Donald Revell Poems

I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar
In a war movie on the arm
Of a young actor. He has just swum
...

Virgil watched them
Crossing the river away from him
The fathers without their children
Only a little while
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Birds small enough to nest in our young cypress
Are physicians to us

They burst from the tree exactly
Where the mind ends and the eye sees
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When the world was loveliness I was
A composer, Borodin, my left eye
Level with the floor beside toy men.
Wild work and havoc they made,
...

Death calls my dog by the wrong name.
A little man when I was small, Death grew
Beside me, always taller, but always
Confused as I have almost never been.
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Linoleum and half a dozen eggs
In 1960
Many towered Ilium
A brand name and a shopping list too
...

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry "We are ripe, reap us!"
—Ted Hughes
I begin to think Actaeon never changed.
...

1

Fitfully in pictures disappearing now,
They are not toys but, rather, tiny horses
In the parade of youth: polish, spit, and display
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The climate thinks with its knees.
When the wound opens, music suspires.
Opening a gate, I gain the color
below the roof tiles and the tree limbs.
...

Before anything could happen,
flecks of real gold
on her mouth, her eyes more
convex than any others,
...