Cole Swensen Poems

One
Green moves through the tops of trees and grows
lighter greens as it recedes, each of which includes a grey, and among the
greys, or beyond them, waning finely into white, there is one white spot,
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noctes illustratas
(the night has houses)
and the shadow of the fabulous
broken into handfuls—these
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amid the growing craze for automatons
The voice within the device that moves is not
(as if nothing human
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Item: this year:
and made so beautiful August that it made never of the age of
man alive
Comme (as) dit (is) est (said):
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As Albertus Magnus instructs us
that shade is dearer than fruit and the trees be not bitter ones let them
not be
bitter please
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Languor. Succor. Ardor. Such is the tenor of the entry. You open a little door.
The door could be anywhere.
And laid there a face. For instance, at certain points, no longer wishing or able
to emulate Rome,
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In the essay "A Winter Walk," which predated the more famous essay "Walking"
by a few years, Thoreau paid particular attention to the astonishing array of whites

from fog to snow to frost to the crystals growing outward on threads of light. The
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No, worry about nothing
but the chiseling
of hills into distance
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Hand me this hand
The sail is bent
The trail is sold
and the wind tied in knots
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erodes the line between being and place becomes the place of being time and so
the house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the architecture of a storm
The architect tore down room after room until the sound stopped. A ghost is one
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