The Hospital Window
I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.
Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.
Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.
Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,
In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father
Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not
Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world
That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,
High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.
James L. Dickey
–
Tracks
Night, two o’clock, moonlight. The train has stopped
in the middle of the plain. Distant bright points of a town
twinkle cold on the horizon.
As when someone has gone into a dream so far
that he’ll never remember he was there
when he comes back to his room.
And as when someone goes into a sickness so deep
that all his former days become twinkling points, a swarm,
cold and feeble on the horizon.
The train stands perfectly still.
Two o’clock: full moonlight, few stars.
Tomas Transtormer
–
Pretty
Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the leaf is pretty when it falls.
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain.
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks.
He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,
The prey escapes with an underwater flash.
But not for long, the great has him now.
The pike is a fish who always has his prey
And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty.
His paws are not webbed; he cannot shut his nostrils
As the otter can and the beaver; he is torn between
The land water. Not ‘torn he does not mind.
The owl hunts in the evening, and it is pretty.
The lake water below him rustles with ice.
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist.
All this is pretty; it could not be prettier.
Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes.
It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,
Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier.
A field in the evening, tilting up.
The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late,
The sky is lighter than the hill field.
All this looks easy, but really, it is extraordinary.
Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty.
And it is careless, and that is always pretty.
This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless.
As Nature is always careless and indifferent.
Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty.
So a person can come along like a thief-pretty!
Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,
Lick the icicle broken from the bank,
And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.
Cry pretty, pretty, pretty, and you’ll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty.
And so to be delivered entirely from humanity.
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.
Stevie Smith
–
maggie and milly and molly and may
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
ee cummings
—
the cloths of heaven
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
