The Trees Are Coming Into Leaf Like

As A Guiding Principle I Believe That Every Poem Must Be Its Own Sole Freshly Created Universe, And Therefore Have No Belief N 'tradition' Or A Common Myth-kitty Or Casual Allusions In Poems To Other Poems Or Poets, Which Last I Find Unpleasantly Like The Talk Of Literary Understrappers Letting You See They Know The Right People.

In Everyone There Sleeps A Sense Of Life Lived According To Love.

Now, Helpless In The Hollow Of An Unarmorial Age, A Trough Of Smoke In Slow Suspended Skeins Above Their Scrap Of History, Only An Attitude Remains: Time Has Transfigured Them Into Untruth. The Stone Finality They Hardly Meant Has Come To Be Their Final Blazon, And To Prove Our Almost-instinct Almost True: What Will Survive Of Us Is Love.

To Put One Brick Upon Another, Add A Third, And Then A Fourth, Leaves No Time To Wonder Whether What You Do Has Any Worth.

Heads In The Women's Ward On Pillow After Pillow Lies The Wild White Hair And Staring Eyes; Jaws Stand Open; Necks Are Stretched With Every Tendon Sharply Sketched; A Bearded Mouth Talks Silently To Someone No One Else Can See. Sixty Years Ago They Smiled At Lover, Husband, First-born Child. Smiles Are For Youth. For Old Age Come Death's Terror And Delirium.