Tercet Poems
The Auroras of Autumn
by Wallace Stevens
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.
Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?
This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
......
Long Feud
by Louis Untermeyer
Where, without bloodshed, can there be
A more relentless enmity
Than the long feud fought silently
Between man and the growin grass.
Man's the aggressor, for he has
Weapons to humble and harass
The impudent spears that charge upon
His sacred privacy of lawn.
......
Sea Surface Full Of Clouds
by Wallace Stevens
In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine
Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
......
The Ditty the City Sang
by Alfred Kreymborg
If a lad's but a lad in the heart of a town,
Is it mad he has grown, or a dunce or a clown,
When he crowns common sights with delights of his own?
He thought he saw ships at the end of the street
With songs that the wind taught the sails to repeat.
But washlines have nothing like ships on their feet.
He thought he saw figures and faces you miss
Coming back to embracing no more than a kiss.
......
Nobody Riding the Roads Today
by June Jordan
Nobody riding the roads today
But I hear the living rush
far away from my heart
Nobody meeting on the streets
But I rage from the crowded
overtones of emptiness
Nobody sleeping in my bed
But I breathe like windows
broken by emergencies
Nobody laughing anymore
......
Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu
by Lucien Stryk
What do they think of
Where they lean
Like ponderous heads, the rocks?—
In prankish spring, ducks
Joggling here
And there, brushing tails,
Like silly thoughts shared,
Passed from head
......
The Auroras of Autumn
by Wallace Stevens
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.
Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?
This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
......
Sea Surface Full Of Clouds
by Wallace Stevens
In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine
Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
......
Oak Leaves are Hands
by Wallace Stevens
In Hydaspia, by Howzen
Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,
For whom what is was other things.
Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.
Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
......
Repetitions of a Young Captain
by Wallace Stevens
A tempest cracked on the theatre. Quickly,
The wind beat in the roof and half the walls.
The ruin stood still in an external world.
It had been real. It was something overseas
That I remembered, something that I remembered
Overseas, that stood in an external world.
It had been real. It was not now. The rip
Of the wind and the glittering were real now,
......
