3

Theodore Roethke

1Night Crow

When I saw that clumsy crow

Flap from a wasted tree,

A shape in the mind rose up:

Over the gulfs of dream

5Flew a tremendous bird

Further and further away

Into a moonless black,

Deep in the brain, far back.

2 I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

The shapes a bright container can contain!

5

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,

Or English poets who grew up on Greek

(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;

10She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

Coming behind her for her pretty sake

(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

15Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;

She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;

Her several parts could keep a pure repose,

20Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

I’m martyr to a motion not my own;

What’s freedom for? To know eternity.

25I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

But who would count eternity in days?

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:

(I measure time by how a body sways).

3 Wish for a Young Wife

My lizard, my lively writher,

May your limbs never wither,

May the eyes in your face

Survive the green ice

5Of envy’s mean gaze;

May you live out your life

Without hate, without grief,

And your hair ever blaze,

In the sun, in the sun,

10When I am undone,

When I am no one.

Fog

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

Carl Sandburg

1It sits looking

over harbor and city

5on silent haunches

and then moves on.

2 Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

5And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

10 I am the grass.

Let me work.

3 Cool Tombs

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the

copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and

collateral turned ashes] . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a

pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? . . . in the dust,

in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero

or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are

losers . . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in

the cool tombs