PolyArchive

The Underground Seamus Heaney There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Behind you before you turned to a reed Or some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off […]

Digging Seamus Heaney Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through […]

Coda Dorothy Parker There’s little in taking or giving, There’s little in water or wine; This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent […]

Ground Swell Mark Jarman   Is nothing real but when I was fifteen, Going on sixteen, like a corny song? I see myself so clearly then, and painfully– Knees bleeding through my usher’s uniform Behind the candy counter in the theater After a morning’s surfing; paddling frantically To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me, […]

Discordants Conrad Aiken I. (Bread and Music) MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you, all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver, And I have […]

Marginalia Billy Collins Sometimes the notes are ferocious, Skirmishes against the author Raging along the borders of every page In tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, They seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments […]

Infirmity Theodore Roethke In purest song one plays the constant fool As changes shimmer in the inner eye. I stare and stare into a deepening pool And tell myself my image cannot die. I love myself: that’s my one constancy. Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; […]

pity this busy monster, manunkind E. E. Cummings pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness –electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of […]

Ulysses (1833) Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson(1809–92) It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink […]

…Among those “enemies” prosecuted as a parasite was Joseph Brodsky, a young poet and future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, he was considered among “the most politically unreliable” people, because he  “was part of a circle of anti-Soviet individuals” and “wrote poems of a decadent and even hostile nature” instead of engaging in activities that […]

  If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. –T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets The Heidelberg Project is an art environment in the heart of Detroit’s east side. The project was started by artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather, Sam Mackey, in 1986. After serving in […]

Travelogue for Exiles Karl Shapiro Look and remember. Look upon this sky; Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air, The unconfined, the terminus of prayer. Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome. What do you hear? What does the sky reply? The heavens are taken: this is not your home. Look and remember. […]

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering — this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, […]

EVERY EXPLORER NAMES his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful–except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered. Walker […]