"Midway the Stable Place

Below the southern, seaward ledges, where,
Such is the heavy weathering away,
No flower grows, no silence hearts the air,
Each rock gives slowly from its utmost bay.
  There comes the day's calthumpian, all afleer,
  In his midwaste quotidian King Lear.

His great moonface rumridden and windshot,
His voice the cleaving of the wind to sea,
He drives full speed head on and sets his pots
In his own image and without a lee,
  Safe in the backwash of the ledge at bay,
  An act of God who does not die this day.

It is midwaste of breaking and the foam,
Midblack the upward curve, the flecking lace,
There always order gives disorder room,
There always midlight is the stable place.
  There in the blossoming of waywardness,
  O stalwart Lear, you eddy and confess."

--R P Blackmur


"Man his own nature never yet could sound,
He knows not whence he is, nor whither bound.
Atoms tormented on this earthly ball,
The sport of fate, by death soon swallowed all..."

--Voltaire's "Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake" (tr John Morley)


      "Last Song

I will blow my last song to the moon's dingy door
  Hastily sealed; I will blow my song through the slit,
Through the cobwebbed crevice between the door and the floor
  Where hairy old moon-spider grandmothers nod and knit
    I will blow my last song.

Then some night when the wind rustles velvety thick
  With moist yellow jasmin-stars, and the smell of rain
Drifts an impatient silver, the door will click
  Dreamily ajar, and misty with moon-spider skein
    My last song will blow down."

--Joseph Auslander, Sunrise Trumpets (1924)