Classic Poem

Ask me a question
Ask me what you and I are about
Ask me why everything works smoothly and surely as it does
And more than ninety million people get up in the morning
And keep going until
They go to bed at night
Ask me about God and Heaven
And what happens to dead men
O unhappy asker of foolish questions
O lost man wandering in tangled streets
I knew the answer five minutes ago
If you had come when I sat in the cafe.

If you had come when I sat in the cafe
And saw a young girl kissed by her lover
If you had come when my head was clear
If you had come before I got drunk
From seeing two lovers start in a boat
To spend the afternoon on the lake
I could have told you then
I could have told you then why the world
Is always blossoming somewhere
And why it is always spring somewhere
But I have forgotten now
No man can remember what is longer than its shadow
No man can remember
What has spoken in private to his heart
Something must be forgotten
Something must be lost
Something must be allowed to go without protest
Ask me questions
Yes I will be full of answers today
This moment because my head is full
Because my head is far off and a cloud
That will never burst over the gardens that lie in
The neat hemstitched pockets of Earth's full apron
— This moment I will tell you.

I will tell you a girl's breasts
Are soft and sweet-smelling flowers
The color of moon and sun
And your lips are the wind fresh out of spring
And you'll soon be rushing everywhere
O and every green thing trembles at your touch
You whose lips say only " Hush! "
You who saying this say everything.

The tram cars leave the Piazza every twenty minutes
And they are going somewhere with more certainty
Than the judges who sit on their benches
Condemning men to die by the clock
And so many yards of rope
And the earth blossoms into spring
Without saying it is time for spring now
I believe I will make things hum
O the earth is a shy girl
And no man gets up early enough
To see her lover leaving her bed
And the father of all beautiful things
Must be a poet deliciously mad
I tell you a painter or a sculptor
Would show us her white belly and thighs and breasts
Frozen against her lover's caress
But the poet loosens himself
And a silence falls as if the earth's mother
Were shaking out her hair to sleep
And it is winter when the earth's lover is away
And the earth's womb is warm with a child
— Mothers must sleep much and rest to be ready
— Fathers must travel much and dream to be ready
Spring is no sleek docile child who will wait for orders
Spring comes alive like the rushing torrent
From the meek unprotesting glacier
— Spring is born with a wild full white head of hair.
Ask me questions
O you girls who pass me
Softly and nervously as swans on still water
I am not a man throwing you crumbs of stale bread
I am not a fish darting away from your cruel beaks

Ask me questions
The moon will be on the water tonight
It will float close to you
More helpless than a piece of bread
More glittering and silvery and slippery than a fish
O if the moon were bread
O if the moon were fish now
Wouldn't the night be easy
Wouldn't the swan's nights be fun
And would you be asking me questions with your eyes
You girls who pass me like swans
— O the soft white breasts
But I was speaking of answers
And an answer sits lighter on my heart than a feather on the wind
And I wish you were cold and white and stripped as moonlight
And that you stood and waited and waited and waited
While I slept with the cry of my heart
And dreamed and dreamed and dreamed
While dawn hesitated forever
Beside my cold silent bed.