The Elementary Scene
Looking back in my mind I can see The white sun like a tin plate Over the wooden turning of the weeds;
The street jerking —a wet swing— To end by the wall the children sang. The thin grass by the girls' door,
Trodden on, straggling, yellow and rotten,
And the gaunt field with its one tied cow— The dead land waking sadly to my life— Stir, and curl deeper in the eyes of time. The rotting pumpkin under the stairs Bundled with switches and the cold ashes Still holds for me, in its unwavering eyes,
The stinking shapes of cranes and witches,
Their path slanting down the pumpkin's sky. Its stars beckon through the frost like cottages (Homes of the Bear, the Hunter—of that absent star,
The dark where the flushed child struggles into sleep) Till, leaning a lifetime to the comforter,
I float above the small limbs like their dream: I,
I, the future that mends everything.
Randall Jarrell
Other author posts
Seele Im Raum
It sat between my husband and my children A place was set for it—a plate of greens It had been there: I had seen it But not somehow—but this was like a dream— Not seen it so that I knew I saw it
Mail Call
The letters always just evade the One skates like a stone into a beam, falls like a bird Surely the past from which the letters Is waiting in the future, past the graves
Gunner
Did they send me away from my cat and my To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth, To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent Did I nod in the flies of the schools
The Breath Of Night
The moon rises The red cubs In the ferns by the rotten Stare over a marsh and a
