Mary Barnard Poems

After reading Ash Wednesday
she looked once at the baked beans
and fled. Luncheonless, poor girl,
she observed a kind of poetic Lent—
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Rotting in the wet gray air
the railroad depot stands deserted under
still green trees. In the fields
cold begins an end.
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Ink-black, but moving independently
across the black and white parquet of print,
the ant cancels the author out. The page,
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Out of a high meadow where flowers
bloom above cloud, come down;
pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice.
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What's geography? What difference what mountain
it is? In the intimacy of this altitude
its discolored snowfields overhang half the world.
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At supper time an ondine's narrow feet
made dark tracks on the hearth.
Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire's heat,
but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold.
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Wheel of sorrow, centerless.
Voices, sad without cause,
slope upward, expiring on grave summits.
Mournfulness of muddy playgrounds,
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The seas has made a wall for its defence
of falling water. Those whose impertinence
leads them to its moving ledges
it rejects. Those who surrender
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