How fashionably sad my early poems are!
On their clipped lawns and hedges the snows fall;
Rains beat against the tarpaulins of their porches,
Where, Sunday mornings, the bored children sprawl,
Reading the comics, before the parents rise.
-- The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!
Who walks out through their streets tonight? No one.
You know these small towns, how all traffic stops
At ten; the corner streetlamps gathering moths;
And the pale mannequins waiting in dark shops,
Undressed, and ready for the dreams of men.
-- Now the long silence. Now the beginning again.
Donald Justice "Collected Poems" -- Albert A. Knopf. Inc ©2004
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