Sheet Music
If you cannot trust the dog, the faithful one?
And is this anyway a dog? The shadows move,
Dog and dog, two lanky figures, three, sniffing . . .
If you cannot trust the dog, the faithful one?
And is this anyway a dog? The shadows move,
Dog and dog, two lanky figures, three, sniffing . . .
I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
. . .
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days, . . .
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
. . .
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
. . .
Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now
Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung
To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice. . . .
On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique . . .
There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea, . . .
Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
. . .
Nautilus Island’sNautilus Island’s Lowell once remarked, “The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town.” hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea. . . .