poems, pictures

Most of the images and poems on this page are the work of other people. I'm offering them here because they've moved me somehow, and they might resonate with you, too. If you are the owner of rights to anything here and you would like me to remove it, please let me know at "oj AT plooey.com", and I will take it down tout suite

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World + Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   
As false dawn.
                     Outside the open window   
The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   
Now they are rising together in calm swells   
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   
The soul descends once more in bitter love   
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   
Of dark habits,
                      keeping their difficult balance.”

The Finder Found + Edwin Muir

Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek
Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,
Catch sight some ordinary month or week
Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—
The gatherer gathered and the finder found,
The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—
And perch in pride in the buyer's hand, at home,
And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?

The Slow Train + Michael Flanders & Donald Swann

Miller's Dale for Tideswell ...
Kirby Muxloe ...
Mow Cop and Scholar Green ...

No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe 
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road. 
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat 
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street. 
We won't be meeting again 
On the Slow Train.

I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw. 
At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more. 
No whitewashed pebbles, no Up and no Down 
From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town. 
I won't be going again 
On the Slow Train.

On the Main Line and the Goods Siding 
The grass grows high 
At Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside 
And Trouble House Halt.

The Sleepers sleep at Audlem and Ambergate. 
No passenger waits on Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay. 
No one departs, no one arrives 
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives. 
They've all passed out of our lives 
On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.

Cockermouth for Buttermere ... on the Slow Train, 
Armley Moor Arram ... 
Pye Hill and Somercotes ... on the Slow Train, 
Windmill End.