Stephen Spender (PLC, 1965) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Spender
James Dickey (PLC 1966-68) https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Dickey
William Jay Smith (PLC 1968-70) https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Jay-Smith
William Stafford (PLC 1970-1)https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Stafford
Two Poems | Stephen Spender
I
Doing anything and everything is a drug
My pen is a bitter root of oblivion, my thoughts
Force day to cover with pictures the abyss of waiting.
Then the meals interrupt and I ask For what,
For what am I waiting?
Is it for my loneliness to spring
An ascetic shoot of new power?
Or is it for her to come into the room
In her red dress and kiss my eyes to bliss
Murmuring “I love you as I love”?
For a year now I have breathed-in lies
Imagining my life was half one life, reciprocated
In another’s living need.
But now that half is fallen away and I stand with my body
Split by lightning
How is it possible to believe that what divides
Me, does not deprive her too?
That somewhere she is not sweetly sorrowfully waiting
On a similar desolate shore
Feeling the same loss as I do
And knowing the same cure?
Oh but there are posts, there are trains!
So these iron days prove
How long I have been wrong, it seems,
And how I still only swallow the truth
- That I have lost for ever her I love -
For a shrieking instant, then turn back again
To a drug of bitter days and dreams.
II
As I sit staring out of my window
Wasting time which the traffic does not waste
Nor any go the passers by in the street
Who keep time with time as they go
Measuring the seconds with their feet,
In their minds riding the crested tide
On white horses of pursuant days
I think of you, James, at another window
With your stubby hands relaxed and your blue gaze
Invaded by a sense of emptiness,
Startled as if a gust of air,
Had blown through the interstices
Of your mind and hair,
Ruffling your forehead with a puzzled despair.
But I have learned lately that the spaces
And the timeless loneliness
Of the unfruitful waste places,
The desert, the untidy room, and the hour
Between waking and sleep,
Are windows opened onto power
Where we become most what we are,
When the conscious eye and ear
Are severed from what they see and hear
And in the hollow silent blackness deep,
Living tunes and images flower.
Buckdancer’s Choice by James Dickey
So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler
In the invalid’s bed: my mother,
Warbling all day to herself
The thousand variations of one song;
It is called Buckdancer’s Choice.
For years, they have all been dying
Out, the classic buck-and-wing men
Of traveling minstrel shows;
With them also an old woman
Was dying of breathless angina,
Yet still found breath enough
To whistle up in my head
A sight like a one-man band,
Freed black, with cymbals at heel,
An ex-slave who thrivingly danced
To the ring of his own clashing light
Through the thousand variations of one song
All day to my mother’s prone music,
The invalid’s warbler’s note,
While I crept close to the wall
Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter,
Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break
Through stratum after stratum of a tone
Proclaiming what choices there are
For the last dancers of their kind,
For ill women and for all slaves
Of death, and children enchanted at walls
With a brass-beating glow underfoot,
Not dancing but nearly risen
Through barnlike, theatrelike houses
On the wings of the buck and wing.
More poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/james-l-dickey
Ballad of the Lady quid pro quo[1] by William Jay Smith
On the Coasts of Consternation,
Through a mournful field of snow,
On a piebald circus steed,
Rode the Lady Quid Pro Quo.
Rode the Lady Quid Pro Quo.
Dressed in domino demurely,
Reins held loosely but securely;
Through a melancholy mead,
On a piebald circus steed,
At a chaste and modest speed
Rode the Lady Quid Pro Quo,
Rode the Lady Quid Pro Quo.
(I know there are more verses, but not accessible on the net.)
Portrait for a Lapidary[2]
Perfection is the sense of being whole.
Her life is perfect then: it is entire,
flickering perhaps like minnows in a bowl,
yet positive and lunatic as fire.
What men will seek, what men will always feel
is no more sure to her than her own death:
she is eternal who doth so reveal
the tactful circle of her numbered teeth.
Evening may come, and after evening, dark.
She will grow old: symmetrical and clean,
the pavement of her mind resist the mark
of acid love and thought's acetylene.
She will preserve as the sleek, tropic tree
the careful curve of her stupidity.
More poems: https://poets.org/poet/william-jay-smith
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border by William E. Stafford
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
Bess by William Stafford
Ours are the streets where Bess first met her
cancer. She went to work every day past the
secure houses. At her job in the library
she arranged better and better flowers, and when
students asked for books her hand went out
to help. In the last year of her life
she had to keep her friends from knowing
how happy they were. She listened while they
complained about food or work or the weather.
And the great national events danced
their grotesque, fake importance. Always
Pain moved where she moved. She walked
ahead; it came. She hid; it found her.
No one ever served another so truly;
no enemy ever meant so strong a hate.
It was almost as if there was no room
left for her on earth. But she remembered
where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers;
she did not weep when she passed its houses;
and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner
and slipped from pain, her hand opened
again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.
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