Sideways Poems

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
...

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
...

In Baltimore there lived a boy.
He wasn't anybody's joy.
Although his name was Jabez Dawes,
His character was full of flaws. In school he never led his classes,
...

IN SEVEN PARTS

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum
universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus et
...

When all of a sudden the city air filled with snow,
the distinguishable flakes
blowing sideways,
looked like krill
...

This is not bad --
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
...

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther -- and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
...

`You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
...

We live from day to day to day
and we play and we play and we play
we always have and we think we always will
yes there is a brain cell that knows that end it will
...

ST Agnes' Eve---Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
...

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
...

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
...

I'm walking backwards for Christmas,
Across the Irish Sea,
I'm walking backwards for Christmas,
It's the only thing for me.
...

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
...

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face
to face.
...

We’d gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
...

My restless blood now lies a-quiver,
Knowing that always, exquisitely,
This April twilight on the river
Stirs anguish in the heart of me.
...

A city clerk, but gently born and bred;
His wife, an unknown artist's orphan child-
One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:
They, thinking that her clear germander eye
...

Pellam the King, who held and lost with Lot
In that first war, and had his realm restored
But rendered tributary, failed of late
To send his tribute; wherefore Arthur called
...

Awake, of Muse, the echoes of a day
Long past, the ghosts of mem'ries manifold --
Youth's memories that once were green and gold
But now, alas, are grim and ashen grey.
...

I felt it overjoyed
When I saw
An idol of Kali
Dark black
...

Cowboys riding in the Phoenix desert, being thrown from bucking bulls here behind Outlaws.

Little children in the mutton bronc's, holding on for dear life, getting thrown in spite of how tightly they hold on.
...

Just a leg,
A dark black leg
Red-colour water painted
Sideways of the foot
...

A windy and a wet October day
But in the woodland just across the way
A yellow robin's ticking song I do hear
His kind in the wood can be heard at most times of year
...

you mean it would be a sin not to mention the swans here. sex is silence, love—uh—seeping. at the end blips remain to be seen: a flag, a fling. we winged it! maybe not sensible, but without fairy tales, longer hair/langour/longueur of sense. death sentence. off from that i see the specter's bird lid: how it shoves sideways before the lens. which was to be proven: one can throb for everything, the eyes don't fall out of the head, the stillness, even after the worst flattening blows, could move the nothing: not not not not. in its end, its bedeutung. signed, hölderling.

Variation/alternate translation by Traver Pam Dick (previously unpublished)
...

She speaks to me in hieroglyphics. In a row of tiny pictures. Each one brightly coloured. And finely detailed. Each picture never quite straight, always facing sideways. She speaks quickly, one image following another. A long row of them, and then more after that. Her hair is dark as Anubis, her blue eyes of Horus outlined in black. A golden cobra lies coiled around her head. Whenever she speaks, I find myself mesmerized by this endless row of images. Crafted in arcane language, one after the other. A row of brightly-painted hieroglyphics. I wish I knew what she was trying to say
...

.
I'm drifting
drifting with the clouds so gently
gently uplifting and oversteering so purposely
...