Cowboy Song
Charles Causley (English, 1917-2003)
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I come from Salem County
Where the silver melons grow,
Where the wheat is sweet as an angel’s feet
And the zithering zephyrs blow.
I walk the blue bone-orchard
In the apple-blossom snow,
When the teasy bees take their honeyed ease,
And the marmalade moon hangs low.
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My Maw sleeps prone on the prairie
In a boulder eiderdown,
Where the pickled stars in their little jam-jars
Hang in a hoop to town.
I haven’t seen Paw since a Sunday
In eighteen-seventy-three
When he packed his snap in a bitty mess-trap
And said he’d be home by tea.
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Fled is my fancy sister
All weeping like the willow,
And dead is the brother I loved like no other
Who once did share my pillow.
I fly the florid water
Where run the seven geese round
O the townsfolk talk to see me walk
Six inches off the ground.
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Across the map of midnight
I trawl the turning sky,
In my green glass the salt fleets pass
The moon her fire-float by.
The girls go gay in the valley
When the boys come down from the farm,
Don’t run, my joy, from a poor cowboy,
I won't do you no harm.
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The bread of my twentieth birthday
I buttered with the sun,
Though I sharpen my eyes with lovers’ lies
I’ll never see twenty-one.
Light is my shirt with lilies,
And lined with lead is my hood,
On my face as I pass is a plate of brass,
And my suit is made of wood.
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Note: American legend, infused with ”Streets of Laredo" and “Oh, Susannah,” filtered through the Cornish imagination of "the greatest poet laureate we never had.” Perhaps because he missed that utmost laurel, Charles Causley does not seem to be very well known in the U.S., though fellow poets rated him among the best. His bio is worth a survey.
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Arizona Nature Myth
James Michie (English, 1927-2007)
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Up in the heavenly saloon
Sheriff sun and rancher moon
Gamble, stuck in the sheriff’s mouth
The fag end of an afternoon.
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There in the bad town of the sky
Sheriff, nervy, wonders why
He’s let himself wander so far West
On his own; he looks with a smoky eye
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At the rustler opposite turning white,
Lays down a king for Law; sits tight
Bluffing. On it that crooked moon
Plays an ace and shoots for the light.
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Spurs, badge and uniform red,
(It looks like blood, but he’s shamming dead),
Down drops the marshal, and under cover
Crawls out dogwise, ducking his head.
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But Law that don’t get its man ain’t Law.
Next day, faster on the draw,
Sheriff creeping up from the other side,
Blazes his way in through the back door.
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But moon’s not there. He’s ridden out on
A galloping phenomenon,
A wonder horse, quick as light.
Moon’s left town. Moon’s clean gone.
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Key: As the moon phase approaches full, sun and moon both show during the afernoons: the waxing moon rises in the east before the sun sinks under the western horizon. On each successive evening, the moon rises a little later, closer to sunset, larger and brighter. At full moon, moonrise and sunset coincide; the sun and moon no longer share the sky.
(Highly suitable for this week; the full moon will be this Friday night -- technically — it will appear full all the way from Thursday night through Saturday night.)
Another Englishman: as well as a poet, Michie was a professional editor and highly admired translator of Latin, Greek and French classics. The linked bio is an in-depth obituary from the Guardian.
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Tywater
Richard Wilbur (American, 1921- )
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Death of Sir Nihil, book the nth,
Upon the charred and clotted sward,
Lacking the lily of our Lord,
Alases of the hyacinth.
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Could flicker from behind his ear
A whistling silver throwing knife
And with a holler punch the life
Out of a swallow in the air.
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Behind the lariat’s butterfly
Shuttled his white and gritted grin,
And cuts of sky would roll within
The noose-hole, when he spun it high.
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The violent, neat and practiced skill
Was all he loved, and all he learned.
When he was hit, his body turned
To clumsy dirt before it fell.
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And what to say of him, God knows.
Such violence. And such repose.
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Note: The subject of “Tywater,” according to editors, was a former rodeo performer, killed in WWII while serving in the infantry.
A New Jersey native, Wilbur is the recipient of two Pulitzer prizes and has served as Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress.
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -- T.S. Eliot