Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Robert Fitzgerald
Metaphysician
by Robert Fitzgerald (1910 – 1985)
His logic unperturbed, exacting new
Tribute in turbulence, a tithe of motion:
Runners by whose feet daylight is shaken,
Moths, mantles wind-wrought, releases sharply
Against throned columns, shafts closing in air –
Attend. Time’s clear device in each man’s eye
Makes shadows what he sees, and streets shadows
Wherein we move, impelled or quieted.
We have been out to see the latest signs
Unbent from heaven, and these who staring walk
Beside us are not blind, and all who see
Through this low draft of shade will be undone.
Thus to lie one night with his back broken
And dream at dawn the idol in the stone.
Lightness in Autumn
By Robert Fitzgerald
The rake is like a wand or fan,
With bamboo springing in a span
To catch the leaves that I amass
In bushels on the evening grass.
I reckon how the wind behaves
And rake them lightly into waves
And rake the waves upon a pile,
Then stop my raking for a while.
The sun is down, the air is blue,
And soon the fingers will be, too,
But there are children to appease
With ducking in those leafy seas.
So loudly rummaging their bed
On the dry billows of the dead,
They are not warned at four and three
Of natural mortality.
Before their supper they require
A dragon field of yellow fire
To light and toast them in the gloom.
So much for old earth’s ashen doom.
Fourteen Lines 