Download PDF - Alan Stephens Poems

452 Pages·2012·14.04 MB·English

Collected Poems
books by alan stephens
The Sum (1958, Alan Swallow)
Between Matter and Principle (1963, Alan Swallow)
The Heat Lightning (1967, Bowdoin College Museum of Art)
Tree Meditation and Others (1970, Swallow Press)
White River Poems (1976, Swallow Press)
In Plain Air (1982, Swallow Press)
Water Among the Stones (1987, privately printed)
Stubble Burning (1988, Robert L. Barth)
Goodbye Matilija (1992, Living Batch Press)
The White Boat (1995, Buckner Press)
Away from the Road (1998, Living Batch Press)
Collected Poems (2012, Dowitcher Press)
Selected Poems (2012, Dowitcher Press)
Running at Hendry’s: Sonnets (2012, Dowitcher Press)
Alan Stephens
COLLECTED POEMS
1958–1998
Edited by A.A. Stephens
Dowitcher Press
Santa Barbara, California
Acknowledgments are given to the original publishers.
Copyright 2012 by A.A. Stephens
alanstephenspoems.com
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cover art: Tom Stephens
Book design and composition:
Valerie Brewster, Scribe Typography
isbn 978-0-9857812-1-7 (hardback)
isbn 978-0-9857812-0-0 (paper)
35798642
first printing
Dowitcher Press
www.dowitcherpress.com
For Fran

Contents
Away from the Road
(1998)
Fragment on a Theme by Ausonius 5
The Teacher 5
Gerontic 6
Watching the Shorebirds that Winter Here 8
Back in 1946–47 8
Untitled 9
Two Pieces out of a Winter Morning 10
High Summer 11
Under Cricket Music 12
Homage to Gensei 14
Herders Moving a Flock Down Highway 395 15
A Memorial in the Neighborhood 16
Three Studies from Two Days 19
A Pull-out by the Sespe 20
Away from the Road 21
Sophocles: Antigone 332–372 24
A Last Time 25
The Fox 25
Refl ecting Pool 33
A Sip of the Manzana 40
Names of Trout Flies 43
vii
The White Boat
(1995)
i
long shadow time
Long Shadow Instants at Hendry’s Beach 51
The Clubman 52
The Morning of Glenn Gould’s Funeral 52
‘For the life of a man comes upon him slowly …’ 53
Old Man Afraid 53
The Watch Dog 54
Geron the Heron 54
ii
some mountain poems
Prologue: Variation on a Theme by Frost 55
A Passing Thought in the Cascades 56
An early spring day … 56
Manzana Cow and Dragonfl ies 57
Fall in Spring 58
A recent spur-of-the-moment hike … 59
iii
over at the academy
Martial of Bilbilis 61
So-and-so Reassesses Yeats 61
Reading 61
Fragment of the History of the West 62
Song 62
Professor Bath’s Talk on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 63
One Who Is Cultivated 63
Anthem for the New Institute 63
viii
iv
far from yoshitoshi
A Few Aspects of the Moon
Dusk — city and harbor lighting up below 64
Have to fi nd me a clump of grass 65
At last the big moon cleared the grove 65
How fi ne if Tsukioka … 65
Going to Pine Mountain again! 65
Smashed on the pavement up ahead 66
One for the laments our time begets 66
Out to mail a letter 66
At 3:00 a.m. out of bed 67
Darkness comes on … 67
This cold full moon … 68
I lie awake in the small hours 68
Well, moon, enough of these 69
Some-time-later Words 69
With a Half Hour to Revisit Yoshitoshi’s
One Hundred Aspects of the Moon at the Museum
The two scholars with their oarsman 70
Stillness of evening … 71
The courtier Fujiwara no Yasumasa stands 71
The ebbing moonlit sea has drawn 71
The child Kintoro … 72
Flooded with moonlight … 72
v
two women in the middle distance
The White Boat 73
Molly Baugh 76
ix