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Best Poems From
ROBERT DICKERSON
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17.
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A Pure Strain
Longshoreman child
of a longshoreman
husband of a
longshoreman's daughter,
in you we perceive
a pure strain.
robert dickerson
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18.
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Anything Goes
Sweet, were you no longer of the earth
from what dread altar would arise my prayer?
Where should my needle seek its constant North?
What nucleus my orbitry inhere?
Then of what use the Byzant nightingale
were there no bored, jeweled hand to wind?
Really, of what usea curling tail
were there no pretty pig to wind behind?
And what if I no longer breathed in life?
Who should sing you then, and sacrifice
until the fire-blasted altar bore
rich stains of wine and thickly-clotted gore?
Who so freely barter Love for Scorn?
Was ever such a perfect marriage known?
robert dickerson
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19.
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Bus Poem #8; Penelope
It seems like Penelopes' weaving, West 14th Street-
eternally under construction, that is.
Yet all gains rapidly unravelled
by night when only the drunks and the tv people
walk the glittering sidewalks, rambling, lost
in their thoughts, talking out their heads.
All summer long, like Penelope's nightly weaving
the ditch undigs itself, the concrete flows
backwards up ghostly troughs
dropped from a thick and wholly starless sky;
the freshly laid asphalt sublimes,
the street unbastes itself along carefully laid seams,
its fresh white line
wound up in a ball
while Penelope herself sits bare-headed
on her bed over Reddens' Funeral Home
weeping into the heat.
Each morning the workmen return
like unbidden suitors, loathed but borne,
a keener one occasionally pushing back his hat,
muttering a parbleu of dismay, daring not
to be sharing suspicians with duller chums.
After all, a job is a job, and one
job being like another, all
jobs are equally ok, and this
is a job.
robert dickerson
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20.
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Lament
the snow falls on my fathers' bed
on the foot
on the head
the snow falls on my fathers' bed
all the night and morning long
my fathers' bed is in the ground
his sleep is deep
his sleep is sound
my fathers' bed is in the ground
na will he soon awaken
his earthly day was not so long
but thirty year
or very near
his earthly day was not so long
the reason more to mourn him
the devil took him by the hand
and turned him on
to heroin
the devil took him by the hand
and that is why he's gone
softly on the dreaming land
sifts and blows
the gleaming snow
softly on the weeping land
and on my fathers' stone
the snow falls on my fathers' bed
on the foot
on the head
the snow falls on my fathers' bed
all the night and morning long.
robert dickerson
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