Do You Know Yourself? Poem. no caps lol Craft at work once again!

I do not know myself
I go to dark and am of dark

Ignorant of myself

I sleep and dream--
But not enlightened

Nor when I wake
And remember dream

All I have not seen
All I will not see again

That I will take to ignorant dark

Desire is unchanged
Year on year it is on

Each page to turn
Each face to love

If I loved
Till the end of the world

It would never be done

Once I was a son
Once I had all the time in the world

Now a day starts
Now it ends
Now a window is dark

(by Hugh Seidman)

That was beautiful,man!

HEART's NEEDLE part 1

Child of my winter born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn.

By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will,

All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep

In their smooth covering white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,

And thinks: Here lies my land
Unmarked by agony, the lean foot
Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper's boot;
And I have planned

....continued


(W. D. Snodgrass)

..... Heart's Needle ... continued

--My chances to restrain The torments of demented summer or
Increase the deepening harvest here before It snows again
--Love's wishbone, child, although I've gone As men must and let you be drawn Off to appease another,
It may help that a Chinese play Or Solomon himself might say
I am your real mother.

No one can tell you why the season will not wait;
the night I told you I must leave, you wept a fearful rate
to stay up late.
Now that it's turning Fall, we can go to take our walk
among municipal flowers to steal one off its stalk,
to try and talk.

Winter again and it is snowing Although you are still three,
You are already growing Strange to me.
You chatter about new playmates, sing Strange songs;
you do not know Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding
Or where I go

Or when I sang for bedtime, Fox Went out on a chilly night Before I went for walks And did not write.
You never mind the squalls and storms that are
renewed long since; Outside the thick snow swarms
Into my prints

And swirls out by warehouses, sealed,
dark cowbarns, huddled still beyond to the blank field.
The fox's hill.

When he backtracks and sees the paw,
gnawed off, he cannot feel;
Conceded to the jaw of toothed, blue steel.



....... continued

(W. D. Snodgrass)

Hearts Needle (...continued)

You raise into my head
Fall night that I came once more to sit on your bed
sweat beads stood out on your arms and forehead
and you wheezed for breath, for help,
like some child caught beneath its comfortable
wooly blankets, drowning there.

Your lungs caught and would not take the air Of all things
only we have power to choose that we should die; nothing
else is free in this world to refuse it.
Yet I, who say this, could not raise myself from the bed
how many days to the thieving world.
Child I have another wife, another child
We try to choose our life.

Here in the scuffled dust is our ground of play.
I lift you on your swing and must shove you away
see you return again, drive you off again, and then ....
stand quiet till you come.

You, though you climb
higher, farther from me, longer,
will fall back to me stronger.
Bad penny, pendulum,
you keep my constant time
to bob in blue July
where fat goldfinches fly
over the glittering, fecund
reach of our growing lands.
Once more now, this second,
I hold you in my hands.

(continued)

(by W. D. Snodgrass)

HEART's NEEDLE (...cont'd)

I get numb and go in
though the dry ground will not hold
the few dry swirls of snow
and it must not be very cold.

A friend asks how you've been
and I don't know
or see much right to ask

Or what use it could be to know
In three months since you come
and leaves have fallen and the snow;
your pictures pinned above my desk
seem much the same.

The window's turning white.
The world moves like a diseased heart
packed with ice and snow
Three months now we have been apart
less than a mile. I cannot fight
or let you go.

The vicious winter finally yields
the green winter wheat;
the farmer, tired in the tired fields
he dare not leave, will eat.

Once more the runs come fresh; prevailing
piglets, stout as jugs,
harry their old sow to the railing
to ease her swollen dugs

and game colts trail the herded mates
that circle the pasture courses;
our seasons bring us back once more
like merry-go-round horses.

....... continued

(W. D. Snodgrass)

HEART's NEEDLE (continued)

With crocus mouths, perennial hungers,
into the park Spring comes;
we roast hot dogs on old coat hangers
and feed the swan bread crumbs,
pay our respects to the peacocks, rabbits,
and leathery Canada goose
who took, last Fall, our tame white habits
and now will not turn loose.

In full regalia, the pheasant cocks
march past their dubious hens;
the porcupine and the lean, red fox
trot around bachelor pens.

and the miniature painted train
wails on its oval track;
you said, I'm going to Pennsylvania!
and waved. And you've come back.

If I loved you, they said I'd leave
and find my own affairs.
Well, once again this April, we've
come around to the bears;

punished and cared for, behind bars,
the coons on bread and water
stretch thin black fingers after ours.
And you are still my daughter.

**END**

(W. D. Snodgrass)