© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
……. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurant. …………—Apollinaire Open this door where I knock weeping. I I will come to you with a candle burning light a stick of incense comb and braid your hair with sparrows’ feathers … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I wake the snakes on the way to the lake Coiling in leaves, slithering at my feet Half-seen in the low branches, thick brown waists Headless, tailless stone still in wait for me To trip them into slithering again. … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… There was a transitory spider’s web clinging to a metaphoric branch of birch that I undid stupidly touching it as I was going down the mountain side, the troubled spider in the middle clinging to a strand of its … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… What follows are the first seven poems of Catullus in Latin with humble translations by me; I also do a reading in Latin of Catullus 2: Passer. Hope you enjoy it and get a feeling for the sounds. The … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I’m on a grand jury, state of New York, special narcotics, ten in the morning to one in the afternoon every weekday for a month. It takes thirty-five minutes to get there by bus, forty-five minutes if I walk through … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Out of the drizzle and the fog they come boys dressed up like soldiers though they’re more like the hands that wind around a clock. Out of the Scotch mist’s chilly smoke and the cry of gulls they stop … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
A squirrel just walked across my shoulder Like I wasn’t there and didn’t matter Part of the bench, a kind of nothingness Who thought for a moment that a hand pressed On him like an old friend’s familiar Enough to … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
How do you teach someone something they don’t Know? The first thing that comes to mind is by Example. Look a student in the eye Even if she’s blind; otherwise she won’t Understand you. The stone deaf will hear love … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … To be understood words are objective yet we understand them subjectively. When Willa Cather writes, “The long main street began at the church, the town seemed to flow from it like a stream from a spring,” the prose … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
La Fonte You borrowed San Juan de la Cruz and kept it. I saw it again when you returned from the West. It looked like it had fallen in the mud with some pages stuck together like a book kept … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer’s lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? Blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend: … Continue reading