The sun has come.
The mist has gone.
We see in the distance...
our long way home.
I was always yours to have.

Abstraction is an old story with t
Granted no one but a humanist much
Then there is this wildness whereo
It should be of the pleasure of a
No tears in the writer, no tears i

To step over the low wall that div
Road from concrete walk above the
Brings sharply back something know
The miniature gaiety of seasides.
Everything crowds under the low ho

When I think about myself,
I almost laugh myself to death,
My life has been one great big jok
A dance that’s walked
A song that’s spoke,

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hum
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there t
Here the clam deep in the speckled

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

I thought it would last my time—
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and f
Where the village louts could clim
Such trees as were not cut down;

Go to Tibet.
Ride a camel.
Read the Bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a Beard.

I was a bum in San Francisco but
to go to a symphony concert along
and the music was good but somethi
audience was not
and something about the orchestra

There are similarities
I notice: that the hills
which the eyes make flat as a wall
together, open as I move
to let me through; become

Understand, I am always trying to
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,

Many authorities on bird life had
It was a remarkably fine phoenix,
It costs a great deal of money to
For quite a while Mr. Poldero con
But then business slackened. The

Up, black, striped and demasked li
At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tai
Paraded the skunk. Night after ni
I expected her like a visitor.
The refrigerator whinnied into sil

The apes yawn and adore their flea
The parrots shriek as if they were
Like cheap tarts to attract the st
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and
Lie still as the sun. The boa-con

We wear the mask that grins and li
It shades our cheeks and hides our
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts…
We smile and mouth the myriad subt

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,

The earth was green, the sky was b
I saw and heard one sunny morn,
A skylark hang between the two,
A singing speck above the corn;
A stage below, in gay accord,

The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that
Some people wrap their lies around
And you sit wondering

We sit indoors and talk of the col
And every gust that gathers streng
Is a threat to the house. But the
We think of the tree. If it never
We’ll know, we say, that this was

you won’t see them often
for wherever the crowd is
they
are not.
those odd ones, not

No speed of wind or water rushing
But you have speed far greater. Y
Back up a stream of radiance to th
And back through history up the st
And you were given this swiftness,

Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn’t frighten me at all
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording

My son, my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
And whom my body warms.
Sweet death, small son, our instru

On the grass when I arrive,
Filling the stillness with life,
But ready to scare off
At the very first wrong move.
In the ivy when I leave.

Not quite four a.m., when the rapt
strikes me from sleep, and I rise
from the comfortable bed and go
to another room, where my books ar
in their neat and colorful rows. H

Let me tell you a little story
About Miss Edith Gee;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace
At number 83.
She’d a slight squint in her left

I know someone who kisses the way
a flower opens, but more rapidly.
Flowers are sweet. They have
short, beatific lives. They offer
much pleasure. There is

Don’t call this world adorable, or
It’s frisky, and a theater for mor
The eyelash of lightning is neithe
The struck tree burns like a pilla
But the blue rain sinks, straight

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blo
The winter sun creeps by the snow
The stubborn season has made stand
My life is light, waiting for the
Like a feather on the back of my h

Either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you
when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.

I can see myself now
after all these suicide days and n
being wheeled out of one of those
(of course, this is only if I get
by a subnormal and bored nurse

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,

Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,