Randall Jarrell

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

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens
The slacked or shorted, basketed,

Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon
Der heilige Hieronymus—his lion is at the zoo—Listens, listens
All the long, soft, summer
Dreams affright his couch, the deep boils like a pot

At the back of the houses there is the wood
While there is a leaf of summer left, the
Makes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
Has paths I can walk, when I wake, to

The saris go by me from the embassies
Cloth from the moon
Cloth from another planet
They look back at the leopard like the leopard

It was not dying: everybody died
It was not dying: we had died before In the routine crashes— and our fields Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,

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, ...

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters

The moon rises
The red cubs
In the ferns by the rotten
Stare over a marsh and a

When the swans turned my sister into a swan I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan's red beak; and the beak would
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the...

A sword in his right hand, a stone in his left hand,
He is naked
Shod and naked
Hatted and naked

The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life
The week is dealt out like a
That children pick up card by card
One keeps getting the same hand

One looks from the
Almost as one looked as a child
In the
What I see still seems to me plain,

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

In the shabby train no seat is vacant
The child in the ripped
Sprawls undisturbed in the
Of the smashed compartment

I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake
Run by a lady my age
She was gay
When I told her that I came from