January Poems - Poems For January

O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire, What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire The streams than under ice. June could not hire Her roses to forego the strength they learn In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn The bridges thou dost lay where men desire In vain to build. O Heart, when Love's sun goes To northward, and the sounds of singing cease, Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace. Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose. Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows, The winter is the winter's own release.

I I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them: the domes of the Church of the Paulist Fathers in Weehawken against a smoky dawn -- the heart stirred -- are beautiful as Saint Peters approached after years of anticipation. II Though the operation was postponed I saw the tall probationers in their tan uniforms hurrying to breakfast! III -- and from basement entries neatly coiffed, middle aged gentlemen with orderly moustaches and well-brushed coats IV -- and the sun, dipping into the avenues streaking the tops of the irregular red houselets, and the gay shadows drooping and drooping. V -- and a young horse with a green bed-quilt on his withers shaking his head: bared teeth and nozzle high in the air! VI --and a semicircle of dirt-colored men about a fire bursting from an old ash can, VII -- and the worn, blue car rails (like the sky!) gleaming among the cobbles! VIII -- and the rickety ferry-boat "Arden"! What an object to be called "Arden" among the great piers, -- on the ever new river! "Put me a Touchstone at the wheel, white gulls, and we'll follow the ghost of the Half Moon to the North West Passage -- and through! (at Albany!) for all that!" IX Exquisite brown waves -- long circlets of silver moving over you! enough with crumbling ice crusts among you! The sky has come down to you, lighter than tiny bubbles, face to face with you! His spirit is a white gull with delicate pink feet and a snowy breast for you to hold to your lips delicately! X The young doctor is dancing with happiness in the sparkling wind, alone at the prow of the ferry! He notices the curdy barnacles and broken ice crusts left at the slip's base by the low tide and thinks of summer and green shell-crusted ledges among the emerald eel-grass! XI Who knows the Palisades as I do knows the river breaks east from them above the city -- but they continue south -- under the sky -- to bear a crest of little peering houses that brighten with dawn behind the moody water-loving giants of Manhattan. XII Long yellow rushes bending above the white snow patches; purple and gold ribbon of the distant wood: what an angle you make with each other as you lie there in contemplation. XIII Work hard all your young days and they'll find you too, some morning staring up under your chiffonier at its warped bass-wood bottom and your soul -- out! -- among the little sparrows behind the shutter. XIV -- and the flapping flags are at half-mast for the dead admiral. XV All this -- was for you, old woman. I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can't understand it? But you got to try hard -- But -- Well, you know how the young girls run giggling on Park Avenue after dark when they ought to be home in bed? Well, that's the way it is with me somehow.

Again I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window: Play louder. You will not succeed. I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. And the wind, as before, fingers perfectly its derisive music.

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires, Shall the blind horse sing sweeter? Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer The supper and knives of a mood. In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms, An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires, Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food, Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair In a wind that plucked a goose, Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs, Rounds to look at the red, wagged root. Because there stands, one story out of the bum city, That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea Secretly in statuary, Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street, Not spin to stare at an old year Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries Like the mauled pictures of boys? The salt person and blasted place I furnish with the meat of a fable. If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble An upright man in the antipodes Or spray-based and rock-chested sea: Over the past table I repeat this present grace.