“And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.”

“I saw the sky descending, black and white,Not blue, on Boston where the winters woreThe skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates,And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers toreThe chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waitsIts victim and tonightThe worms will eat the deadwood to the footOf Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;The wild ingrafted olive and the rootAre withered, and a winter drifts to whereThe Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spansCharles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles.I saw my city in the Scales, the pansOf judgement rising and descending. PilesOf dead leaves char the air—And I am a red arrow on this graphOf Revelations. Every dove is sold.The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its holdOn serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph.In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:“Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beastWho fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.”At the high altar, goldAnd a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beatMy cheek. What can the dove of Jesus giveYou now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.”

“In the end, there is no end.”

“The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.”

“Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gently tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die--when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.”

“If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.”

“Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heel of smallwar--until the end of timeto police the earth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime”