All Poems
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To A Ten-Months' Child
© Donald Justice
Late arrival, no
One would think of blaming you
For hesitating so.
The Assassination
© Donald Justice
It begins again, the nocturnal pulse.
It courses through the cables laid for it.
It mounts to the chandeliers and beats there, hotly.
We are too close. Too late, we would move back.
We are involved with the surge.
Ode To A Dressmaker's Dummy
© Donald Justice
Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover. Metal stand.
Instructions included.
-- Sears, Roebuck Catalogue
A Map Of Love
© Donald Justice
Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept
Continents a dream had kept
Love's Strategems
© Donald Justice
But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.
Villanelle At Sundown
© Donald Justice
Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.
Anonymous Drawing
© Donald Justice
A delicate young Negro stands
With the reins of a horse clutched loosely in his hands;
So delicate, indeed, that we wonder if he can hold the spirited creature
beside him
On The Death Of Friends In Childhood
© Donald Justice
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
Men At Forty
© Donald Justice
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
A Birthday Candle
© Donald Justice
Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles on a cake,
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish
Sadness
© Donald Justice
1
Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents,
Why were you so sad on porches, whispering?
What great melancholies were loosed among our swings!
Absences
© Donald Justice
It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano--outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.
Pantoum Of The Great Depression
© Donald Justice
Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
Poem
© Donald Justice
This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.
Closed Gentian Distances
© James Schuyler
A nothing day full of
wild beauty and the
timer pings. Roll up
the silver off the bay
Salute
© James Schuyler
Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
October
© James Schuyler
Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in
the shedding leaves.
Faure's Second Piano Quartet
© James Schuyler
On a day like this the rain comes
down in fat and random drops among
the ailanthus leaves---"the tree
of Heaven"---the leaves that on moon-
