From Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos
From The Star-Apple Kingdom
From The Fortunate Traveller
From The Arkansas Testament
From 25 Poems (1949). The fishermen rowing homeward...
Letter to a painter in England
I with legs crossed along the daylight watch
From Epitaph for the Young (1949). XII Cantos
From Poems (1957). The dormitory
The sisters of Saint Joseph
From In a Green Night (1948-60). A far cry from Africa
From The Castaway (1965). The castaway
Nights in the gardens of port of Spain
God rest ye merry gentlemen
From The Gulf (1969). The corn goddess
From Another Life (1973). From book I. The divided child: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
From book II. Homage to Gregorias: 8
From book III. A simple flame: 14, 15
From book IV. The estranging sea: 20, 21, 22, 23
From Sea Grapes (1976). Sea grapes
Party night at the Hilton
From The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979). The schooner Flight
From The Fortunate Traveller (1982). Old New England
The man who loved islands
The season of phantasmal peace
From Midsummer (1984). "The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud
"Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome"
"At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms"
"This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness"
"The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh"
"Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn"
"Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains"
"Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit"
"With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin"
"I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide"
"So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conc-bordered"
"I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas"
(Gauguin I and II) "On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists"
"A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table"
"Rest, Christ! from tireless war. See it's midsummer"
"With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings"
"Something primal in our spine makes the child swing"
"Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease"
"Gold dung and ruinous straw from the horse garages"
"Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors"
"Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue"
"Muds. Clods, The sucking heel of the rain-flinger"
"The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines"
"Autumn's music grates. From tuning forks of branches"
"The camps hold their distance
brown chestnuts and gray smoke"
"Chicago's avenues, as white as Poland"
"Raw ochre sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon"
"I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells"
"Since all of your work was really an effort to appease"
"I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head"
"The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me"
From The Arkansas Testament (1987). Cul de Sac Valley
Saint Lucia's first Communion
God rest ye merry, gentlement: part II
From The Bounty (1997). The Bounty
"It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff"
"New creatures ease from earth, nostrils nibbling air"
"I am considering a syntax the color of slate"
"I saw stones that shone with stoniness, I saw thorns"
"The sublime always begins with the chord 'And then I saw'"
"Awakening to gratitude in this generous Eden"
"The sea should have settled him, bit its noise is no help
"She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind"
"At the end of this line there is an opening door"
"After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia"
"The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help"
"She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind"
"At the end of this line there is an opening door"
"After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia"
From Tiepolo's Hound (2000). "They stroll on Sundays down Donningens Street"
"What should be true of the remembered life"
"Flattered by any masterful representation"
"Over the years the feast's details grew fainter"
"Blessed Mary of the Derelicts. The church in Venice"
"One dawn I woke up to the gradual terror"
"Teaching in St. Thomas, I had never sought it out"
From The Prodigal (2004). "In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania"
"Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps"
"Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace"
"O Genoan, I come as the last line of where you began"
"I lay on the bed near the balcony in Guadalajara"
"The dialect of the scrub in the dry season"
"Prodigal, what were your wanderings about"
"Grass, bleached to straw on the precipices of Les Cayes"
From White Egrets (2010). "The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard"
"Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such"
"This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels"
"Agust, the quarter-moon dangles like a bugle"
"It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest"
"What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?"
"The sorrel rump of a mare in the bush"
"All day I wish I was at Case-en-Bas"
"Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joys
"For the crackle and hiss of the word 'August'"
"'So the world is waiting for Obama,' my barber said"
"In the leathery closeness of the car through canfields"
"Here's what that bastard calls 'the emptiness'-"
Epithalamium: The rainy season
"This page is a cloud between whos fraying edges"
Index of titles and first lines.
