Weldon Kees

Iron, sulphur, steam: the wastes
Of all resorts like this have left their traces.
Old canes and crutches line the walls.
Light

The surgical mask, the rubber
Are singed, give off an evil smell.
You seem to weep more now that
Spreads everywhere we look.

When the
Gave out, we
Burning the books, one by one;
First the

The middle is the place to stand If there can be one solid spot,
Undoubted, in that damaged land.
Two schools exist; one says there is No region lacking hazard, pain,
And fear; the other mentions plains

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…

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

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

"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ "
wholeheartedly."But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead
Raked in piles, the wicker
Creaking.

"A equals X," says Mister One."A equals B," says Mister Two."A equals nothing under the
But A," says Mister Three.
A
Applaud; some wipe their eyes;

—That spot of blood on the drawing room wall,
No larger than a thumbnail when I looked a moment ago,
Is spreading,
Cousin Agatha, and growing brighter.

It must have been in March the rug wore through.
Now the day passes and I
At warped pine boards my father's father nailed,
At the twisted grain.

“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…

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.  I found him

To build a quiet city in his mind:
A single overwhelming wish; to build,
Not hastily, for there is so much wind,
So many eager smilers to be killed,

Plurality is all.
I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores;
I ride the cars and hear of Mrs.
Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the…

Squat, unshaven, full of gas,
Joseph Samuels, former clerkin four large cities, out of work,
waits in the darkened underpass.
In sanctuary, out of reach

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.
All winter long, it seemed, a darkening Began.
But now the moonlight and the odors of the street Conspire and combine toward one community.
These are the rooms of Robinson.

Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.
From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite Twisted above…

The war is in words and the wood is the
That turns beneath our rootless feet;
the vines that reach, alive and snarled,
Across the path where the sand is swirled

The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow
and old:

The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over.
The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano

Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six or more.
Whether at dusk or
Or at blinding noon, a