Sunday, February 20, 2022

Song of the Master and the Boatswain by W. H. Auden

Song of the Master and the Boatswain

 
At Dirty Dick's and Sloppy Joe's
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse
The homeless played at keeping house.
 
There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor's Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope my old age.
 
The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep. 



Friday, February 18, 2022

lucy and her girls by Lucille Clifton

lucy and her girls

 
lucy is the ocean
extended by
her girls
are the river
fed by
lucy
is the sun
reflected through
her girls
are the moon
lighted by
lucy
is the history of
her girls
are the place where
lucy
was going
 
--
 
i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter.
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and
dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn’t understand
the powerful memories of ghosts.     now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother   my live daughter   and me
through our terrible shadowy hands.



Thursday, February 17, 2022

The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud

The Drunken Boat

 
As I was going down impassive Rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:
Yelping redskins had taken them as targets
And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
 
I was indifferent to all crews,
The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons
When with my haulers this uproar stopped
The Rivers let me go where I wanted.
 
Into the furious lashing of the tides
More heedless than children's brains the other winter
I ran! And loosened Peninsulas
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub
 
The storm blessed my sea vigils
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
That are called eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!
 
Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook
 
And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;
 
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments!
 
I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,
And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves
And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!
 
I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,
Lighting up, with long violet clots,
Resembling actors of very ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!
 
I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows
A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea,
The circulation of unknown saps,
And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!
 
I followed during pregnant months the swell,
Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs,
Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!
 
I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas
Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human
Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins
Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!
 
I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm,
And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!
 
Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!
 
I should have liked to show children those sunfish
Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.
—Foam of flowers rocked my drifting
And ineffable winds winged me at times.
 
At times a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,
Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees...
 
Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels
And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes
And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes
Drowned men sank backward to sleep!
 
Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves,
Thrown by the storm into the birdless air
I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued
By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;
 
Free, smoking, topped with violet fog,
I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,
Bearing, delicious jam for good poets
Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,
 
Who ran, spotted with small electric moons,
A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses,
When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels
The ultramarine skies with burning funnels;
 
I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off
The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms,
Eternal spinner of the blue immobility
I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!
 
I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer:
—Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,
Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –
 
But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor
O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!
 
If I want a water of Europe, it is the black
Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.
 
No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,
Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,
Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.
 
(Translated by Wallace Fowlie)



Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The Remains by Timothy Liu

The Remains

 
                                                  —Wuxi, China
 
Walking out of the new cemetery, my father 
takes my hand, having just re-interred the remains 
of his own father and his father's two wives— 
his mother dead from T.B. by the time he was ten.
 
He takes my hand and says, Now I can die in peace 
even if we didn’t get the actual bones. Village thugs 
hired by my uncle made sure the burial mounds 
behind the house my father grew up in would not feel
 
a single shovel blade go in as they stood there 
sentinel with arms crossed. My uncle's wife 
had a dream that out of the grave's opened gash 
demons rushed—ancestral ghosts not wanting to be
 
disturbed. In less than a decade, bulldozers will come 
to take the Liu village down. My grandfather's 
ashes, my grandmother's bones, my own father 
walking away with two fistfuls of dirt and saying,
 
This will have to do. So many others have died 
who’ve left nothing behind. I'll never come back 
to this place again. My father kisses my hand, 
I who've flown across twelve time zones to be here
 
at his side in a borrowed van, me looking out
the window at a countryside once overrun 
with Japs marching West along the railroad tracks, 
my father and his siblings hiding in an outhouse,
 
a dead horse found in the schoolyard soon after 
the soldiers had gone. Your hands are so soft! I say 
to my father. So are yours, he says. Remember 
when it was we last held hands? I must have been
 
a kid, I say, maybe eight, or ten? You were six, 
my father says. And I'm still your son, I say, 
leaning into his shoulder, our hands the same size. 
And I'll always be your father, my father says
 
before I have the chance to say another word, 
my eighty-year-old father nodding off into sleep.



Tuesday, February 15, 2022

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372) by Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)

 
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
 
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
 
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
 


Monday, February 14, 2022

The Old Life by Galway Kinnell

The Old Life

 
The waves collapsed into themselves
with heavy rumbles in the darkness
and the soprano shingle whistled
gravely its way back down into the sea.
When the moon came from behind clouds
its white full-moon’s light
lightly oiled the little beach stones
back into silence. We stood
among shatterings, glitterings,
the brilliance. For some reason
to love does not seem ever
to hurt any less. Now it happens
another lifetime is up for us,
another life is upon us.
What’s left is what is left
of the whole absolutely love-time.



Sunday, February 13, 2022

Sixteen Center by Donika Kelly

Sixteen Center

 
Last week, an insurrection,
yesterday, the second impeachment,
and this evening of slurry and wind
that makes the old dog wary, I call
my grandpa, my mama’s daddy, to ask
why we called his parents’ land 16 Center.
He doesn’t know! And he laughs,
can fathom no reason but his daddy’s
drunk whimsy and charisma in the naming
of those twenty acres of Arkansas backwoods,
those pastures and good timber a mile
down Columbia County Road 14.
Nor does he remember how to call a hog.
Nor does he remember who first called
him Billy, as much his name now as Sam
and for nearly as long. We leave what is forgotten
behind us easily enough, detour
through what rough country he can recall:
his uncle Sonny Boy taking him west to live
in Vegas; his grandma, Ma Gladys, in L.A.
rescuing him from Vegas; his baby sister shot,
and him thirteen, holding her feet at the hospital
down in Haynesville as she died; his many jobs;
his longest love; an outline, a sketch he’s drawn
before that I want to fix in my mind. I know
my questions rarely resolve past treble: I talk
too fast, too high, am nearly unintelligible
to him, yet we pass an hour this way.
He offers some measure of a past
we do not share, and it’s easier to let be
what is lost, to put down what I never carried.
 


Saturday, February 12, 2022

The Cypress Broke by Mahmoud Darwish

The Cypress Broke

 
                                The cypress is the tree’s grief and not  
                               the tree, and it has no shadow because it is  
                               the tree’s shadow  
                                      —Bassam Hajjar
 
The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept on
the road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green,
as it has always been. No one got hurt. The vehicles
sped over its branches. The dust blew
into the windshields ... / The cypress broke, but
the pigeon in a neighboring house didn’t change
its public nest. And two migrant birds hovered above
the hem of the place, and exchanged some symbols.
And a woman said to her neighbor: Say, did you see a storm?
She said: No, and no bulldozer either ... / And the cypress
broke. And those passing by the wreckage said:
Maybe it got bored with being neglected, or it grew old
with the days, it is long like a giraffe, and little
in meaning like a dust broom, and couldn’t shade two lovers.
And a boy said: I used to draw it perfectly,
its figure was easy to draw. And a girl said: The sky today
is incomplete because the cypress broke.
And a young man said: But the sky today is complete
because the cypress broke. And I said
to myself: Neither mystery nor clarity,
the cypress broke, and that is all
there is to it: the cypress broke!
 
(Translated by Fady Joudah)
 


Friday, February 11, 2022

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

 
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
 
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
 
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
 
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
 
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
 
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
 
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
 
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
               So how should I presume?
 
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
               And how should I presume?
 
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
               And should I then presume?
               And how should I begin?
 
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
 
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
 
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
 
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
               That is not it, at all.”
 
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
               “That is not it at all,
               That is not what I meant, at all.”
 
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
 
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
 
Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
 
I do not think that they will sing to me.
 
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. 



The Dog by Robin Coste Lewis

The Dog

 
       Matthew Henson’s Penultimate Expedition
       Before Discovering the North Pole
 
 
Eating her did not feel immoral. 
Inside our efforts to maintain 
 
our lives, our affection
had remained consistent. 
 
On every occasion, whenever a man ran 
or died (which they did—often)
 
she would stand and howl 
at the winds, the atrocious boulders 
 
heaving through the air all around us. 
Even as we watched yet another friend fall—
 
struck in the head—she would stand 
between my knees and hiss and growl 
 
at the burning red clouds, 
the white electric water.
 
And now we were in a dreadful condition,
beginning to turn mad, but I know 
 
if I had died first, she’d have stood over me 
and never considered what I began to consider 
 
daily. Runt and cur, she outlived the whole crew—
all of them: beasts and men. And then finally, when,
 
for over a week, we had not seen one bear 
or seal or even a blade of something beige 
 
(and there was nothing left of my clothes 
we could eat and still survive) one completely
 
 
sunless morning, when the pale, clear seal
oil had diminished into a single flame, she merely sat still 
 
beneath my blade and did not flinch, but 
looked up—into me—the way a mother 
 
sometimes steals a secret glance into her child: 
resigned to its preposterous morality. 





Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Flowers by the Sea by William Carlos Williams

Flowers by the Sea

 
When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s
edge, unseen, the salt ocean
 
lifts its form—chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone
 
but color and the movement—or the shape
perhaps—of restlessness, whereas
 
the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem
 


American Sonnet 85 by Wanda Coleman

American Sonnet 85

 
jailer? will you still love me when i’m flit?
will you pay to hear my angst of sob and bathe in it?
jailer, the cuffs between us the cuffs so dear!
what will you do when i’m no longer accessible by key?
jailer? do you believe faint cure bests
no cure at all?
 
I do not know my back as well as you do
all down my crack and up it too
 
jailer! this contraband is such i can’t conceal
wears my lips and shreds umbilical zeal
the chancre blossom of our forced embrace
                        will never heal
 
jailer, why so quiet?
i can hear a politician piss on cotton 



Monday, February 7, 2022

transplant by Andrew McMillan

transplant

 
the sound of hair being ripped out
reminded me of velcro shoes
being hastily removed      I hadn’t
realised it possible
that I might grow into kinder
ownership of my own looks
that I could   one day   have been fine
with baldness   but it seemed to me
at seventeen that I was being
unmanned   and that my unlived youth
was already receding
so I paid a doctor thousands
to take a strip of hair from the back
of my head   pull out each follicle
and put them into the front
to give me the line I thought would
make me happy   and stitch the skin
on the back of the skull together
leaving me with this grimace
this equator   this scar
that catches the cold weather   hold
sit deep inside   reminder
of my vanity   tideline
of Canute   tattoo of the time
I couldn’t live with what I was becoming 



Sunday, February 6, 2022

Evening Poem by Alice Oswald

Evening Poem

 
Old scrap-iron foxgloves
rusty rods of the broken woods
 
what a faded knocked-out stiffness
as if you’d sprung from the horsehair
    of a whole Victorian sofa buried in the mud down there
 
or at any rate something dropped from a great height
straight through flesh and out the other side
has left your casing pale and loose and finally
 
just a heap of shoes
 
they say the gods being so uplifted
can’t really walk on feet but take tottering steps
and lean like this closer and closer to the ground
 
                        which gods?
 
it is the hours on bird-thin legs
the same old choirs of hours
returning their summer clothes to the earth
 
with the night now
as if dropped from a great height
 
falling



Saturday, February 5, 2022

Uptown, Minneapolis, Minnesota by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Uptown, Minneapolis, Minnesota

 
Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck
parked outside my apartment is somehow certain,
I have a hard time believing winter is somehow,
all of a sudden, over — the worst one of my life,
the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d like to be,
it’s impossible to be prepared for everything.
Even the mundane hum of my phone catches me
off guard today. Every voice that says my name
is a voice I don’t think I could possibly leave
(it’s unfair to not ask for the things you need)
even though I think about it often, even though
leaving is a train headed somewhere I’d probably hate.
Crossing Lyndale to meet a friend for coffee
I have to maneuver around a hearse that pulled too far
into the crosswalk. It’s empty. Perhaps spring is here.
Perhaps it will all be worth it. Even though I knew
even then it was worth it, staying, I mean.
Even now, there is someone, somehow, waiting for me.
 


Friday, February 4, 2022

A Hundred Bolts of Satin by Kay Ryan

A Hundred Bolts of Satin

 
All you
have to lose
is one
connection
and the mind   
uncouples
all the way back.   
It seems
to have been
a train.
There seems
to have been
a track.
The things
that you
unpack
from the
abandoned cars   
cannot sustain   
life: a crate of   
tractor axles,   
for example,
a dozen dozen   
clasp knives,   
a hundred   
bolts of satin—
perhaps you   
specialized   
more than   
you imagined.
 


Thursday, February 3, 2022

Christmas Tree by James Merrill

 Christmas Tree

 
*
To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.
Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdropping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angles, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s
Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.



 

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

The Workers Love Palestine by Zaina Alsous

The Workers Love Palestine

 
The week before the SUN announced hospice
my great-great-great-great-grandchild the harpist announced:
 
         WORKERS OF THE WORLD
             JOIN THE STRIKE FOR GUARANTEED LIGHT
 
The florists union in Caracas and the Algerian weavers presented joint proposals
 
             TOWARD ILLUMINATION THAT MULTIPLIES
 
Bare hills, lakes of salt sutured dim ruins
shadowless
of shipping yards and empires of memories of sarin
 
The children's council listened in wreaths of yellow iris,
patterned leaves designating each role
 
Did you know that within attunement to effort
the end of monument resides?
 
Then the harpist, my progeny, that fate I had so long evaded—
debt I owe to demographic warfare
 
and names sliced open, reborn in disfigured repetition—
sang three hundred years of returning
 
 
 
Language is merely the placeholder
for what the LAND has always known
 
Species being is an observation of MOM (preface)
Absent the wet painting of a razed village (sold)
 
This land is land
Land is land
                                       LAND LAND
 
 
I AM COMING
HOME



Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Arrival at Santos by Elizabeth Bishop

Arrival at Santos

 
Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery;
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
 
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
 
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
 
Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag.
So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,
 
but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen.
And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,
myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,
 
descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters
waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans.
Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!
Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's
 
skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,
a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,
with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.
Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall
 
s, New York. There. We are settled.
The customs officials will speak English, we hope,
and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,
 
but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps—
wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter
 
do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.