• Further Advantages of Learning/Under Soracte
• Incarnation
• Confusion
• Still On Water
• Credits

  Move on to Page III for these works...

• Poems From The Japanese
• Quietly
• Sottoportico San Zaccaria
• When We With Sappho

One day in the Library,
Puzzled and distracted,
Leafing through a dull book,
I came upon a picture
Of the vase containing
Buddha's relics. A chill
Passed over me. I was
Haunted by the touch of
A calm I cannot know,
The opening into that
Busy place of a better world.

Another day, deep in the stacks,
Where no one had come for years.
Walled in by the forbidding tomes
Of Migne's Patrologia,
I stood, reading the heart tearing
Plaints of Abelard. All at once
I realized that for some time
I had been smelling a sweet, light
Perfume, very faint, and very chic;
And then I heard the shiver
Of thin bracelets, and a murmur
That went on and paused and went on again;
And discovered that beyond me
In the next aisle a boy and girl
Made love in the most remote
Corner of knowledge.

KENNETH REXROTH

I pass your home in a slow vermilion dawn,
The blinds are drawn, and the windows are open.
The soft breeze from the lake
Is like your breath upon my cheek.
All day long I walk in the intermittent rainfall.
I pick a vermilion tulip in the deserted park,
Bright raindrops cling to its petals.
At five o'clock it is a lonely color in the city.
I pass your home in a rainy evening,
I can see you faintly, moving between lighted walls.
Late at night I sit before a white sheet of paper,
Until a fallen vermilion petal quivers before me.

KENNETH REXROTH

Solitude closes down around us
As we lie passive and exhausted
Solitude clamps us softly in its warm hand.
A turtle slips into water
With a faint noise like a breaking bubble;
There is no other sound, only the dim
Momentous conversation of windless
Poplar and sycamore leaves and rarely,
A single, questioning frog voice.
I turn my eyes from your entranced face
And watch the oncoming sunset
Powder the immense, unblemished zenith
With almost imperceptible sparkles of gold.
Your eyes open, your head turns.
Your lips nibble at my shoulder.
I feel a languid shudder run over your body.
Suddenly you laugh, like a pure
Exulting flute, spring to your feet
And plunge into the water.
A white bird breaks from the rushes
And flies away, and the boat rocks
Drunkenly in the billows
Of your nude jubilation.

KENNETH REXROTH