Donald Justice: Всі вірші поета

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Men at Forty

Men at forty

Learn to close softly

The doors to rooms they will not be

Coming back to

Donald Justice

Villanelle at Sundown

Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.

The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.

Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.

Or are Americans half in love with failure?

One used to say so, reading Fitzgerald, as it happened.

(That Viking Portable, all water spotted and yellow—

remember?) Or does mere distance lend a value

to things? —false, it may be, but the view is hardly cheapened.

Donald Justice

Sestina: Here in Katmandu

We have climbed the mountain.

There's nothing more to do.

It is terrible to come down

To the valley

Where, amidst many flowers,

One thinks of snow,

As formerly, amidst snow,

Climbing the mountain,

Donald Justice

Bus Stop

Lights are burning

In quiet rooms

Where lives go on

Resembling ours.

The quiet lives

That follow us—

These lives we lead

But do not own—

Donald Justice

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy

Simply by going on and on,

Without end and with little apparent meaning.

Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on

We managed. No need for the heroic.

Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

I don't remember all the particulars.

Donald Justice

The Tourist from Syracuse

One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin.

— John D. MacDonald

You would not recognize me.

Mine is the face which blooms in

The dank mirrors of washrooms

As you grope for the light switch.

My eyes have the expression

Of the cold eyes of statues

Donald Justice

Absences

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.

There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,

Like the memory of scales descending the white keys

Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,

Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,

Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .

Donald Justice

Nostalgia Of The Lakefronts

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.

A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;

Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.

Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,

Is fading to a landscape deep with distance—

And always the sad piano in the distance,

Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling

(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)

Donald Justice