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| "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" The houses are haunted by white nightgowns. None are green, or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings, or yellow with blue rings, none of them are strange, with socks of lace and beaded ceintures. People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather. *Wallace Stevens |
| "The Pike" The river turns, leaving a place for the eye to rest, a furred, a rocky pool, a bottom of water. The crabs tilt and eat, leisurely, and the small fish lie, without shadow, motionless, or drift lazily in and out of the weeds. The bottom-stones shimmer back their irregular striations, and the half-sunken branch bends away from the gazer's eye. A scene for the self to abjure!-- and I lean, almost into the water, my eye always beyond the surface reflection; I leans, and love these manifold shapes, until, out from a dark cove, from beyond the end of a mossy log, with one sinuous ripple, then a rush, a thrashing-up of the whole pool, the pike strikes. *Theodore Roethke |
| "The Explorer" Somehow to find a still spot in the noise was the frayed inner want, the winding, the frayed hope whose tatters he kept hunting through the din. A velvet peace somewhere. A room of wily hush somewhere within. So tipping down the scrambled halls he set vague hands on throbbing knobs. There were behind only spiraling, high human voices, the scream of nervous affairs, wee grief. grand griefs. And choices. He feared most of all the choices, that cried to be taken. There were no bourns. There were no quiet rooms. *Gwendolyn Brooks |
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| "Market" Ragged boys lift sweets, haggle for venomgreen and scarlet gelatins. A broken smile dandles its weedy cigarette over papayas too tripe and pyramids of rotting oranges. Turkeys like feather- duster flowes lie trussed in bunchy smother. The barefoot cripple foraging crawls among rinds, orts, chewed butts, trampled peony droppings-- his hunger litany and suppliant before altars of mamey, pineapple, mango. Turistas pass. Por caridad, por caridad. Lord, how they stride on the hard good legs money has made them. . . |
| . . .Ay! you creatures who have walked on seas of money all your foreign lives! Por caridad. Odor of a dripping flyblown carcass moans beneath the hot fragrance of carnations, cool scent of lilies. Starveling dogs hover in the reek of frying; ashy feet (the twistfoot beggar laughs) kick at them in vain. Aloft the Fire King's flashing mask of tin looks down with eyes of sunstruck glass. *Robert Hayden |
| "Grape Sherbet" The day? Memorial? After the grill Dad appears with his masterpiece-- swirled snow, gelled light. We cheer. The recipe's a secret and he fights a smile, his cap turned up so the bib resembles a duck. That morning we galloped through the grassed-over mounds and named each stone for a lost milk tooth. Each dollop of sherbet, later, is a miracle, like salt on a melon that makes it sweeter. Everyone agrees--it's wonderful! It's just how we imagined lavender would taste. The diabetic grandmother stares from the porch, a torch of pure refusal. We thought no one was lying there under our feet, we thought it was a joke. I've been trying to remember the taste, but it doesn't exist. Now I see why you bothered, father. *Rita Dove |
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