Poems by Donald Justice

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Nostalgia Of The Lakefronts

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.

A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;

Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.

Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,

Is fading to a landscape deep with distance—

And always the sad piano in the distance,

Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling

(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)

140

by Donald Justice

Absences

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.

There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,

Like the memory of scales descending the white keys

Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,

Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,

Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .

131

by Donald Justice

The Tourist from Syracuse

One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin.

— John D. MacDonald

You would not recognize me.

Mine is the face which blooms in

The dank mirrors of washrooms

As you grope for the light switch.

My eyes have the expression

Of the cold eyes of statues

156

by Donald Justice

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy

Simply by going on and on,

Without end and with little apparent meaning.

Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on

We managed. No need for the heroic.

Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

I don't remember all the particulars.

192

by Donald Justice

Bus Stop

Lights are burning

In quiet rooms

Where lives go on

Resembling ours.

The quiet lives

That follow us—

These lives we lead

But do not own—

163

by Donald Justice

Sestina: Here in Katmandu

We have climbed the mountain.

There's nothing more to do.

It is terrible to come down

To the valley

Where, amidst many flowers,

One thinks of snow,

As formerly, amidst snow,

Climbing the mountain,

157

by Donald Justice

Villanelle at Sundown

Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.

The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.

Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.

Or are Americans half in love with failure?

One used to say so, reading Fitzgerald, as it happened.

(That Viking Portable, all water spotted and yellow—

remember?) Or does mere distance lend a value

to things? —false, it may be, but the view is hardly cheapened.

127

by Donald Justice

Men at Forty

Men at forty

Learn to close softly

The doors to rooms they will not be

Coming back to

119

by Donald Justice

A Birthday Candle

Thirty today, I saw

The trees flare briefly like

The candles on a cake,

As the sun went down the sky,

A momentary flash,

Yet there was time to wish

136

Donald Justice

In Memory Of The Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn

But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

T. S. ELIOT

It was his story. It would always be his story.

It followed him; it overtook him finally—

The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

Probably at the end he was not yet sorry,

Even as the boots were brutalizing him in the alley.

It was his story. It would always be his story,

149

Donald Justice

Poem

This poem is not addressed to you.

You may come into it briefly,

But no one will find you here, no one.

You will have changed before the poem will.

Even while you sit there, unmovable,

You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.

The poem will go on without you.

It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.

124

Donald Justice

A Map Of Love

Your face more than others' faces

Maps the half-remembered places

I have come to I while I slept—

Continents a dream had kept

Secret from all waking folk

Till to your face I awoke,

And remembered then the shore,

And the dark interior.

156

Donald Justice