Donald Justice

Turn your head.
Look.
The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.

Dear ghosts, dear presences,
O my dear parents,
Why were you so sad on porches, whispering?
What great melancholies were loosed among our swings!

Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover. Metal stand. Instructions included. — Sears,
Roebuck CatalogueO my coy darling, still
You wear for me the scent
Of those long afternoons we spent

Me moriré en Paris con aguacero ...
I will die in Miami in the sun,
On a day when the sun is very bright,
A day like the days I remember, a day like other days

One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin. —  John D.
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms
The dank mirrors of

Late arrival,
One would think of blaming
For hesitating so.
Who, setting his hand to

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises

These seven houses have learned to face one another,
But not at the expected angles.
Those silly brown lumps,
That are probably meant for hills and not other houses

But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
T.
S.
It was his story.

Men at
Learn to close
The doors to rooms they will not
Coming back to

But these maneuverings to avoid The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed On objects more or less neutral (As honor, for time being, commands) Will hardly prevent their downfall.
Stronger medicines are…

Jane looks down at her organdy
As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
And she catches it up about her waist,

Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
Here is the shadow moving down the
Where you sit reading by the garden wall.

Thirty today,
I
The trees flare briefly
The candles upon a cake As the sun went down the sky,

This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish.
And it does not matter. The…

The Man Closing Up," from Night Light" (1967), would make his bed,
If he could sleep on it.
He would make his bed with white
And disappear into the white

We shall not ever meet them bearded in
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
forming a ring, perhaps, or joining

-- Coronado Beach,
California,
March, 1905 In a hotel room by the sea, the Master Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster

It always comes, and when it comes they know.
To will it is enough to bring them there.
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.
Their limbs are charmed; they cannot stay or go.

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white
Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down To the valley Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow

It begins again, the nocturnal pulse.
It courses through the cables laid for it.
It mounts to the chandeliers and beats there, hotly.
We are too close.  Too late, we would move back.

Our lives avoided
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

R.
B.
HN speaks: “After so many years of pursuing the ideal I came home.
But I had caught sight of it.