Randall Jarrell

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

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

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

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,

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

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...

If, in an odd angle of the hutment,
A puppy laps the water from a
Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant
Whistles O Paradiso

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,

A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the
The wind waves under the waves of heat

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 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