LITMIR.BIZ

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found there in dusky lane;

      And which had right-of-way?

      Did he or they move toward or in or

      On away from night?

      Their probing eyes

      And his

      Put weights to hidden scales

      In mutual assize,

      In simple search all stunned

      And amiable apprize.

      Darwin, the rummage collector,

      Longing for wisdom to clap in a box,

      Such lore as already learned and put by

      A billion years back in his blood by the fox.

      Old summer days now gone to flies

      Bestir themselves alert in vixen eyes;

      Some primal cause

      Twitches the old man’s human-seeming paws.

      An ancient sharp surmise is melded here

      And shapes all Dooms

      Which look on Death and know it.

      Darwin all this knows.

      The fox knows he knows.

      But knowing is wise not to show it.

      They stand a moment more upon the uncut lawn.

      Then as if by sign, quit watchfulness;

      Each imitates the other’s careless yawn.

      And with no wave save pluming tail of fox and kin

      Away the creatures go to sleep the day,

      Leaving old Charlie there in curious disarray,

      His hair combed this, his wits the other way.

      So off he ambles, walks, and wanders on,

      Leaving an empty meadow,

      A place

      Where strange lives passed …

      And dawn.

Evidence

      Basking in sun,

      Age 37, mid-Atlantic, on a ship,

      And the ship sailing west,

      Quite suddenly I saw it there

      Upon my chest, the single one,

      The lonely hair.

      The ship was sailing into night.

      The hair was white …

      The sun had set beyond the sky;

      The ship was sailing west,

      And suddenly, O God, why, yes,

      I felt, I knew …

      So was I.

Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are

      Even before you opened your eyes

      You knew it would be one of those days.

      Tell the sky what color it must be,

      And it was indeed.

      Tell the sun how to crochet its way,

      Pick and choose among leaves

      To lay out carpetings of bright and dark

      On the fresh lawn,

      And pick and choose it did.

      The bees have been up earliest of all;

      They have already come and gone

      and come and gone again

      to the meadow fields

      and returned

      all golden fuzz upon the air

      all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full,

      nectar-dripping.

      Don’t you hear them pass?

      hover?

      dance their language?

      telling where the sweet gums are,

      The syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies,

      That make boys squirm with unpronounced juices,

      That make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes

      Their dolphin selves naked

      aflash

      on the warm air

      Poised forever in one

      Eternal

      Glass

      Wave.

Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!

      What did he call, and what was said?

      From the sleep of the dead, from the lone white

      Arctic midnight of his soul

      What shy albino mole peered forth and gave a cry?

      Or was it just the wind asifting through the winter screens

      Upon the attic windows

      Where the dust looks out at dew on empty lawns?

      Or did the dawn mist find a tongue

      And issue like his mystic seaport tides

      From out his mouth while, all-unknowing, drowned, he slept

      And dreamed on … Emily?

      O what a shame, that these two wanderers

      Of three A.M. did not somehow contrive

      To knock each other’s elbows drifting late

      On sidewalks-vast inhabited by only leaves

      And mice and tracks of silver from lost hieroglyphic snails.

      How sad that from a long way off these two

      Did not surprise each other’s ghosts,

      One sailing lawns, the other ocean storms,

      Strike up a conversation out of single simple words,

      Alarms repeated and re-echoed, and so make up a life

      From halves which separated long before the oceans rolled

      Still sought each other, but in different towns.

      Un-met and doomed they went their ways

      To never greet or make mere summer comment

      On her attic mothball or his sea-dog days.

      Death would not stop for her,

      Yet White graves yawned for him,

      Each loved one half of that which, grim, enticed and beckoned,

      Yet neither reckoned it as half a life for each;

      With sudden reach they might have found

      Each other and in meld and fuse and fusion

      Then beheld between the two, two halves of loving Life,

      And so made one!

      Two halves of sun

      To

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