ONE NIGHT STAND

Listen, you silk-hearted bastard,
I said in the bar last night,
You wear those dream clothes
Like a swan out of water.
Listen, you wool-feathered bastard,
My name, just for the record, is Leda.
I can remember pretending
That your red silk tie is a real heart
That your raw wool suit is real flesh
That you could float beside me with a swan’s touch
Of casual satisfaction.
But not the swan’s blood.
Waking tomorrow, I remember only
Somebody’s feathers and his wrinkled heart
Draped loosely in my bed.

— Jack Spicer

OCTOBER

I

October --
its plangency, its glow

as of words in
the poet's mind

as of God in
the saint's.

II

I wept for your mother
in her pain, wept in
my joy when you were
born,
Maia,
that October morning.
We named you
for a star a star-like
poem sang.
I write this
for your birthday
and say I love you
and say October
like the phoenix sings you.

III

This chiming
and tolling
of lion
and phoenix
and chimera
colors.
This huntsman's
horn, sounding
mort for
quarry fleeing
through mirrors
of burning
into deathless
dying.

IV

Rockweight
of surprising snow

crushed
the October trees,

broke
branches that
crashing set
the snow on fire.

-- Robert Hayden

FAREWELL TO FLORIDA

I

Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back

II

Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...

III

I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.

IV

My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

— Wallace Stevens