A cloud of flowers!
Is the bell Ueno

The first drizzling shower is falling;
The monkey seems craving a small rain coat.

Lo! the butterfly shifts its seat
On the willow whenever the wind blows.

I couldn't have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.
So I cut the first tomato into eighths,
salted the pieces in the dusk
and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's)
or bitter,
even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem
that made my throat feel dusty and warm.

Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness.
The miser accused by her red sums.
Better had I eaten the dirt itself
on this the first night in my life
when I have not been too busy for my loneliness—
at last, it comes.

That morning under a pale hood of sky
I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling
against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

The day mirled and clabbered
in the thick, stony light,
and the rooks' feathered narling
astounded the salt waves, the plush coast.

I lugged a bucket past the forked
coercion of a tree, up toward
the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school,
hunkered there in its gully of learning.

Only later, by the galvanized washstand,
while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers
swam beyond the windows,

Tell me not, fans, I am unkind
For saying my good-bye
And leaving your kind cheers behind
While I to new fans fly.

Now, I will leave without a trace
And choose a rival's field;
For I have viewed the market place
And seen what it can yield.

Though my disloyalty is such
That all you fans abhor,
It's not that I don't love you much:
I just love money more.











Reprinted by permission of the author.

Recall, while now thy longing gaze
Grows dim with more than autumn's haze,
Of all the walks thy feet have pressed,—
That path the peacefulest to rest:

Of fountains that thy need have nursed,
That “well” the sweetest to thy thirst:

Of flowers—and lo! thy hands were full—
That blossom the most beautiful:

Of touch and tone, through all the past,
The tenderest and lingering last:

That radiance of the vanished years,
Most radiant for thy very tears:

Name that which, trembling like a star,

An earl of England hath a crest
An infant in an eagle's nest;

And (hid to heraldry) the strange
Yet simple legend, “Without change.”

No herald, yet I hold amiss
The reading that traverses this.

No doubt the eagle caught away
The infant from its nurse that day,

And felt new softness at the touch,
Pervade his fiery spirit; much

As might the lion that relents,
A lamb, to Una's innocence.

And well, methinks, the nursling might
From the stern rapture of that flight

Some token of the eyrie bring

Years of his freedom—two!
And a shivering phantom stands,
With the firelight flickering through
His gaunt and wasted hands.
“Home”—and he bowed his head
With a low and wailing cry;
Ah! not for shelter, and not for bread,
Only a place to—die.

To die at the master's feet,
Out of the scourging storm,
Where the winds might never beat,
Where Tom lay ever warm;
Till Freedom the pitiless
Fell from th' eternal sky,
And the bitterness of his nakedness
Made Tom so glad to—die.

Oh! had these arms the pith

Upon the valley's lap
The liberal morning throws
A thousand drops of dew
To wake a single rose.

Thus often, in the course
Of life's few fleeting years,
A single pleasure costs
The soul a thousand tears.