Boy and Egg
Every few minutes, he wants
to march the trail of flattened rye grass
back to the house of muttering . . .
Every few minutes, he wants
to march the trail of flattened rye grass
back to the house of muttering . . .
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter . . .
‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ‘tis light? . . .
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart, . . .
I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;
I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb
and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely, . . .
Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads
At last we came into the unleashed wind;
The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end . . .
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
. . .
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper, . . .