The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has mov…

You can’t put in the ground swell… from the Christiansted, St.Croix,… behind the paratrooper’s voice: ‘T… after Vietnam. I made thirty jump… Bells punish the dead street and p…

Those five or six young guys lunched on the stoop that oven-hot summer night whistled me over. Nice and friendly. So, I stop.

There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at ni… on that branched tree from which m… like falling fruit around the scho… But things must fall, and so it al…

Old Eddie’s face, wrinkled with r… Looked like a Mississippi man’s.… Derisive and avuncular at once, Swivelling, fixed me. They’d see… Too many wakes, too many cathouse…

though our longest sun sets at rig… makes but winter arches, it cannot be long before we lie do… have our light in ashes. . . Browne, Urn Burial

I came up out of the subway and th… people standing on the steps as if… something I didn’t. This was in t… and nuclear fallout. I looked and… was empty, I mean utterly, and I…

The last leaves fell like notes fr… and left their ovals echoing in th… with gawky music stands, the winte… looks like an empty orchestra, its… ruled on these scattered manuscrip…

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies… Batten upon the bloodstreams of th… Corpses are scattered through a pa… Only the worm, colonel of carrion,…

There were still shards of an anci… in those shires of the island wher… their pools of shadow from an olde… surviving from when the landscape… ‘Herefords at Sunset in the valle…

As for that other thing which comes when the eyelid is gla… and the wax gleam from the unwrinkled forehead asks no more questions

BOOK SIX Chapter XLIV In hill-towns, from San Fernando… the same sunrise stirred the feath… down the archipelago’s highways. T…

Then all the nations of birds lift… the huge net of the shadows of thi… in multitudinous dialects, twitter… stitching and crossing it. They li… the shadows of long pines down tra…

The growing idleness of summer gra… With its frail kites of furious bu… Requests the lemonade of simple pr… In scansion gentler than my hammoc… And rituals no more upsetting than…

[for Alix Walcott] Between the vision of the Tourist… Paradise lies the desert where Is… force a rose from the sand. The th… cores the dawn clouds with concent…