The Art of Poetry No. 72
“All young men are unhappy. That's why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They're unhappy in a formless kind of way . . . [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.”
“All young men are unhappy. That's why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They're unhappy in a formless kind of way . . . [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.”
The traveler struggles through a wood. He is lost.
The traveler is at home. He never left.
He seeks his way on the conflicting trails,
Now you are a bag of ash
Scattered on a coastal ridge,
Where you watched the distant crash,
For one who watches with too little rest
A body rousing fitfully to its pain
—The nerves like dull burns where the sheet has pressed—
I look round the cluttered
icons of your room:
quilt, photo, stuffed bird.
He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
The ice plant is not in flower:
it extends, a springy floor
over the rocks and the sand
My body trots semblably
on Market Street. I control
the singular spy from my
New face, strange face, for my unrest.
I hunt your look, and lust marks time
Dark in his doubtful uniform,
Here is a room with heavy-footed chairs,
A glass bell loaded with wax grapes and pears,
A polished table, holding down the look
Lictor or heavy slave would wear it best,
The robe of uncapricious Emperor,
Waging a profitable war, at least
Martin sat young upon his bed
A budding cenobite,
Said ‘Though I hold the principles
Look, in the attic, the unentered room,
A naked boy leans on the outspread knees
Of his tall brother lolling in costume,
The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
One night I reached a cave: I slept, my head
Full of the air. There came about daybreak
A red-coat soldier to the mouth who said
You are not random picked. I tell you you
Are much like the one I knew before, that died.
Shall we sit down, and drink and munch a while