Yvor Winters Poems

This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
...

I, one who never speaks,
Listened days in summer trees,
Each day a rustling leaf.
...

Where am I now? And what
Am I to say portends?
Death is but death, and not
The most obtuse of ends.
...

My mother
Foresaw deaths
And walked among
Chrysanthemums,
...

Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.
...

The calloused grass lies hard
Against the cracking plain:
Life is a grayish stain;
The salt-marsh hems my yard.
...

The grandeur of deep afternoons,
The pomp of haze on marble hills,
Where every white-walled villa swoons
Through violence that heat fulfills,
...

Where I walk out
to meet you on the
cloth of burning
fields
...

The night was faint and sheer;
Immobile, road and dune.
Then, for a moment, clear,
A plane moved past the moon.
...

The branches,
jointed, pointing
up and out, shine
out like brass.
...