share


The Cloud of Knowing

There are those who would have paid that.
The amount your eyes bonded with
(O spangled home) will have to work it out in a room
like they have certain chairs set up together
which were blue-violet. We all have to fail
at the end of days, yet not so pronto
she said. And lo, it was like a breeze of vacuum
beyond the stiff perimeters already granted us.
A whole goes. And then a whole lot.

Most valuably, no one writes a letter
to those sprinting up ahead, who wouldn’t read it anyway.
In Dodge and other windswept places
the evening news took pride of place.
Attentats were back. Parental concern loomed. Peckers
swollen by rainforest beckoned.
Many liberals and even some conservatives
called for a business replacement. Jeez, you guys,
can’t you hum anything? What about little Elfrida?
He’s not the young person I knew.
That one had a lot of little bits in it,
you know, soothing, from home, a minefield.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

(1927-2017) was one of the great American poets. This poem was published in The White Review No. 8.

READ NEXT

Art

February 2015

Filthy Lucre

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

February 2015

White silhouettes sway against softly gradated backgrounds: blues, purples, yellows and pinks. The painted palm trees are tacky and...

feature

Issue No. 4

Tibetan Kitsch

Evan Harris

feature

Issue No. 4

I first glimpsed the Potala Palace behind the bending legs of a prostitute. She swayed, obscuring a vista of...

fiction

November 2015

Three Days in Prague

Naja Marie Aidt

TR. Denise Newman

fiction

November 2015

A sparkling frost-clear landscape exists between them under a soft and smudged sky. Irises exist, blue and yellow, and...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required