Bayard Taylor, 'A Night With A Wolf'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

A Night With a Wolf

Little one, come to my knee!
Hark how the rain is pouring
Over the roof in the pitch dark night,
And the winds in the woods a-roaring

Hush, my darling, and listen,
Then pay for the story with kisses;
Father was lost in the pitch-black night
In just such a storm as this is.

High on the lonely mountain
Where the wild men watched and waited;
Wolves in the forest, and bears in the bush,
And I on my path belated.

The rain and the night together
Came down, and the wind came after,
Bending the props of the pine tree roof
And snapping many a rafter.

I crept along in the darkness,
Stunned and bruised and blinded...
Crept to a fir with thick-set boughs,
And a sheltering rock behind it.

There, from the blowing and raining,
Crouching I sought to hide me;
Something rustled, two green eyes shone,
And a wolf lay down beside me.

( Little one, be not frightened; )

by Bayard Taylor

My Stop is Grand ~ Christian Wiman

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

I have no illusion
some fusion
               of force and form
will save me,
bewilderment
              of bonelight
ungrave me

as when the El
shooting through a hell
               of ratty alleys
where nothing thrives
but soot
              and the ratlike lives
that have learned to eat it

screechingly peacocked
a grace of sparks
              so far out and above
the fast curve that jostled
and fastened us
               into a single shock of—
I will not call it love

but at least some brief
and no doubt illusionary belief
               that in one surge of brain
we were all seeing
one thing:
                a lone unearned loveliness
struck from an iron pain.

Already it was gone.
Already it was bone,
              the gray sky
and the encroaching skyline
pecked so clean
              by raptor night
I shuddered at the cold gleam

we hurtled toward
like some insentient herd
                plunging underground at Clark
and Division.
And yet all that day
              I had a kind of vision
that's never gone completely away

of immense clear-paned towers
and endlessly expendable hours
               through which I walked
teeming human streets,
filled with a shine
              that was most intimately me
and not mine.