: In the hope of some strange answer.’ 50 door in the mountain Then you sang ‘hey nonny, nonny, no’ and cried, And asked him to finish. ‘Quoth the potato-bug,’ He said, and stood up slowly. ‘By Shakespeare.’ And walked away. The Second Dream We all heard the alarm. The planes were out And coming, from a friendly country. You, I thought, Would know what to do. But you said, ‘There is nothing to do. Last time The bodies were like charred trees.’ We had so many minutes. The leaves Over the street left the light silver as dimes. The children hung around in slow motion, loud, Liquid as butterflies, with nothing to do. A Bride’s Hours 1. dawn I try to hold your face in my mind’s million eyes But nothing hangs together. My spirit lies Around my will like an extra skin I cannot fill or shake. My eyes in Bachrach’s rectangle look in. I, who was once at the core of the world, Whose childish outline held like a written word, Am frozen in blur: my body, waiting, pours Over its centaur dreams, and drowns, and wakes To terror of man and horse. dream barker 51 ...