creature of liminal spaces

And for today, April 13: Ada Limón. I borrowed K's copy of The Carrying to post this, since mine is back in Houston. I love this poem, and it's also one of like four or five poems on my "post this eventually" list that involves horses. We saw several horses on our drive to dinner tonight, and some of them were wearing COATS. (It's cold here.)

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn't a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

—Ada Limón, "What I Didn't Know Before," from The Carrying, 2018.

my color's green

I had a really lovely day today, even though I also did like four loads of laundry and had to run several stupid errands. I also drank coffee and ate croissants outside, and went the farmers' market, and watched a couple of episodes of a new show with my drama-watching buddies, and got to hug and spend time with two different friends in person, which was pretty much the best thing I've gotten to do in months. Tomorrow I have to clean and pack and get organized, and on Monday I leave for vacation, the first trip involving an airplane I've taken in over a year. I can't wait.

     —after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

     —for Walter Aikens

—Ross Gay, "Sorrow Is Not My Name" from Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

only your savage heart

This poem is also for Lan Wangji, and for Wei Wuxian, and for my extraordinarily talented friend helcinda, who just posted her phenomenal vid album, The Black Parade: an Untamed Vid Album. It's a masterpiece, and I honestly don't have words for how good it is, or for how many times it has made me cry and clutch my heart with feelings. So, in honor of those feelings, here's some Pablo Neruda. I post a lot of Neruda, but let's be honest: he wrote some of the very best love poetry in any language, and I always spend at least a couple of hours narrowing down my choices. This seemed like the right one, today. ♥

De las estrellas que admiré, mojadas
por ríos y rocíos diferentes,
yo no escogí sino la que yo amaba
y desde entonces duermo con la noche.

De la ola, una ola y otra ola,
verde mar, verde frío, rama verde,
yo no escogí sino una sola ola:
la ola indivisible de tu cuerpo.

Todos las gotas, todas las raíces,
todos los hilos de la luz vinieron,
me vinieron a ver tarde o temprano.

Yo quise para mí tu cabellera.
Y de todos los dones de mi patria
sólo escogí tu corazón salvaje.


Of all the stars I admired, drenched
in various rivers and mists,
I chose only the one I love.
Since then I sleep with the night.

Of all the waves, one wave and another wave,
green sea, green chill, branchings of green,
I chose only the one wave,
the indivisible wave of your body.

All the waterdrops, all the roots,
all the threads of light gathered to me here;
they came to me sooner or later.

I wanted your hair, all for myself.
From all the graces my homeland offered
I chose only your savage heart.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XLVI from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

what doesn't change

Yesterday night, on the subway home from a very lovely evening of friends and birthday celebrations, I asked N. what poem I should post. She said, "a poem about a train," and I laughed and then went home and posted Neruda. But I kept thinking about train poems.

Roselva says the only thing that doesn't change  
is train tracks. She's sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery  
by the side, but not the tracks.
I've watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn't curve, doesn't break, doesn't grow.

Peter isn't sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train  
is a changed track. The metal wasn't shiny anymore.  
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.  
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn't change.

Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.  
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound  
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Trying to Name What Doesn't Change" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland: Far Corner Books, 1995). As always, I love her.

half-tipsy with the wonder of being alive

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

—Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) "Great Things Have Happened," from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread, Nineties Press, 1993. (I first encountered this poem on tumblr, and tracked it down to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, which is an invaluable source for my National Poetry Month posts.)

To be fair, I do have a lot of feelings about the moon landing, although it didn't happen in my lifetime. (I frequently think fond, slightly sad thoughts about that one fic I wrote that one time about Steve Rogers watching the footage of the moon landing that I can't actually post because it's a sequel to a story I'm never going to finish and a prequel to a story I'm never going to write, and it doesn't really work out of context.) But anyway. I like this poem.

tell a new story

Is it still the 13th? I had a surprisingly busy day. Here is a poem that is excellent to read late at night, and is also by a friend of mine! My friend Charlie has been spending National Poetry Month Aprils with me since my very first year of posting poems, a million years ago in 2007 when we were both in college, and now he is a published poet! HOW COOL IS THAT? I love this poem.

The night the paintings opened, we
were young again,
outside the lines and still wet. Your feet
left blue on the marble floor when you
came over with your guitar and
gave me a lopsided wink. I finally
put down that goddamned hairbrush and
shook out my curls, smears of carmine
sliding on your skin like the heart
your artist had decided
was broken. We
were hungry, so
ducking between the sprinkler systems
and the flames, we
stole some of Cézanne’s peaches and
ran out to tell a new story.

—Charlie Byrd, "Pentimento," published in Liminality Issue No. 2, Winter 2014/2015, here.

this world's profane loveliness

This is a particularly rough week for my friend K, and she asked if she could make a request. Then she sent me this poem.

Here is a thing about graduate school: it can be miserable, and lonely, and isolating, but when you form a real and lasting friendship in the grad school trenches, it matters. It matters for its rarity, and because you've gone through a particular kind of hell together that also comes with some truly glorious high points; on the one hand, you're crying on the phone at two in the morning because you might need to quit the program, and on the other hand, the next day you spend three hours talking about John Donne. Which is all to say that this is for K, who is, along with John Donne and poems like this one, my light in the darkness of graduate school.

1.

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—
Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea
glimmering in pale beneath a starless black. . .

2.

No, scratch that too. I'm all exotic
metaphor, inkhorn snarls, never content
with the unelaborated thing;

always the forced apotheosis,
every least sparrow a visible sign,
strong-arming water to wine. So tenderly

I love this world's profane loveliness,
its small, scarce loveliness, like a puritan
I batter magnitude out of homespun.

3.

Faithless my zeal, for the puritan's faith
imputes us all with a roughhouse grace, most
lovely in our brokenness, bruised and bent

to glory. Scratch that—to sufficiency.
Start again: The stars are black with storms
blown shoreward; the dinoflagellates

smacked on the shoals leak light from shattered cells;
they phosphoresce the breakers in their roister.
Let me sing, then, the beauty of creatures

microscopic, who make the vastness gleam
in smithereens.

4.

                       See: starlike, after all.

—Kimberly Johnson (b. 1971), "Easter, Looking Westward." Originally published in The Journal, Ohio State University, 2006.

I heard Kimberly Johnson read some of her poetry last year, and—as I think this poem demonstrates very well—she's really extraordinary. She's also a professor of Renaissance literature, which is sort of reassuring to me personally. I think this poem is breathtaking regardless of its references, but that said, John Donne's Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward is certainly worth reading or rereading, especially today.

sane and spring-like

I have big plans for the rest of the month (not really big plans, just a spreadsheet), so here is one last sonnet for the road. Okay, actually, I am breaking a rule: here are two last sonnets for the road, because today I cannot choose. I always forget how fucking flawless Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are until I'm reading them again, and then they knock the breath right out of me. Angry feminist readers and complicated, multi-various love are pretty much the fastest ways to my heart.

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

*

I pray you if you love me, bear my joy
A little while, or let me weep your tears;
I, too, have seen the quavering Fate destroy
Your destiny's bright spinning—the dull shears
Meeting not neatly, chewing at the thread,—
Nor can you well be less aware how fine,
How staunch as wire, and how unwarranted
Endures the golden fortune that is mine.
I pray you for this day at least, my dear,
Fare by my side, that journey in the sun;
Else must I turn me from the blossoming year
And walk in grief the way that you have gone.
Let us go forth together in the spring:
Love must be this, if it be anything.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Sonnets VIII and V (respectively) from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, 1920, of which I have a beautiful and battered first edition that I picked up in a used bookstore one poetry month past, and may mean that I never post any Edna St. Vincent Millay poems that do not appear in this book.

and seven planets blazing in her hair

It's my birthday! I HAVE SURVIVED THE YEAR OF ROCKSTAR DEATH. Today's celebratory plans involve lighting cupcakes on fire with a blowtorch, so I may not survive the year of rockstar death by very much, but at least I will have a good time. (Possibly we should invite the firemen from next door to my party.) I've already been out to brunch, and put on a lot of glittery eye makeup; later this afternoon, we are having a bunch of people over for a birthday shindig, because I have great friends, and I think my birthday is a pretty good excuse to have a party. I flatly refuse to have anything other than an excellent day. What else are birthdays for?

Well. Birthdays are also for Auden. It's actually sort of shocking that I haven't posted this one, before.

By all means sing of love but, if you do,
Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo:
When ladies ask How much do you love me?
The Christian answer is cosi-cosi;
But poets are not celibate divines:
Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks,
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons;
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.

Suppose your Beatrice be, as usual, late,
And you would tell us how it feels to wait,
You're free to think, what may be even true,
You're so in love that one hour seems like two,
But write—As I sat waiting for her call,
Each second longer darker seemed than all
(Something like this but more elaborate still)
Those raining centuries it took to fill
That quarry whence Endymion's Love was torn;
From such ingenious fibs are poems born.
Then, should she leave you for some other guy,
Or ruin you with debts, or go and die,
No metaphor, remember, can express
A real historical unhappiness;
Your tears have value if they make us gay;
Oh Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.

The living girl's your business (some odd sorts
Have been an inspiration to men's thoughts):
Yours may be old enough to be your mother,
Or have one leg that's shorter than the other,
Or play Lacrosse or do the Modern Dance,
To you that's destiny, to us it's chance;
We cannot love your love till she takes on,
Through you, the wonders of a paragon.
Sing her triumphant passage to our land,
The sun her footstool, the moon in her right hand,
And seven planets blazing in her hair,
Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air;
Tell how her fleet by nine king swans is led,
Wild geese write magic letters overhead
And hippocampi follow in her wake
With Amphisboene, gentle for her sake;
Sing her descent on the exulting shore
To bless the vines and put an end to war.

If half-way through such praises of your dear,
Riot and shooting fill the streets with fear,
And overnight as in some terror dream
Poets are suspect with the New Regime,
Stick at your desk and hold your panic in,
What you are writing may still save your skin:
Re-sex the pronouns, add a few details,
And, lo, a panegyric ode which hails
(How is the Censor, bless his heart, to know?)
The new pot-bellied Generalissimo.
Some epithets, of course, like lily-breasted
Need modifying to say, lion-chested,
A title Goddess of wry-necks and wrens
To Great Reticulator of the fens,
But in an hour your poem qualifies
For a State pension or His annual prize,
And you will die in bed (which He will not:
That public nuisance will be hanged or shot).
Though honest Iagos, true to form, will write
Shame! in your margins, Toady! Hypocrite!,
True hearts, clear heads will hear the note of glory
And put inverted commas round the story,
Thinking—Old Sly-boots! We shall never know
Her name or nature. Well, it's better so.

For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "'The Truest Poetry Is The Most Feigning'," September 1953. This is one of my favorite versions of Auden: acerbic and brilliant, and a little wry, and a lot meta, sarcastic and sharp and kind of bitter (also totally right about the myth of plain style, come the fuck on), and kind of right about the things poetry can't do; and yet also forever believing in poetry, despite everything, and against all odds (true hearts, clear heads). I really, really love Auden.

where everything seems to happen in waves

I have all these happy poems about spring that I want to post, but I am not having the sort of week (or, in all honesty, the sort of month) that allows for those sorts of poems. Mostly I just keep accidentally falling to pieces around my friends. There is a lot of crying; also, a lot of feeling like I am only holding myself together with, like, tape and string and sheer pig-headed tenacity.


For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

— Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), "Letter to N.Y."

like a shadow or a friend

Things are a little rough again, here in the Houses of Slightly Regressed Healing -- I called us the Houses of Pelennor Fields a week or two ago, and I think that may still hold true. I would really like it, if I could come out of this seemingly endless tunnel into a place where every single day is not a trial of my resilience. On the other hand, apparently my resilience is kind of kick ass; and through all of this, I continue to have extraordinary friends, and exceptional family, and really excellent poetry.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kindness," from Different Ways to Pray, 1980 (reprinted in The Words Under the Words, 1995).

before, behind, between, above, below

When I made my new reorganized spreadsheet for National Poetry Month, I discovered a pattern: on my birthday, every year since I began in 2007, I have alternated between Donne and Auden. (There has only been one exception: in 2008, which was a weird year in general, I posted the entire first book of Paradise Lost on my birthday.) Last year was an Auden year, so this year is a Donne year; I love Donne, both dirty and sublime, and I thought perhaps this was a year to break into the Elegies. Also I like to post sexy poems on my birthday.

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir'd with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glittering,
But a fair fairer world incompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th' eyes of busy fools may be stopt there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th'hill's shadow steals.
Off with your wyerie Coronet and show
The hairy Diademe which on you doth grow.
Now off with those shoes, and then softly tread
In this love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's Angels used to be
Receaved by men: thou Angel bring'st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise, and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
    Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new-found-land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My mine of precious stones, my Emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
    Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls cast, in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:
Like pictures, or like books gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are mystick books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal'd. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a Midwife show
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance, much less innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

—John Donne (1572-1631), Elegie XIX, "To His Mistress Going To Bed." I made some random editorial decisions about punctuation and orthography.

It's been a good birthday. Some of my friends are still here, and we've been talking about Donne and how there should be a Doctor Who episode called "Jack and the Doctor" in which Donne is a companion, and Clarissa, and 18th century fanfiction, and YA fantasy, and the Wizard's Oath. We also had cake and ice cream cake, and earlier today I took my roommate out to breakfast and went and bought myself things and wandered around in the beautiful weather and cleaned my apartment and painted my toenails. I am also wearing lots and lots of glitter and a little black dress. Here's to 27.

Also: a very happy birthday to all the other birthdays today and this week (it is a week of birthdays!); and I love you all. ♥

like a flaring thing

Sometimes I have this problem with National Poetry Month. The problem goes like this: I know today is a Herbert day -- for about ten different reasons, starting with drinking champagne and reading Erasmus on the lawn in the sunshine instead of eating lunch, and ending with my friend who just passed her oral exams drunkenly folding $20 bills into frogs -- but then after a very long day of excellent classes and glorious weather and good friends, I get lost rereading The Temple; and then it is half past 11, and somewhere in this book is the right poem for the day, but the thing is that once you cross that threshold, The Temple is a whole lot bigger on the inside, and choosing the right poem becomes weighted, complicated, more than just a choice. A heart in a building in a heart that is a building. The TARDIS effect of Metaphysical Poetry. Your relationship with God.

Herbert is not always wonderful, and in any case I think he may be an acquired taste, but I love him. Feel free to speculate about what my selection of this poem says about me. Alternatively, go read the rest of The Temple. You might hate it, especially if you're not into devotional poetry; on the other hand, you'll get to enjoy the dubious pleasure of the Anamarygram.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word?
   He is a brittle crazie glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
   This glorious and transcendent place,
   To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy story,
   Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glorie
   More rev'rend grows, & more doth win;
   Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
   When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
   Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
   And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "The Windows" from The Temple, 1633.

leave comfort root-room

I am overplaying my hand, a bit, posting Hopkins this early in the month. It was that kind of day, though; maybe one of these years I will post a Hopkins poem that isn't a sonnet. MAYBE SOMEDAY I WILL POST THE EPITHALAMION. Anyway, not today.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "My own heart"

Oh gosh, the things he does with language. It cannot have been easy to live in your head, GMH, but I remain extraordinarily glad that you wrote it all down.

long light

It is a completely gorgeous day. After my theory class we went out to lunch, and then Jason and I took our reading to Riverside Park. He has a camp chair, which is clearly a worthwhile investment for reading outside. I sat on the ground with my back to a tree, getting mud all over my feet, and read Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House, which is crazy and glorious and a little like an acid trip through a seventeenth-century country house landscape, complete with evil lesbian nuns and tree bondage, floods and flowers and military gardens and agriculture and family history. Metaphysical poetry is kind of the greatest, and reading it outside on a day like today was almost unfairly perfect.

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on ...

—Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), 'You, Andrew Marvell', from Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952).