For What Time Stays

by John Wieners

All the best poems since The Hotel Wentley Poems.
Scheduled for publication Summer 1962. A sample:

The fog flung over the fields.

The dew heavy on the individual stalks of
grass or weed. The beetles making just
the right sound in the woods, and on the
top of the highest tree, a bird cackling.

She smell of green weeds on the pathway.

Whitman’s poems to MANHATTAN, ‘Give me
the splendid silent sun’ all the crowds
now dead.

And in the day I am tormented by the memory
of warm supper clubs at night, never crowded,
the way a young man opens the door, Mambah singing
there, as Mabel Mercer, on a kitchen chair.

For I have looked down into the pit and turned away
                    trembling.