The poems
Poetry
Summer Ending
Late in August the jays come nearer,
To clamour morning at the very eves;
The stooping sunflower grows no higher,
But arches its disk and swells its seeds.
Beetle-harried, over the arbour,
Grape leaves curve like sieves of brown;
Densely scarlet or streaked with amber,
Tomatoes drag the vine-stems down.
Cabalist spider-webs glint and shimmer,
As morning climbs from the clinging mist. . . .
But western fire sinks to umber,
And the ship of summer begins to list.
There at the woods edge, in the pitted snow,
Timidly lurching, dragging a broken wing
The green briar caught, sidled the black crow—
Even in this dark world a pathetic thing.
Fearful, that black one huddled under the oak,
Under the stubborn leaves’ whispering stir,
As the February night, like gray smoke,
Came secretly on, swift and sinister.
A dusk confrontation: so we stared
Each at the other, brothers, and each bearing
A little truculently his ugly wound;
There in a sibilant quiet tensely shared,
We stared and waited, each coldly fearing
The lonely night and the mist along the ground.
The day’s imperative history
Lies always in, toward unexplored
Terrain of mountain, swamp, and mist,
Of frost, and storm untoward.
Dimly the outer days go by
Like shadows on a sea of wheat,
The cloud shadows cast from high,
Remote dazzle.—All defeat—
The gleaned grain of mythic sheaves—
Lies in, in land of talking leaves.
North of the old orchard, the house shambles
Earthward; in angles the sloping porches hold
Damp mats of leaves faded; the door stumbles
Ajar vaguely, to admit manifold
Inquisitive cavalcades of rain and sleet,
Of mist and frost and snow, to wander through
The lank rooms. That ever human feet
Here dragged or danced, the witnesses are few.
And yet, and yet, to one who comes in faith—
Renouncing time’s treason and the allure
Of somnolent senses—infrequently is shown
Plane displaced by plane, a sudden, sure
Radiance,—life in dazzling depth,
Beyond the tyranny of weathering stone.
Du Temps Perdu
One dare not picnic in the Past,
Or ramble undirectedly;
Too many places are nefast
Since they are thronged by derelict
And exiled revenants, wild for home,
Sly to possess what host may come.
You think to pick the anemone
Swaying by the gray rail fence;
You kneel to reach—and learn what glee
Opportunity can dispense.
Heart staggers, brain dims,
And upward swirl hell’s dissonant hymns.
Do not dispose your sandwiches,
Or think to cool your tepid wine,
By creeks where childhood expeditions
Felt only sunfish tug the line;
There a kelpy tosses mane,—
And you will not go home again.
By J. Terry Zeller
The book
Discover the influences, the life, and the poems of William S. Trout – Lancaster poet and professor.