On the desert, between pale mounta… Far whispers creeping through an a… Coyote, on delicate mocking feet, Hovers down the canyon, among the… His voice running wild in the wind…

The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands

I was the patriarch of the shining… Of the blond summer and metallic g… Men vanished at the motion of my h… And when I beckoned they would co… The earth grew dense with grain at…

Now every leaf, though colorless,… With disembodied and celestial lig… And drops without a movement or a… A pillar of darkness to the shifti… The lucent, thin, and alcoholic fl…

Reptilian green the wrinkled throa… Green as a bough of yew the beard; He bent his head, and so I smote; Then for a thought my vision clear… The head dropped clean; he rose an…

Amid the iris and the rose, The honeysuckle and the bay, The wild earth for a moment goes In dust or weed another way. Small though its corner be, the we…

The calloused grass lies hard Against the cracking plain: Life is a grayish stain; The salt-marsh hems my yard. Dry dikes rise hill on hill;

You would extend the mind beyond t… Furious, bending, suffering in thi… And unpoetic dicta; you have been Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fa… As metal singing hard, with firmne…

Dear Emily, my tears would burn y… But for the fire-dry line that mak… Burning my eyes, my fingers, while… Singly the words that crease my he… If I could make some tortured pil…

Where I walk out to meet you on the cloth of burning fields the goldfinches

From the high terrace porch I wat… No light appears, though dark has… Sunk from the cold and monstrous s… Lie naked but not light. The dark… Down the remoter gulleys; pooled,…

Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930 Here for a few short years Strengthen affections; meet, Later, the dull arrears Of age, and be discreet.

I, one who never speaks, Listened days in summer trees, Each day a rustling leaf. Then, in time, my unbelief Grew like my running—

Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I cam… I, sometime living, sometime with… Creeping by iron ways across the b… Wastes of Wyoming, turning in des…