To Archibald MacLeish The afternoon with heavy hours Lies vacant on the wanderer’s sigh… And sunset waits whose cloudy towe… Expect the legions of the night

Dark accurate plunger down the suc… Of arch on arch, where ogives burs… Reverberance of hail upon the dead Thunder like an exploding crucible… Harshly articulate, musical steel…

I have looked at them long, My eyes blur; sourceless light Keeps them forever young Before our ageing sight. You see them-too strict forms

In the twilight of my audacity I saw you flee the world, the burn… Of summer gave up their light: I Followed you with the uncommon spa… Of fear-supported and disbursed ey…

To E. E. Cummings I see the horses and the sad stree… Of my childhood in an agate eye Roving, under the clean sheets, Over a black hole in the sky.

I myself saw furious with blood Neoptolemus, at his side the black… Hecuba and the hundred daughters,… Cut down, his filth drenching the… In that extremity I bore me well,

A Monologue Think about it at will: there is t… Which is the commentary; there’s t… Which may be called the immaculate Conception of its essence in itsel…

An old soldier on the night before… reunion talks partly to himself, p… The people’€”people of my kind, my… People but strange with a white li… In the face: the streets hard with…

Jefferson Davis: 1808-1889 No more the white refulgent street… Never the dry hollows of the mind Shall he in fine courtesy walk Again, for death is not unkind.

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names t… The wind whirrs without recollecti… In the riven troughs the splayed l… Pile up, of nature the casual sacr…

I. A DREAM At nine years a sickly boy lay dow… At bedtime on a cot by mother’s be… And as the two darks merged the ro… So strange it left the boy half de…

The fire I praise was once perdur… Till it snuffs with our generation… No matter, it’s all one, it’s but… Not as late honeysuckle half so st… So think upon it how the fire burn…

Not yet the thirtieth year, the th… Station where time reverses his li… To rim both ways, and makes of for… Whose long coordinates are birth a… And zero is the origin of breath:

To the memory of W. B. Yeats Towards nightfall when the wind Tries the eaves and casements (A winter wind of the mind Long gathering its will)

His dim, ut fama est, vitiis ad pr… his Troiana vides funera principii… I. MADRIGALE Seed in your heart, warm dust tran… Gold, blooms in flakes of radiance