Old Men Sitting Too Long in Coffee Shops

Old men sitting too long in coffee shops

Are the great sages of the world;

And old men in chairs on sunny sidewalks

Are Buddha and Solomon, Jesus and Groucho Marx.

It’s possible just to sit, they say.  It is.

You might have coffee, or a paper handy,

Or an old friend who knows all your old jokes,

And laughs with pleasure, hearing them again;

But then again, you might have nothing –

No coffee, no paper, no friend, no jokes –

And that would be all right too, and much the same,

Especially if a bird hops by on the sidewalk,

Or the waitress absently smiles on her way,

Because it doesn’t take much – they say –

It doesn’t take much.  It may even look like nothing

If you’re used to something more.

But that’s the trouble, isn’t it?

You all expect the world.

And we did too, and now we sit,

Triumphs and griefs forgotten –

Or not forgotten exactly, so much as put aside,

Like the paper, the coffee, the friend, the bird,

All of which are very nice, very nice indeed,

But not quite of the essence, which is something else,

Something we can’t quite explain to you, but if

You sit here quietly for a year or twelve,

You’ll start to have a feel for it, and then

You’ll finally know what we were talking about,

Not quite too late to thoroughly enjoy it

Before you disappear, unmissed, unmourning,

As we by then will long ago have done.

Soul Season

If autumn isn’t your favorite season,

You don’t have a soul.

I’m sorry I’m the one

Who had to break it to you.

I’m sure you’re very nice, and maybe even

Susceptible to Mozart, but no soul.

Spring’s empty promises are fine for girls,

And summer’s raw seduction is a boy’s hot dream,

But full-grown human persons need a mellower joy,

And winter is for Russians

And their drunk, mad Russian bears.

So give me autumn, with its crisping leaves,

Sharp wind, rich odor, and long winterish nights.

Give me the smell of smoke among the trees,

The many-colored world, the crunching light,

And over all the smug, warm knowledge that my soul,

Battered as it may be,

Is still in me.

Girl in Bookshop, Galway

Never seen someone attack a bookstore like you did:

Diving and prowling, eyes bright with hungry fire,

Fingers racing along spines, giving them shivers,

Searching, it turned out, for Frost.

It seemed a kind of trance that you were laboring in,

And I was loath to break it, but a voice

Beat carpe diem into my dull brain

Till I was more fearful of not speaking –

Though not, admittedly, by very much.

The fire didn’t fade from those wild eyes;

You didn’t raise the shutters of politeness

Over your eager very-Irish face.

That’s when I knew it wasn’t only books

That kindled you and made you beautiful;

It was the world – the vast and brimful world –

Made vivid in a line about Vermont,

Or other places you had never seen,

Or in a stranger’s awkward hoping smile

In a bookshop, in Galway, where Frost would have to wait.

The Natural City

New York City is nobody's fault.

It sprouted here, one building at a time,

Then thousands at a time, till finally

It came to be this glorious hell it is.

Don't blame the Dutch; they only wanted

A place to park their ships.

The Brits had little more ambition, but

The city itself had its own plans.

Just look around you; does it look thought-through?

Is this a city you would stencil out?

It's a tumor, an orchid, a still-happening accident,

Reckless and unapologizing,

Flaring up like some outré lichen

On, across, this once-innocent island.

Sure, there are signs of intervention –

Parallel streets, a graceful park.

Don't let them fool you; they're the trellis that

The hungry kudzu greedily consumes.

Nothing could be more human

Than all this gruesome, unintended sprawl –

Whose knifelike spires affront the sky,

Whose roots hook deep into the meat of the earth –

Nothing could be more appallingly perfect;

Get out, get out, if you possibly can.

Scotland

Beauty is not a pretty thing.

Beauty has guts, and probing roots

That vie and tangle in the soil,

And feed the blooms that feed the bees.

Beauty is not from yesterday;

It carries the weight of centuries

Across its broad and crooked back

When it comes hobbling down the lane.

And beauty isn’t easy.  Beauty’s hard.

It makes demands; it won’t negotiate.

A cruel master and a crueler love,

It bends or breaks you, and it has its way.

But beauty’s worth it.  Beauty’s worth the pain,

The toil, the sleepless nights, the blood, the years;

It roots us in a past in which our souls,

Blind, bold and timeless, chant their homesick songs,

And beauty listens, and its ears are ours.

Water of Leith

Flows the brook from stone to stone

Down to the sea, in which to drown.

Guiltless the brook, and guileless too;

The brook does not make me think of you.

The brook does not for a moment guess

What bend or boil it brawls to next,

But slips on down to the hungry sea;

The brook is as big a fool as me.

Rob Roy's Grave

It isn’t natural for a man to be

Remembered past a century or so –

His children dead, his earthly wealth all spent,

His lands in hands he would not recognize.

Have done with me, as I have long had done.

The Highland glens will know my step no more.

The river that I forded as a boy,

A man, a fugitive, now chills me not,

Nor can my wife’s loved fingers warm me now.

Forget me, then; but never, please, forget

The wild and the rushing of the stream,

And how the fire welcomes home the ghost –

The weary traveler, who ghostlike seems.

And if it helps you to remember these,

Remember Rob; it’s all the same to me.