Jan Schreiber ~ Brookline Poet Laureate 2015-17
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  • Shakespeare et al.
    • Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
    • Fulke Greville (1554-1628)
    • William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
    • Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
    • John Donne (1572-1631)
    • George Herbert (1593-1633)
  • 20th Century Poems
    • William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
    • Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
    • Robert Frost (1874-1963)
    • Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
    • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
    • Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
    • Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
    • W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
    • Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
    • Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
    • Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
    • Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
    • Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
  • Poems in Translation
    • Bai Juyi (772–846)
    • J. W. von Goethe (1749-1832)
    • Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
    • Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
    • Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
    • Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
    • Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)
    • Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
  • Poems by Jan Schreiber
    • Acoustics
    • Now Winter Nights Enlarge
    • A Little Patter
    • The Inventory
    • Cormorants
    • The Road to Nowhere
    • The Birds
  • Contact
Picture
R O B E R T   L O W E L L  (1917-1977)

Water

It was a Maine lobster town--

each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak 
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick 
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember?  We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only 
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away 
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls 
might return like gulls
to the rock.  In the end, 
the water was too cold for us.

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