1100
PARTISAN REVIEW
This fat can't laugh.
Only my salt has a chance.
I'll seek my own meekness.
What grace I have
is
enough.
The lost have their own pace.
The stalks ask something else.
What the grave says,
The nest denies.
In their harsh thickets
The dead thrash.
They help.
Robert Fitzgerald
SOUTH SIDE
The sun in the south ranges a winter heaven
Of crooked sticks and smoke, a silver glare
Low and blinding in the hard cold.
Go down any street; it has long darkened,
Abiding your bleary eye with patience,
Your pity with a crazed forgotten cupola
Stained by the truths of rain and switch engines:
A home for the aged. Cut through any yard,
The grey mud when it melts will run gold
Into a morning gutter but soon go black,
The drain of a smelly thaw. Now the frost
Holds, and the winter, and the winter sun,
As
a single stranger, ducking against the sting
That blows across lots, comes, and at a corner
Heaves his old overcoat apart, scrabbling
Vp from his hip a sticky ball of handkerchief:
Out for an airing on Sunday afternoon.
