Galveston, 1961
by Richard Wilbur
You who in crazy-lensed
Clear water fled your shape,
By choppy shallows flensed
and shaken like a cape,
Who gently butted down
Through weeds, and were unmade,
Piecemeal stirring your brown
Legs into stirred shade,
And rose, and with pastel
Coronas of your skin
Stained swell on glassy swell,
Letting them bear you in:
Now you have come to shore,
One woman and no other,
Sleek Panope no more,
Nor the vague sea our mother.
Shake out your spattering hair
And sprawl beside me here,
Sharing what we can share
Now that we are so near --
Small talk and speechless love,
Mine being all but dumb
That knows so little of
What goddess you become
And still half-seem to be,
Though close and clear you lie,
Whom droplets of the sea
Emboss and magnify.
I found it in a New Yorker. That last stanza is a total winner. Oh, yes, I am a lover of rhyme and meter, although too lazy to do it myself. And the issue also had a long form book review on a biography of Gerald Manley Hopkins, yes, the guy who wrote Pied Beauty. It contained this snippet of a poem that I don't think I'd seen before (oh, the gaps, people. The gaps in my poetry.): The Windhover
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
You who in crazy-lensed
Clear water fled your shape,
By choppy shallows flensed
and shaken like a cape,
Who gently butted down
Through weeds, and were unmade,
Piecemeal stirring your brown
Legs into stirred shade,
And rose, and with pastel
Coronas of your skin
Stained swell on glassy swell,
Letting them bear you in:
Now you have come to shore,
One woman and no other,
Sleek Panope no more,
Nor the vague sea our mother.
Shake out your spattering hair
And sprawl beside me here,
Sharing what we can share
Now that we are so near --
Small talk and speechless love,
Mine being all but dumb
That knows so little of
What goddess you become
And still half-seem to be,
Though close and clear you lie,
Whom droplets of the sea
Emboss and magnify.
I found it in a New Yorker. That last stanza is a total winner. Oh, yes, I am a lover of rhyme and meter, although too lazy to do it myself. And the issue also had a long form book review on a biography of Gerald Manley Hopkins, yes, the guy who wrote Pied Beauty. It contained this snippet of a poem that I don't think I'd seen before (oh, the gaps, people. The gaps in my poetry.): The Windhover
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding