Robert Francis Poems

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
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Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice-
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A seated statue of himself he seems.
A bronze slowness becomes him. Patently
The page he contemplates he doesn't see.
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The first speaker said
Fear fire. Fear furnaces
Incinerators, the city dump
The faint scratch of a match.
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Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
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The beautiful is fair. The just is fair.
Yet one is commonplace and one is rare,
One everywhere, one scarcely anywhere.
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The winter apples have been picked, the garden turned.
Rain and wind have picked the maple leaves and gone.
The last of them now bank the house or have been burned.
None are left upon the trees or on the lawn.
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Bull by day
And dozes by night.

Would that the bulldozer
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Words of a poem should be glass
But glass so simple-subtle its shape
Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.
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Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.
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