Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 13:30:03 -0600
From: George Trail <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: A Poem


>Ye Lit-Kids,
>
>does not all Great Art leave us with the stupor of silence?


Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am
	silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

(And, on what could be thought of as noise.)

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the
	promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of
	the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working
	his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starved who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth
	to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls
	restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
	rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them--I come and I depart.

g




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