Weldon Kees

Last summer, in the blue heat,
Over the beach, in the burning air,
A legless beggar lurched on calloused
To where I waited with the sun-dazed birds

Over the river and through the woods To grandmother’s house we go
She waits behind the bolted door,
Her withered face in thirty pieces,
While blood runs thin, and memory,

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Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns, But that was quite some time ago
Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs, Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant
Moving through ivy in the park Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate; But tha...

Butcher the evil millionaire, peasant,
And leave him stinking in the square
Torture the chancellor
Leave the

“I want to get away somewhere and re-read Proust,” Said an editor of Fortune to a man on Time
But the fire roared and died, the phoenix quacked like a goose,
And all roads to the country fray like shawls Outside the dusk of suburbs
...

Under the bunker, where the reek of kerosene Prepared the marriage rite, leader and whore,
Imperfect kindling even in this wind, burn on
Someone in uniform hums Brahms
Servants

For a
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it

In the broken light, in owl weather,
Webs on the lawn where the leaves end,
I took the thin moon and the sky for
To pick the cat's brains and descendA weedy hill

Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read Beneath the innocence of morning flesh Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night’s slow p...

Between the visits to the shock
The doctors used to let you
On the old upright
Donated by a former

This nothingness that feeds upon itself:
Pencils that turn to water in the hand,
Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air,
Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass,

Then walk the floor, or twist upon your bed While bullets, cold and blind, rush backward from the target’s eye,
And say, “I will not dream that dream again
I will not dream Of long-spent whispers vanishing down corridors That turn throug...