Yet far from his, the engineer's, at sunset
And again at sunrise, when,
Like the likenesses the old see,
Loveliness besets it as haphaza rd as genes:
Fortunate accidents take the form of cities
At either end, the cities give their poor edges
To the river, the buildings there
The fair color that things have to be.
Oh, the paper reeds by a brook
Or the lakes that lie on bayous like a leopard
Are not at more seeming random, or more certain
In
their sheen how to stand than are these towns
And of the rivering vessels so and so
Where the shadow of the bridges rakes them once,
The best you can think is that, come there, a pilot
Will know what he's done when his ship is fingered
Like that Greek boy whose name I now forget
Whose youth was a long study to cut stone;
One day
his
mallet slipped, a goddess willing,
Who only meant to take his afternoon,
So that the marble opened on a
girl
Seated at music and wonderfully sinewed
Under linen, riffling a harp;
At which he knew not that delight alone
The impatient muse intended, but coupled with it, grief–
The strings in particular were so light-
And put his chisel down for marveling on that stone.
THE FIS HVE NDOR
Where he stood in boots in water to his calves,
A kind of fisherman, dispensing with a dipnet
Sullen carp into tubs of ice,
Was only in a tank on the back of a truck.
