Photo: Horia Varlan, via Flickr
Howard Moss, the late poet, was born today in 1922. Moss’s Selected Poems won the National Book Award in 1972; he served as The New Yorker’s poetry editor for nearly forty years, from 1948 until his death in 1987. The Paris Review published his poem “A Balcony with Birds” in our fourth issue, circa the winter of 1953; an excerpt follows.
The light that hangs in the ailanthus weaves The leaves’ leavetaking overtaking leaves.The actual is real and not imagined,—still, The eye, so learned in disenchantment, seesTwo trees at once, this one of summer’s will, And winter’s one, when no bird will assailThe skyline’s hyaline transparencies, Emptying its architecture by degrees. Roundly in its fury, soon, the sun Feverish with light, goes down, and onCome ambitious stars—the stars that were But this morning dimmed. Somewhere a slowPiano scales the summits of the air And disappears, and dark descends, and thoughThe birds turn off their songs now light is gone, The mind drowned in the dark may dream them on.
The light that hangs in the ailanthus weaves The leaves’ leavetaking overtaking leaves.The actual is real and not imagined,—still, The eye, so learned in disenchantment, seesTwo trees at once, this one of summer’s will, And winter’s one, when no bird will assailThe skyline’s hyaline transparencies, Emptying its architecture by degrees.
Roundly in its fury, soon, the sun Feverish with light, goes down, and onCome ambitious stars—the stars that were But this morning dimmed. Somewhere a slowPiano scales the summits of the air And disappears, and dark descends, and thoughThe birds turn off their songs now light is gone, The mind drowned in the dark may dream them on.
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